Media Molecule
For PlayStation 4
“WE’RE going to make a hedge-aroo? Sounds good!” With that, John Beech is off. Wielding two PlayStation motion controllers with great precision, he tugs and teases a brown blob on screen into a hedgehog shape. The wand-like controllers are used to pull tufty prickles from its back. Four more blobs become kangaroo legs that are stretched, toned and prodded into place.
Beech is a designer at Media Molecule, a game studio in Guildford, UK. The company is known for its quirky, creative games and the demo of its new release Dreams at Rezzed, a video-game event in London, is more improv workshop than tech showcase. “Be prepared to be imaginative,” we are told before Beech bounds on stage. He asks the crowd what he should make and runs with it.
Advertisement
With a few more casual flicks and clicks, he animates his hedge-aroo’s head and legs to make it dance. He then makes an underground station, complete with train, disco ball and confetti. He adjusts the colours and angles of the lighting. Opening up a multitrack music editor, he chops out the middle section of a jaunty tune and sets it playing in his hedge-aroo’s underground disco. Dreams is a masterclass in how much can be done with so little.
Yet people have been confused about what exactly Dreams is since it was announced several years ago. Is it a video game or a powerful design tool that lets you craft your own music, films, games and more from scratch? Both, kind of. “It’s a fantastic creative engine disguised as a game,” says Beech.
Since Dreams launched on 16 April in “early access” mode, in which keen players buy an unfinished version and Media Molecule uses their feedback to tweak the final release, things have become clearer. So far, around 58,000 player creations have been shared online. But that’s just the start: over several years, millions of examples are expected to follow.
In the full release later this year, Dreams will be packaged with a more recognisable game – an adventure with quests, milestones and levels. Many players will probably just play that, says Beech. But what is clear is that those who do dive in will bring a lot of very weird and wonderful things to the surface.
Browsing through what players have made and uploaded already is like scrolling through society’s subconscious. “It’s a bit like YouTube for games,” says Beech. “You’ve no idea what you’re going to get.”
Player-made contributions have been a big part of Media Molecule’s output for some time. Its LittleBigPlanet game series was marketed with the tag line “Play, create, share”. In many ways, Dreams is a natural progression, but taken to an extreme. Where LittleBigPlanet invited players to design their own levels for an existing game using pre-made props, Dreams pretty much invites you to do anything. Players can take the images in their head and bring them to life.
The usual stuff crops up, of course: spooky woods, kooky houses, robots, unicorns. Then there’s a giant T. rex stomping on skyscrapers and a cactus that wants a hug. One person has made stunningly detailed fried eggs. Another has recreated the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa.
There is also an animated story about a pea trying to cook itself, narrated by the protagonist. Then there’s an amazing reproduction of a scene from Dead Space – a 2008 survival horror video game made by a team of hundreds. This recreation has been made by just one player – Quinn Barnett. It is more or less accurate apart from the giant yellow banana amid the mutant apocalypse.
People have also uploaded dozens of original games, from first-person shooters to racing games to platformers. Beech is thrilled: “Oh, wow, it’s such a mix, it’s unbelievable.” One that caught his eye introduces you to different designs of Roman column. “There is a test at the end, but it’s done in a really fun way,” he says. He now thinks that teachers should use Dreams in their lessons.
Beech even used Dreams to plan his wedding. He made a replica of the venue and his girlfriend walked around it in virtual reality and pointed to where she thought they should put the balloons and flowers. “Everyone from work who came to my wedding was familiar with the venue because they’d seen it on my screen,” he says.
My first go with Dreams is a little overwhelming. The motion controls are easy but there are so many options at every turn that I freeze, wondering what to do. Beech admits that it is a steep learning curve, but he’s convinced reaching the top will be worth it.
“Dreams is very intuitive and slick,” says Barnett. He’s dabbled in game-making before but says he can already do more in Dreams than with other design tools. He remade Dead Space to get to grips with Dreams and now wants to use it to make original games. “I expect this will demystify game development for a lot of people,” he says. “It’s a gateway for creative people who might have been daunted by conventional programming and 3D graphics systems.”
That’s what Beech hopes, too. He got his job at Media Molecule by creating levels in LittleBigPlanet that became popular with other players. Migraines had made it hard for him to take exams and he left school with few qualifications, working as a builder for 11 years.
When he started playing LittleBigPlanet at 26, he drew on his job to build things in the game. “I’d see what other people had done and thought I could do it better,” he says.
One day he was nearly killed at work when he was buried at the bottom of a trench. He came home covered in mud and started playing the game to relax and he found messages from other players telling him he should get a job at Media Molecule. “It suddenly clicked and I thought, now that’s a good idea,” he says.
“I went up there wearing a backpack with my PlayStation in it and they told me I could start the following week,” he says. That was 10 years ago. For the last eight he has been working on Dreams.
To make Dreams possible, Media Molecule has had to reinvent how games are made. Most games construct their worlds out of millions of interconnected polygons, which give everything you see its shape. These are then given more detail by covering them with what are known in the game design industry as textures. It’s a little like making structures out of millions of odd-shaped boxes and then wallpapering over them.
“People who dive in will bring weird things to the surface. It’s already like trawling through society’s subconscious”
Working with polygons and textures is hard, though. “In most games you have very skilled artists who have learned how to optimise this,” says Beech. “We can’t give that to someone and expect them to be able to do it.”
So Dreams does without polygons and uses what the studio calls “flecks” instead – virtual objects that can be given both shape and detail, like the brown blob that sprouts hedgehog spines. “I don’t think anyone has done it before,” says Beech. “We can have almost infinite detail.”
The result is an amazing creation tool that combines the power of professional-grade design software with the handling of a video game. “Someone asked me – do you think it’s going to put game artists out of a job?” says Beech. “I don’t. I think it’s going to create the next generation.”
