Dreams: Unlocking Creativity in Everyone

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the studio director of Media Molecule, Siobhan Reddy. Hello. Big thank you to Ed and Todd. That was absolutely amazing. Um so, good afternoon. Um I'm here today to give a small peek into the journey that has been Dreams and Media Molecule. So, being able to do a live performance like the one that you've just seen has actually been core to the vision uh right from the very beginning. And in fact, was the first way that we showed Dreams off um back in 2013. Rewinding behind me are the steps that we have taken as a studio making Little Big Planet, Tearaway, and Dreams. And it was on a GDC stage 12 years ago where Alex Evans and Mark Healey introduced Media Molecule and our vision to bring creative gaming to PlayStation and the

world with Little Big Planet. It's poignant to be on a GDC stage again not long before we finally release Dreams to our community. According to the outside world, Dreams has been in development forever. Um and for us, Dreams has taken the time that we have needed to meet the vision that we set out at the start. So, like all epic development journeys, Dreams has pushed us out of our comfort zone and into territory that we weren't used to, especially the getting things wrong zone. We have announced more than one day prematurely, and we have remade this game more than once, learning and building on our findings so that we could stay true to the vision of the project. Dreams has been harder, more ambitious, more unpredictable, wildly unpredictable, and has needed every voice of every person at the studio to make this possible. Dreams very much is Media Molecule in

digital form. It's our love letter to creators and creativity. Our studio is one of makers, people who love to create in and outside of work, be it baking, music, gardening, building, fine art. And our mission in all of our games has been to demystify the creation process, to allow people to see something that they have made on the television screen. To us, making video games should be for everyone and have the same accessibility and pleasure as playing with a camera, a guitar, or a pencil. Something that you can just start to learn by just picking it up. And just like how everybody who picks up a guitar won't become a rock star and maybe doesn't even aspire to be one, we hope to promote the idea of making games as being a hobby again, just like it was started out for so many of us in this room. With Dreams, like many things at Media Molecule, it started out by us wanting to have a jam.

Our previous jams had given birth to Sackboy and to the innovative ways that the Tearaway games used the PlayStation controller and the Vita. But maybe this jam was a little more like a musical jam than a traditional game jam. We wanted everything that we would jam with to complement each other, so one tool. And we wanted creation to be so fast that we could feel free. Free to make happy accidents, to get lost in an experiment, to make something ridiculous. We wanted to sidestep the fussy mission of having to bring together a bunch of different tools. For those seeing Dreams for the first time, this is how that jam took shape. Dreams is a game creation engine that brings all the disciplines into one space, so moving between them is a fluid experience. And as you learn the basics of assembling a level, you're learning the same skills that you'll carry into making music or visual effects. You're

never waiting for something to render. Everything happens on screen in real time, so you can learn as you go and play your creations as you make them. But, unlike Little Big Planet, where everything still retained the art handcrafted art style of that game, the Dreams engine has been made to let a world of different art style shine through. Our art director, Karim Ettouney, whose background is in production design and oil painting, has helped to ensure that Dreams is a place where the looseness of impressionism and the tightness of architecture can coexist. You can make something from scratch, collaborate with others, and it's all shareable so that you can remix creations made by our amazing community. And of course, you can just play or watch the content. But to achieve this vision, our team has had to work together differently. The ambition of the project has mean that we have jammed more, less as a full team, but in our molecules, as each discipline within the studio has helped

create the tools designed for them to use from the ground up. The end result of this is that every single person in at Media Molecule has contributed an influence to the shape of Dreams, and they have passionately advocated for their areas more than any other project that we have ever worked on. That has tested our strengths, our weaknesses, and our structure. But it has made us better, and it is how we move the vision closer to the vision day by day. So, vision, such a simple word, but achieving it is an eye-watering exercise. Cuz it's not just the exciting work of coming up with forward-facing ideas, and you can't half to on a vision. Achieving a vision is about choosing a flavor and sticking to it. And so it's just about as much of what you don't do. You have to be prepared to have the required discussions and make choices to

protect the core. Big ideas need to be made tangible. They need to be measurable. You need to have to be You have to be thorough, and you have to get into the grit of the idea. Refactor that code if you need to. Hitting the vision really means crossing the Ts and dotting the Is, no matter how tedious they are. So now isn't the time for the juicy development stories, um but along the way we have got very excited. We have argued. We have debated. We have made spreadsheets like you just wouldn't ever believe. We have killed darlings. We have resurrected lost loves, and we have created an absolutely insane database bug database. But together we have solved thousands upon thousands of creative problems. And that's games development, and let's not pretend that is why we love it. And so now here we are, nearly ready to launch early access and give our community the tools and tutorials to create what excites them. The game they want, the music they want,

the memes they want. And so to prepare ourselves earlier this year, we took about 20,000 self-identified creators and gave them Dreams for 6 weeks, and this is what they made. When the beta went live, we watched as people started playing, and we were biting our nails as that first those first creations were published. And it was amazing. Not the first creations. The first creations were people using the sculpt tool to write out, "Thank you, Media Molecule." Which was very sweet. But the creations started coming quickly, and having gone into the beta just hoping some people would make something, like just anything, suddenly there were creations that we might have hoped to have seen after 6 weeks, just a couple of days in. And our new game developers continue to surprise us. Though, we should have seen this one coming. They copied us. And I don't mean copying actual games, although they did that. They copied our behaviors. They made teasers and wrote disclaimers.

They made version notes, set release dates, and outsourced when necessary. And they didn't just make games. They made music players, visual novels, secret dance clubs, interactive museums, haunted houses. All of the things that give us pause when someone sees Dreams and asks us, "So, is this a game?" Seeing people use Dreams in so many ways with the features that took us all that time and iteration, pushing the boundaries of what we thought was possible with them, that was amazing. Suddenly, the journey just didn't feel so long. And there was something beyond what our players made. It is who they are. They're kind and they're helpful. Just like the community of progressive and supportive sharers that we see here at GDC. When we looked at the top words people used when they spoke to other players, those top three were great, thanks, and love. We even looked for profanity and found

that it was used to emphasize encouragement, not to belittle players. That kindness and support impacted us as well. And it gave us the confidence in what we had made and really gave us the courage to transition to the next step for Dreams. That next step of early access, and our state of hope for that is to learn more about our own game, how people use it, where we can improve upon our systems, what to prioritize in that always evolving list of ideas from the team. But we're hoping that it shows us something more. A A genre, new voices, new directions, and a new face for Media Molecule, the next step in that vision of self-expression and experimentation. So, on a journey so filled with detours, yak shaving, and complex problems, it could have been very easy for us to compromise on the vision. And I am so glad we didn't.

Things like today, where we can show off a live musical performance, our partnership with the experimental theater company Punchdrunk, and some of our other exciting collaborations that I can't talk about today, Dreams can now give our team and the community the freedom to explore new spaces and push our creative vision outside the boundaries of what is considered interactive entertainment, and still make games. I couldn't be more proud of everybody at Media Molecule, grateful to Sony, and especially thankful for all of our cheerleaders throughout this journey. It's been hard. But what happens next is unknown, and so it is for you. So, to everybody here on your own journey, I wish you the very, very best on your quest to deliver your vision, and I wish you the very best people by your side. This industry is at its best when we help each other along. Thank you.