Manos Vezos: So. Dreams VR. This must be an update long in the making as… judging by the game itself -the base version- it seems impossible to have been an afterthought right?
David Smith: Yeah, quite right! Yeah, it’s something that we really wanted to release as part of Dreams initially, when we launched Dreams, but it was just… Well, obviously we spent quite a while making Dreams and we thought people would rather have some version of Dreams than having it with VR at the same time. But yes, we started work on some of the VR aspects… actually, in truth, some of it goes back years and years and years, like, even back… I remember, when we started Dreams, one of the first things we were playing with was using Move controllers for sculpting. That was one of the first prototypes and I think even a year or two into that we were using like 3DTVs, you know, with, like, glasses, just to get some stereo vision, just to try and make sculpting better, which, you know was… So we were always trying to get Dreams into VR, it’s the natural home for it, especially for sculpting 3D placements, VR is what you want for that so, yeah, it’s a very natural fit.
Manos Vezos: I guess by supporting PS Move controllers from the off half the work was already done for the VR update.
David Smith: In some ways. I mean there was obviously a lot of things to do, there were a lot of aspects where, when you were making things in 2D, you didn’t care about that. So, like, say text. When you put text on the screen, did you mean that to be something in the world, far away, hovering over something in the world or did you mean it to be like a HUD element that was close to you? So things like that kind of added up to be quite a lot of things that we needed to do to kind of retroactively modify to give the users a kind of control over that. But yes, like you say, because Moves were there from the off, we always wanted it to be a 3D editing experience.
Manos Vezos: I’m curious about your approach to UI elements, their design from the get go seeing as you obviously had plans to make available control options expand over time. And I suppose it goes without saying that even when you were trying to come up with the notion of the Imp you had to take into account that eventually that it would be used, one way or the other -that and any other UI element, that’s just an example- in VR. So what process did you end up with just to make sure that whatever UI element you add it ends up working well in multiple different control scenarios?
David Smith: There’s no magic way of doing that. That was working quite hard and tweaking things. But you’re right, that was a real challenge because we were aware that we have quite a lot of different use cases. People using DS4 or Moves or using like the no-gyro controls. For some people, using gyros as a pointer is well… for us, everyone at Media Molecule uses… really loves using the gyros because it gives that kind of accurate control but we were kind of realising that for a lot of beginners they prefer to sort of just… it’s a bit too novel, a bit too new. Though, often, the possibility of having the no-gyro controls was quite important as well. Which, again, is like a different control method. Yeah, it was just a long journey of just testing. I mean this is why Dreams took so long to make. That it was just a very kind of… iterative, careful, really looking honestly at what we had and sort of just saying “what do we to do to actually make this the best version it can be?”. I have no clever answer for that one.
Manos Vezos: You don’t really have to. It is what it is. I remember, in the base game, there’s some indication as to how much the hardware is going to be stressed by whatever creation a player or creator ends up with. Is there a different way to indicate that in the case of VR where frame rate is usually more important an issue?
David Smith: Yeah, so, we take… As with LittleBigPlanet, we take an approach where we try to respect our creators [ability] to make the right decisions. It depends on the experience that you’re making as to how important frame rate is. So there’s some things people are making where it’s all about twitch and feel and then frame rate is very important. So we basically just give our users the ability to really understand what the current performance of the content is and to understand where their time is going. So there is a kind of mode that helps them break down where their cost is in terms of rendering and things. We try to make it accessible. But rather than put like a hard limit, saying how complex a level can be or how long a frame needs to be to run, we say, well, it depends on what you’re making. Because if you’re making, let’s say in VR, a very beautiful world but you’re very static, well actually then, having the frame rate drop is fine. It’s when you have far too twitchier motions. And of course in some things people are going to make in VR, much more of it is going to be about experiential, beautiful worlds, not moving through so quickly. So I quite like that ultimately we sort of say, well, you’ve made your level, you decide whether that’s good enough or not. And people will then give feedback, you know, if they don’t like it, they’ll say they don’t like it for whatever reason. So yeah, we sort of take that approach of empowering our audience to kind of make their decisions.
Manos Vezos: And I take it as creators we’ll be able to control whether our creation is available in VR or not.
David Smith: Yes.
Manos Vezos: Does that hinge on whether it was created in VR though?
David Smith: No, I mean, so, we really tried to play kind of clever middle ground where there’s a lot of content that’s been made. So as I was working a lot of the VR features and coding things I think what I was doing was basically just testing with lots of existing content, loading stuff that was never designed to work in VR and just think, OK, can we be a bit clever so that just by default a lot of things -certainly not everything-, especially the kind of simpler things where it was just a character in an environment wandering around. OK, it really feels like we should be able to make those just work by default in VR. And a lot of them do work pretty well in VR. It’s just you get a kind of more subtle and complex, like I was saying, fiddly UI elements often required a little bit more thought. But then it is down to the creator to specify whether something was intended for VR or not, even though a lot of things work fine in VR regardless. But no, you don’t have to make something in VR for it to be played in VR. It’s sort of… levels and creations are just creations. But you can specify and say this should only be played in VR, this is really designed for VR. And conversely you can say, actually I’ve tested my creation in VR, it doesn’t work and there’s problems like perhaps you can look through walls, perhaps the frame rate is not good enough, you’re not happy with that and then they’re going to say… Oh, some creator might want to make a separate version of their games or experiences, just more optimised for VR. So, again, we kind of want to give that control over to our creators to make decisions about how they want their content to be seen.
Manos Vezos: I took a peek at the published Trello board for your project and I noticed that even though technically… -I don’t really know how often the boards are updated- but in any case the new content appeared to be not exactly 100% ready at that point but you seem to have finished with your tutorials.
David Smith: That’s probably a mistake. I’ll have to check that. But, so, the VR pack ships with a bunch of new content that’s ready as far as I know, yeah that must be a mistake. Of course it’s very important with anything that we make that we’re never just releasing tools, that’s not what we make. We make games, we love making games. And also unless we have made really good things with those tools, how do we know the tools are ready? Really, we have to do both. With the VR pack there’s a bunch of games sort of connected together with a hub space which kind of teaches you some of the new controls in VR. And to show you examples of what you can do. So there’s a shooting gallery and some puzzle games, we have gallery spaces, you can still wander around. Yeah, I think we’re really proud of what we’ve made.
Manos Vezos: Where I’m getting with it is -unless I’m confusing my timelines, because I started testing the game quite early one- I seem to remember that during launch time of the base game, one of the initial issues that was rectified earlier on was the breadth of tutorial content that would actually help players with onboarding, with learning to use the available tools. Did you try at least this time around, with the complexities of VR in mind, to be at a better position from the off? For the update launch.
David Smith: Yes. So we have tutorials specific to VR and some aspects of the kind of general onboarding as we call it, to teach you your first way into Dreams. And making as much of that compatible with VR. So we’re kind of aware that some people, one of their motivations for getting Dreams is that they’re excited about the idea of making things in VR in it. So we know that we can’t just treat it as a bolted on thing. We are aware that people will want to experience a lot of Dreams through that. Also, on that point of tutorials, these things take a long time to make. I think, generally, in any kind of game it’s always these tutorial systems that take the longest to make. And also this you will want to come at the end of the process because once everything else is finalised then you can really make these tutorials. So we have quite a large department that’s focused entirely on tutorials. I think we just slightly underestimated the amount of effort it would take to make them earlier on which is why, yeah, there was a few things that we didn’t have at launch. But yeah, I think that we’re very glad that we got to kind of remedy that later on.
Manos Vezos: OK. And I guess this is going to be my final question. In my mind Dreams is kind of a layman’s game engine that allows its player, user or creator to engage with it any way they might see fit, create something that’s a full experience or just part of it and share whatever they want with the rest of the community, without ever needing to learn any code. It’s kind of an accessible creative platform that seems to be something like Sony’s Minecraft in a way. In terms of accessibility and the breadth of creativity allowed. In that sense, wouldn’t it make sense for the game’s reach to be expanded as much as possible? Maybe with even more control options like mouse and keyboard -I know this has been beaten to death by others so this isn’t an original request- but maybe with an expansion to the PC platform as well which is something that concerns Sony, at least lately with other experiments.
David Smith: (Laughs) These are all very interesting thoughts and I think my answer is “no comment”. (Laughs)
Manos Vezos: Obviously you can’t comment on plans but maybe you can comment on your personal desire. Would you like to see Dreams expand further and further to more people?
David Smith: To more people, yes. I mean I think Dreams is something that I want everyone to play and be involved in it. The creativity and the joy and the madness of the experiences that you can experience I think is so new and so exciting that, yeah, I think that there’s a larger audience that are kind of waiting to find their way into Dreams and we’re kind of eager to work out how to connect with them. Because yeah. This is a game that deserves to be played by everyone on the planet.
Manos Vezos: OK. At least the intent is there. I’m done then. Thanks much for your time and godspeed.
David Smith: Cheers. Bye.
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