Dreams in teaching and opening professional doors to players
Media Molecule games are already generating jobs. There are studios attentive to the work done by the users, due to their quality and community involvement. Media Molecule itself has already recruited four elements, due to the content generated in the available tools. Three of them are from the time of the first LBP, who for their work were recruited to work on the second title of the series. John Beech, one of the leading designers, was a profession builder with no experience as a game producer. But his work was so good that the company hired him and is currently the company's senior designer, responsible for much of the content of Dream of Art, the narrative component of Dreams.
But there are stadiums like Sumo Digital and others that hired them based on the curriculum in the LitleBigPlanet series games. J Dreams represents an excellent gateway for new creators, says Filipe Pina, from the Portuguese studio Nerd Monkeys. The designer was involved in organizing a Game Jam dedicated to Dreams with Sony PlayStation Portugal. During a weekend interesting games and experiences were created in Portugal. To apply it to my work, I have already tried some things, but they were just games to test the potential of the thing, adds Filipe Pina.
In the aftermath of Game Jam, we are already thinking about adding Dreams as a tool for game design in courses or degrees related to the video game industry, for example. The idea of ​​putting Dreams in schools is out of place, not least because Minecraft and Roblox are already used as tools to teach students how to create video games, make quick prototypes, notions of architecture, and other areas. The manager of the stadium agrees with the full potential. We are already working with a select group of educators to develop curricula and educational opportunities for Dreams, and we are sure to continue to support them.
When asked about the main challenges in the development of Dreams, Abbie Heppe says that producing the tools together with content had its challenges. Creating a new intellectual property can be challenging for several reasons, but my personal challenge was to answer the question: what is Dreams ?, maybe thousands of times. Abbie referred to half as joking, but it serves to explain the ambition around Dreams, as well as to develop the best ways to support the post-launch game. Currently the stadium is working on different things, such as the inclusion of virtual reality support, as well as new art kits that will be released to the community. We have a list of things we want to make it possible to do in Dreams and we will continue to work to achieve that vision.
Regarding the players' reaction to Dreams, the stadium considers that so far it has been very positive, although the foot has not yet settled. What excites me about Dreams is how experimental and exciting they are in-game experiences, and what they mean now, six months from now, a year from now and beyond. We will never be here without the support of the excellent community and all the kindness and creativity generated by it.
As for his favorite content created by the players, Abbie Heppe is very fond of experimental things in Dreams, looking for keywords like surreal, strange and funny in the tags. The fun part of being a Dreams player is that there is always something for everyone, and you could even find something you didn't know you liked.
For now, the studio is fully focused on the PlayStation 4 version, with a large list of priorities that must be worked on. However, a possible PC version or even for other platforms has not been completely ruled out: we are not prepared to talk about support for other consoles yet.
