I've been using Dreams since the beta over a year ago. I'm mostly interested in 3D sculpting and animation, but I've played around with most of the tools. Here's my impression.
It basically attempts to boil down video game behaviors to a fairly small number of simple "gadgets" ("mover", "rotator", various sensors, connectors, cameras, etc, plus the usual logic and programming pieces) that fit together into a pretty general engine. There are also higher level features you can use, such as a flexible human "puppet" with algorithmic movements.
It all runs in a graphics engine that is itself pretty inventive. It does not use polygons, but instead models consist of basic positive or negative 3D shapes blended together, and their surfaces consist of particles that can be configured in various ways.
I can't really compare it with other game engines since I haven't used them, but I think it's much closer to something like Unity than to Minecraft. It's obviously simplified a bit, but fundamentally I think it's all there. You can (in principle) make games in any genre, but really any kind of interactive or non interactive stuff. And then there's the sculpting and animating bit. Oh, and there's a sound and music production environment in there. So it actually contains something like Blender and a DAW too. Plus it's a collaborative platform where people can share, use and remix each others stuff.
I'm very impressed with Dreams. Media Molecule have managed to compress an entire creative suite into a PS4 and made it actually nice to use with a single game controller. All the tools are way deeper than they have any right to be. The presentation is obviously aimed at a younger audience, but if you can stand that it's a lot of fun even to just explore the functionality.
It's not a great programming environment though, at least when you're used to working with normal tooling. You can make reusable components but it's fairly clumsy. The thing I can most compare it to would be LabVIEW.
In the end, to me it's not really about making AAA games or "being productive", but just a general outlet for creativity. I actually hope they won't start letting people charge for their stuff in Dreams.
> I actually hope they won't start letting people charge for their stuff in Dreams.
I tend to agree, but I also really like what YouTube has created with the ability to monetise videos: Many thousands of people who are now full-time independent publishers. From the demos that I've seen of this game, it could give aspiring game makers a pathway in the game industry which doesn't require joining a big studio, or learning (relatively speaking) complex tools. But that only works if they're able to sell their creations.
Perhaps if they have strong content moderation (to prevent spammy stuff which tends to occur when money starts getting involved), then they might be able to maintain a great community while creating more independent developers.
After all, Roblox has shown that monetisation in the game-creation space isn't necessarily a disaster.
I'd actually be very happy with something like YouTube Premium (formerly known as Red) whereby you pay a monthly subscription to access all of these Dreams games, and a majority of that revenue would be redistributed amongst the creators, e.g. proportional to play time. This would then be quite similar to the current PS Plus and PS Now subscriptions.
The SIGGRAPH 2015 presentation for Dreams was amazing[1]. They started by experimenting with some very outlandish ideas for modelling and rendering their worlds.
It was a very ambitious project. Hopefully Dreams finds success, because I would love to see more of it.
Some other comments here make the assumption that Dreams is like Roblox or Minecraft. But from what I can see it is way more than those games, and a person should be able to tell that without even playing the game. You can watch videos of the content people are creating within Dreams and see just how varied this is in comparison to other tools.
Yea, just from reading about Dreams it seems basically like a game engine more than a game, albeit a very accessible one that also highlights user generated content prominently a la Mario Maker.
Game creation tools have never been very accessible and surfacing UGC without the player having to dig for it feels like a relatively new phenomenon.
My career has been making game engines. What I've seen created already by the pre-release users of Dreams is incredible. Just scroll through https://twitter.com/hashtag/MadeInDreams and keep in mind that everything you see was made by random users completely on their PlayStations. No Photoshop. No Maya/Blender. No IDE. Just a joystick.
As soon as I read that article I started watching "How to build in Dreams" videos. The user interface is very unusual yet seems to work. This may be a UI breakthrough. The UI is as complex as the ones in most 3D design programs, but it's much more accessible to the casual user.
This may actually be the single most innovative thing about it. I think they've managed to boil down games making to a limited set of functional pieces that fit together in a huge number of ways, and then spent years honing an UI that make them usable with a single game controller. Mind you, the controller does have a dozen buttons (some of them analog), two joysticks, a touchpad and a gyro, so it's not that simple :)
Two joysticks, plus gyroscopic sensors, actually. You use the gyro controls mainly to move a pointer, which is OK, although a mouse would be better on some situations. What's genius is being able to use the pointer along with the joysticks, making movement effortless once you get used to it. Also, rotating objects by rotating the controller feels amazing and extremely natural.
Honestly, after trying Dreams I wouldn't be surprised if DualShock integration became a feature of serious 3D modelers and game engines.
It is very much a spiritual successor. I spent quite a lot of time with the creative mode in LBP too, and Dreams really builds further on that. Much of the functionality was there in LBP in a simpler form. Dreams is much more flexible and general, though. It's also obviously no longer tied to the pseudo-2D platforming genre.
Their demonstration game, "Art's Dream" is a masterpiece in my opinion. It has such charm. As Vinesauce Vinny said, it will either inspire people to go out and make their own wonderful creations or discourage people who will think they can't ever come close to it.
I absolutely love the asset sharing and reuse works. I love making little games for fun but my problem has always been that I'm no visual or audio artist.
This looks really cool for kids. But shame it's PS4 only - looks like the studio was bought by Sony 10 years ago. I'm not sure how much of what you learn here using a PS4 game controller is transferrable when a young person graduates to using "real" desktop tools as they get older.
Roblox (the current 8+ kids favourite) also has some elements of this, but it is quite a trashy addiction fueling virtual currency money making ecosystem - good for the company that owns Roblox but not something that I think is great for kids.
Hard to say, but the programming parts are fairly general and low level so the ideas should transfer pretty well. E.g. there are numeric values, mathematical operations, logic gates, etc. It can perhaps be compared with LabVIEW.
My main worry with Dreams is that it is a closed ecosystem, which is always a minus in my book. So far it does not feel exploitative at all, and Dreams does have some cool "under the hood" features such as OSC support. I don't think the studio itself is likely go evil, but in the end they are owned by Sony...
If your goal is to be a game designer then learnings around map design and storytelling should be robust ones. How well it teaches general programming I have no idea.
Is anyone aware any similar product that also pays back game developers and modders for how many people download their games or how many times people used an asset they created?
Modding on PC isn't the best experience since it requires a lot of work on the developer side to create an API for you AND you need to go ahead and learn how this API works by staring at a small number of samples.
If the game doesn't have an API you need to disassemble the game and figure out how to actually integrate your changes but you can't distribute it since you're violating the developer's intellectual property.
However, modding is amazing, it's the best part about PC gaming. Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Dota, all mods. Modding increases the potential play time of a game in an unbounded way. Why isn't it commonplace for me to be able to command alt click and then just add a new character to the game with 3 basic abilities and then share that to my friends. You can't mod a movie, there is no underlying code you can change freely to add whatever dialog you want or change the position of a camera.
Is there no way to align the economic incentives of players and creators when it comes to modding? How would you split up the pie between modders, original creators and consumers especially considering that modders can increase the size of the pie. What creator wouldn't want to increase the longevity and relevance of their game?
I'm optimistic that more games will be more moddable more easily. Giving modders and creators the tools to distribute their work AND make money off of it, will create a platform that will dethrone Steam and produce memes for ages to come.
If anybody wants to talk more about this, please feel free to email me.
Roblox supports modding and has a "Developer Exchange" program [0] in which, from what I understand, there's an exchange rate for each microtransaction related to modders' content.
Steam Workshop [1] is a platform for distributing mods for games which support it on Steam. A few years back it introduced support for paid content [2], but was soon after removed due to community backlash [3].
Fortnite has the support-a-creator program, where players can enter a creator's code in the in-game item shop to choose to divert a percentage (5%, but they have upped it to 20% once for a special event) of all in-game purchasers to a creator of their choice. The creator can be a map-maker, streamer, blogger, etc.
The program incentivizes continued content creation by creators, and dis-incentivizes moving on to another game, as the creator's SAC revenue would dry up over time.
For those who haven't tried it - in Fortnite Creative you can create a lot more than fps levels. I've seen puzzle games, mazes, obstacle courses, scavenger hunts etc., and there's a wide variety of differently themed assets available.
Monetizing mods is hard, you will need to police the community to make sure assets are not stolen, handle QA and refunds, compatibility between mods, you also need to keep the community happy - you see with latest paid mods from Bethesda where people are asking questions like "why should I pay 5$ for a few armors and a weapon when a 15$ DLC had new teerain, new NPCs, quests, armors etc.
We’re working on this actually at mod.io (we are also the creators of ModDB which you may be familiar with). Still early days but momentum is building and we are seeing plenty of experimentation going on. Feel free to AMA as we’ve done and continue to do a ton of research in the space
Amazing, I have used ModDB in the past so I'm glad to see you building something even more ambitious.
How are you thinking of paying people? If I make a really popular mod of a game do I get a % of that games sales or just some fixed per download amount. How do you deal with popular plagiarism, I minimally change a mod and figure out how to be featured prominently in ranker.
Would you say a significant part of your player base consists of game developer?
So the way I see it, when modding became a thing because back in the 90s and 00s, the barrier to entry for a new game was really high, but the barrier for entry for making assets and such was really low. The situation is reversed now-anyone can pick up Godot, Unity, Unreal, etc and start making whatever they can imagine but they can't just start making AAA quality content. That's why you see lots of assets for a few titles where the community has really gone in deep, but also plenty of games that nobody even tries to mod-without the developer tools there isn't much hope, and if you just want the basic gameplay of, say, a FPS building it from scratch is no longer insurmountable.
> Is anyone aware any similar product that also pays back game developers and modders for how many people download their games or how many times people used an asset they created?
It's called a video game engine. You make and market a game, then people buy it, and depending on how many people buy it you get paid.
Microsoft also tried this with Project Spark in 2013 [1], but eventually closed the project at the end of 2016. It was actually pretty fun to build and play games on box XBox and PC.
This New Yorker article makes it sound like this is something revolutionary. How long ago was Roblox created? That's nothing but a giant game creation sandbox and it lets the creators charge for their content. It's simple and intuitive enough to use that my 10 year old had been creating her own minigames for more than a year now.
Yup and ZZT was another one. There is quite a history of "games for making games". I think this breathless "everything is different now!" narrative is overblown, but I do think these sorts of games/toolkits give voice to people who might not have otherwise had an easy path for expression.
The game industry in general has a memory of about 10 years, perhaps 15 years tops. They'll praise innovation and radical differentiation despite the core features being the core features in major games just two decades earlier.
The favorite example is star control 2 versus Mass effect, the latter being a clear spiritual successor and yet somehow managed to be worse in nearly every aspect except graphics, and perhaps combat (which, in general, is fairly bland and uneccesary in both titles... but ME does admittedly have more depth to it's combat)
A few years ago I was looking for space themed games where you control a ship and are allowed to trade. Think of Escape Velocity, Star Sonata 1/2, Space Rangers, Freelancer, X3, etc. For some reason a lot of forum posts were about Mass Effect when it comes to space games. When I actually played Mass Effect 2 I realized that it was just a generic cover shooter like Mafia 2 or Sleeping Dogs. Oh and it was so glitched I fell off the map multiple times and often got stuck on top of random objects like tables. It was an absolutely awful experience.
Hm. Not really what I was getting at -- ME was perfectly functional, just the characters, races, inter-racial relationships (non-romantic), exploration mechanisms (eg ME bounds you by plotline, SC2 bounds you by fuel and danger), and world history -- all of the core components that made ME interesting as a title -- were substantially inferior to its decades-older predecessor.
The only aspects it managed to be superior were irrelevant to the main thing it was trying to be
Wikipedia says 2006, the same year that Garry's Mod was released, another "video game that lets you make video games". There are plenty of other examples too. I'm not sure why this author treats it like a new, revolutionary concept.
The problem with these games is they just end up being a weird middle ground between development tools and games. The "gameplay" is driven purely by the player's creative drive, which results in a somewhat niche audience. The toolset also usually ends up being more accessable than normal development tools, but also much more limiting.
The article doesn't make it clear what is actually special about this game. It just reads like a fluff piece.
Garry's Mod (as a game development "platform") essentially boils down to a Lua interpreter bolted to the Source Engine, with access to assets from Valve's games. If you want to make a new game(mode) in Garry's Mod, you still have to write code, design levels and possibly create models, textures and sounds in separate somewhat hard to use programs.
That's very different from Dreams, where you can create everything within the same program with a unified set of pretty accessible tools and a very fast iteration cycle.
The limited nature can also make them appealing. A lot of the charm in Mario Maker 2 is the clever things people come up with within the restrictions.
The really enthusiastic creators _really_ learn how the editor and game engine works, for example this document goes into detail about how to take advantage of a quirk of the engine to pull off elaborate constructs:
Roblox was pretty interesting in that it has this built in game editor that is very accessible, but is also highly extensible through Lua so the players/builders can ramp up their skills over time.
Add to that it's marketplace. Many users will never using the building tools and just play games made by other players. Not entirely unique, I was doing Unreal mods decades ago, but the way it is all presented and the varying levels of accessibility are still compelling.
so this game contains an impressive audio/music tools , nice sculpting tools, logic widgets. like I helped my 13 years old son rotate an object in space by connecting some velocity vectors, sin wave widgets (there is no way to input polynomials or trigonometric functions that we found, so you have a sign wave and you change it's shape to look like what you need ). widgets to record data(aka variables) event like things. Then it has sharing. My son played the other games from this team Little Big Planet, he is not into programming (I tried to teach him basic stuff but code syntax is too abstract and error prone) where this kind of games encourage experimenting ... it is not something for developers to create games so is not a Unity/Unreal competitor
Wonder whether microbit with weatherbit may help. It is quite interesting to have done physical (even if just barometer but better with the weather station part) to see how things interact.
I found the block language and (non mit phone) part interesting as well.
okay, so programmatic behaviors in the game are specified with a graph of virtual wires between “gadgets”. It seems like this is the always the metaphor that gets chosen to replace coding in text - but I don’t think it’s exactly good! How do you refactor? How do you share code?
Refactoring I don't know but you can keep all your logic for some task inside a microchip then create input and output handles to hide the inner workings. Then you can publish that microchip as a element for other people to use in their creations.
I did some collaboration on a pretty simple project (Mosaic Maker) in Dreams a few months ago. Just creating modular components that could integrate with a larger scene was somewhat tough but not terrible. Versioning them and updating them was somewhat harder. I think as groups get better at this, they'll get the hang of it. But the sharing layer built into dreams was pretty bad at the time. If you had a few versions of different dependent components, you could hit bugs preventing you from working on them. If your component used someone else's (which is encouraged as one of the pillars of the game), you might find you're blocked from releasing if the creator restricted that component. Or sometimes the opposite: people didn't get credited for what was clearly theirs.
Overall I'd say that collaboration patterns could work if you had a group that knew how they work and supported them.
Not this. But if you use the block languages and JavaScript side by side, sometimes the graphic one ok but most of the time the text JavaScript mode is so much faster. Our visual nerve has 50% of our brain. But text is much more dense.
I find this attitude odd. No one is going to use node-based programming to build a CRUD-app backend. I think some non-game programmers feel threatened by ways of building behaviour that don’t need a computer science degree. The attitude in the games industry is necessarily the opposite. Programmers aren’t game designers or artists or puzzle designers and part of their role is to let those creative professions express themselves, which leads to a richer experience.
I hope software continues to empower creative expression in new ways like this and the barrier to entry keeps being lowered.
>I think some non-game programmers feel threatened by ways of building behaviour that don’t need a computer science degree.
I don't understand this motivation. Did they get the computer science degree only because they thought they needed credentials to be allowed to program? I mean, most of the clearly started programming during their college time but before they received their degree. Node based programming is done by beginners because learning a text based language just isn't a very strong barrier for anyone who is actually willing to invest the time. How long does it take to learn 50% of the most commonly used programming language syntax constructs? Maybe a month? Maybe less? Before you say that it's impossible to build a mental model that is useful for programming in one month, I am strictly talking about the interface to the computer (syntax/nodes). You still need the same mental model with a node based language.
I personally read a C book when I was a teenager and I basically grokked the syntax in the book in 7 days (not the entire language). The difficult parts were actually obtaining a mental model of things like pointers and how the heap and stack works, not which words or symbols to type to satisfy the compiler.
I think I was being too specific when I mentioned a computer science degree. What I wanted to convey is that these types of entry level, or “layperson” ways of specifying behaviour can seem threatening to those who have invested in a career in software development. Understanding pointers and memory management and compilation is often orthogonal to solving the problem at hand, unless the solution would benefit from such understanding (maybe due to performance or memory constraints, or a level of complexity that warrants it). This is, after all, why the industry has developed higher level ways of writing software, like scripting languages or higher level compiled languages. These tools let us trade off low level control for higher productivity. I think another axis of abstraction is in the UI of software development itself: trading away some of the ability to build arbitrarily complex systems in any domain in order to lower the barrier to entry.
LabVIEW is pretty popular in some circles, and many DSP/FPGA tools also use a component+wire model. Verilog is text, but uses a similar model; there’s even a wire keyword.
That would be the description of programming, right? Because that's how I always feel when I start writing a game from scratch, instead of using some click-and-play game maker.
I am a fan of dreams and littlebigplanet, but this really IS a big element of the community mindset. It doesn't mean everything made in the game is bad, but you do need to filter out all the Silent Hill, Sonic, anime, etc clones to find the worthy stuff.
Yes, but the building interface is far worse. SL never cracked their UI problems.
Sinespace, which uses the Archimatrix parametric CSG system, is the closest I've seen to this. Stretch a couch, get more cushions but not wider arms. Stretch a wall, get more windows but not wider ones. That lets you create parametric objects with constraints.
It basically attempts to boil down video game behaviors to a fairly small number of simple "gadgets" ("mover", "rotator", various sensors, connectors, cameras, etc, plus the usual logic and programming pieces) that fit together into a pretty general engine. There are also higher level features you can use, such as a flexible human "puppet" with algorithmic movements.
It all runs in a graphics engine that is itself pretty inventive. It does not use polygons, but instead models consist of basic positive or negative 3D shapes blended together, and their surfaces consist of particles that can be configured in various ways.
I can't really compare it with other game engines since I haven't used them, but I think it's much closer to something like Unity than to Minecraft. It's obviously simplified a bit, but fundamentally I think it's all there. You can (in principle) make games in any genre, but really any kind of interactive or non interactive stuff. And then there's the sculpting and animating bit. Oh, and there's a sound and music production environment in there. So it actually contains something like Blender and a DAW too. Plus it's a collaborative platform where people can share, use and remix each others stuff.
I'm very impressed with Dreams. Media Molecule have managed to compress an entire creative suite into a PS4 and made it actually nice to use with a single game controller. All the tools are way deeper than they have any right to be. The presentation is obviously aimed at a younger audience, but if you can stand that it's a lot of fun even to just explore the functionality.
It's not a great programming environment though, at least when you're used to working with normal tooling. You can make reusable components but it's fairly clumsy. The thing I can most compare it to would be LabVIEW.
In the end, to me it's not really about making AAA games or "being productive", but just a general outlet for creativity. I actually hope they won't start letting people charge for their stuff in Dreams.
> I actually hope they won't start letting people charge for their stuff in Dreams.
I tend to agree, but I also really like what YouTube has created with the ability to monetise videos: Many thousands of people who are now full-time independent publishers. From the demos that I've seen of this game, it could give aspiring game makers a pathway in the game industry which doesn't require joining a big studio, or learning (relatively speaking) complex tools. But that only works if they're able to sell their creations.
Perhaps if they have strong content moderation (to prevent spammy stuff which tends to occur when money starts getting involved), then they might be able to maintain a great community while creating more independent developers.
After all, Roblox has shown that monetisation in the game-creation space isn't necessarily a disaster.
It was a very ambitious project. Hopefully Dreams finds success, because I would love to see more of it.
[1]: (slides) http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGRA...
Here's the video for the presentation which includes animations: https://youtu.be/u9KNtnCZDMI
Game creation tools have never been very accessible and surfacing UGC without the player having to dig for it feels like a relatively new phenomenon.
As soon as I read that article I started watching "How to build in Dreams" videos. The user interface is very unusual yet seems to work. This may be a UI breakthrough. The UI is as complex as the ones in most 3D design programs, but it's much more accessible to the casual user.
Honestly, after trying Dreams I wouldn't be surprised if DualShock integration became a feature of serious 3D modelers and game engines.
I agree. A good example of this is the fantastic keyframe timeline that moves through 3D space as a series of dimensional slices.
I absolutely love the asset sharing and reuse works. I love making little games for fun but my problem has always been that I'm no visual or audio artist.
Roblox (the current 8+ kids favourite) also has some elements of this, but it is quite a trashy addiction fueling virtual currency money making ecosystem - good for the company that owns Roblox but not something that I think is great for kids.
My main worry with Dreams is that it is a closed ecosystem, which is always a minus in my book. So far it does not feel exploitative at all, and Dreams does have some cool "under the hood" features such as OSC support. I don't think the studio itself is likely go evil, but in the end they are owned by Sony...
Modding on PC isn't the best experience since it requires a lot of work on the developer side to create an API for you AND you need to go ahead and learn how this API works by staring at a small number of samples.
If the game doesn't have an API you need to disassemble the game and figure out how to actually integrate your changes but you can't distribute it since you're violating the developer's intellectual property.
However, modding is amazing, it's the best part about PC gaming. Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Dota, all mods. Modding increases the potential play time of a game in an unbounded way. Why isn't it commonplace for me to be able to command alt click and then just add a new character to the game with 3 basic abilities and then share that to my friends. You can't mod a movie, there is no underlying code you can change freely to add whatever dialog you want or change the position of a camera.
Is there no way to align the economic incentives of players and creators when it comes to modding? How would you split up the pie between modders, original creators and consumers especially considering that modders can increase the size of the pie. What creator wouldn't want to increase the longevity and relevance of their game?
I'm optimistic that more games will be more moddable more easily. Giving modders and creators the tools to distribute their work AND make money off of it, will create a platform that will dethrone Steam and produce memes for ages to come.
If anybody wants to talk more about this, please feel free to email me.
Steam Workshop [1] is a platform for distributing mods for games which support it on Steam. A few years back it introduced support for paid content [2], but was soon after removed due to community backlash [3].
[0] https://www.roblox.com/developer-exchange/help
[1] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop
[2] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/aboutpaidcontent
[3] https://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements...
The program incentivizes continued content creation by creators, and dis-incentivizes moving on to another game, as the creator's SAC revenue would dry up over time.
[0]https://www.epicgames.com/affiliate/en-US/overview
How are you thinking of paying people? If I make a really popular mod of a game do I get a % of that games sales or just some fixed per download amount. How do you deal with popular plagiarism, I minimally change a mod and figure out how to be featured prominently in ranker.
Would you say a significant part of your player base consists of game developer?
What does the easy modding workflow look like right now? I'm looking forward to checking out https://github.com/modio/UnityPlugin
It's called a video game engine. You make and market a game, then people buy it, and depending on how many people buy it you get paid.
It's not that Dreams is revolutionary (it's not, just a step forward), but that you can create with only a console.
---
Game makers are a very cool and exciting product category, but also very old, and never seem to really take off.
Making games is hard, even with teams of experts, the best tools money can buy, and inhouse tooling.
Programming - a subset - is also hard. There was once a fad of programs that generate programs, like The Last One https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
A similar impulse was thinking AI will be easy...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Spark
https://twitter.com/hashtag/MadeInDreams
Specifically, I think of this personal account: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1940535026/
The favorite example is star control 2 versus Mass effect, the latter being a clear spiritual successor and yet somehow managed to be worse in nearly every aspect except graphics, and perhaps combat (which, in general, is fairly bland and uneccesary in both titles... but ME does admittedly have more depth to it's combat)
So yes, this is clearly revolutionary technology.
The only aspects it managed to be superior were irrelevant to the main thing it was trying to be
The problem with these games is they just end up being a weird middle ground between development tools and games. The "gameplay" is driven purely by the player's creative drive, which results in a somewhat niche audience. The toolset also usually ends up being more accessable than normal development tools, but also much more limiting.
The article doesn't make it clear what is actually special about this game. It just reads like a fluff piece.
That's very different from Dreams, where you can create everything within the same program with a unified set of pretty accessible tools and a very fast iteration cycle.
The really enthusiastic creators _really_ learn how the editor and game engine works, for example this document goes into detail about how to take advantage of a quirk of the engine to pull off elaborate constructs:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RlBSyS8WcW4S9NIHG0lGjWkN...
Add to that it's marketplace. Many users will never using the building tools and just play games made by other players. Not entirely unique, I was doing Unreal mods decades ago, but the way it is all presented and the varying levels of accessibility are still compelling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeuNWZXN6RI
I found the block language and (non mit phone) part interesting as well.
Not expensive give a try.
Overall I'd say that collaboration patterns could work if you had a group that knew how they work and supported them.
I hope software continues to empower creative expression in new ways like this and the barrier to entry keeps being lowered.
I don't understand this motivation. Did they get the computer science degree only because they thought they needed credentials to be allowed to program? I mean, most of the clearly started programming during their college time but before they received their degree. Node based programming is done by beginners because learning a text based language just isn't a very strong barrier for anyone who is actually willing to invest the time. How long does it take to learn 50% of the most commonly used programming language syntax constructs? Maybe a month? Maybe less? Before you say that it's impossible to build a mental model that is useful for programming in one month, I am strictly talking about the interface to the computer (syntax/nodes). You still need the same mental model with a node based language.
I personally read a C book when I was a teenager and I basically grokked the syntax in the book in 7 days (not the entire language). The difficult parts were actually obtaining a mental model of things like pointers and how the heap and stack works, not which words or symbols to type to satisfy the compiler.
LabVIEW is pretty popular in some circles, and many DSP/FPGA tools also use a component+wire model. Verilog is text, but uses a similar model; there’s even a wire keyword.
"Using clumsy tools for days and days to make a worse version of something that already exists inside of someone else's product"
Also, people who use this wouldn’t otherwise be firing up the Unity editor.
"A video game that lets you make video games that let's you make video games"
Sinespace, which uses the Archimatrix parametric CSG system, is the closest I've seen to this. Stretch a couch, get more cushions but not wider arms. Stretch a wall, get more windows but not wider ones. That lets you create parametric objects with constraints.