When he’s not paying off a loan to Tom Nook, Liam likes to report on the latest Nintendo news and admire his library of video games. His favourite Nintendo character used to be a guitar-playing dog, but nowadays he prefers to hang out with Judd the cat.

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Following its reveal last year, we’ve all been clamouring for more information about Animal Crossing on Switch and during E3 2019, Nintendo delivered. We got a title – Animal Crossing: New Horizons – and a short trailer detailing the premise, plus a more in-depth look during the Nintendo Treehouse Livestream.

If you’re after details on the game – now scheduled to arrive on 20th March 2020 – you’ve come to the right place; we’ve collected everything we know so far about Animal Crossing: New Horizons below for your enjoyment….

What We Know…

The premise

It seems Nook has a new business venture! He’s sold you a Nook Inc. Deserted Island Getaway Package, although said package only comes with the barest of necessities to survive on the island – a tent, a lamp and a camper bed. Once you’ve pitched up, it’s up to you to build a life from the ground up using the natural resources you’ll find on the island.

It’s been delayed to 2020 ☹

Yep, Animal Crossing: New Horizons has slipped from 2019 into next year – the game will now be releasing on 20th March 2020. While this is disappointing for people who hoped to be playing it over the holiday season, we’re sure fans would rather wait a little longer than have the developers burn themselves out or rush Animal Crossing to Switch when it isn’t quite ready. We don’t know about you, but our backlog is positively bursting – there’s plenty to be getting on with in the meantime, so another few months isn’t the end of the world.

You start from scratch

Rather than arriving in a pre-existing village, you’ll be starting from absolutely nothing in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Speaking on the Nintendo Treehouse Livestream, developers Aya Kyogoku and Hisashi Nogami said they wanted to give players the opportunity to build everything from scratch, as opposed to arriving in a pre-built town. This means you’ll be able to choose the exact location of amenities on your island, but there’s a lot of work to do before we get to that stage…

Crafting’s the name of the game

This seems to be the biggest change from previous games. Borrowing mechanics from Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, you’ll be finding and harvesting resources to build furniture, tools, clothes and other things as you colonise the island. Materials such as stone, clay and wood can be easily found and used to fashion rudimentary tools at Nook’s crafting station, while Timmy will buy unwanted inventory items giving you cold hard bells. You’ll need hardwood to craft sturdier equipment, although there’s no confirmation of durability meters attached to the fruits of your carpentry (that’s a joke, although it would be hilarious to sit down on a bench and have it collapse).

There’s a pop-up onscreen map

During the Treehouse livestream we saw a map in the bottom right corner which would flash up (along with the time in the opposite corner) after you’ve been stationary for a couple of seconds. It showed an airport o the south coast of the island – will we be greeting new arrivals there and dropping friends’ off at Departures when they go home?

You can place furniture outside

As well as the ability to move items in half unit increments (as in Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer), you can also now drop furniture outside. This means no more living hard; BBQs everyday (on our specially built patio).

Earn Nook Miles with your NookPhone

Tom Nook’s expertise knows no bounds; he’s expanded into mobile tech and developed his own branded cell phone. Through this device you manage many of your day-to-day activities and also access your DIY recipes (used to craft your gear). Ever the entrepreneur, Nook also has a ‘Air Miles’-like system that gives you passive gains as you accomplish tasks both big and small. Even weeding will go towards earning these miles, giving you a constant sense of progression. We wouldn’t get too excited, though. Knowing that swine Nook, redeeming ten thousand miles will probably get you a rubbish keyring or something, and he’ll no doubt want bells as well. Git.

NookPhone has a camera and apps

While the capture button works as you’d expect, you can also use your phone to add filters to your shots and snap selfies to your heart’s content. There’ll also be other ‘apps’ for the NookPhone – it sure is a versatile bit of kit. No word yet if Crazy Redd can jailbreak it for 5,000 bells.

Accurate Southern Hemisphere seasons

As we previously reported, players in the Southern Hemisphere can finally sync the game to their seasons and get weather that looks a little more like what they see outside the window.

There’s same-console 4-player co-op

Using your NookPhone (watch out, that raccoon collects call data and cookies, you know!), you can ‘call up’ another player with a house on the island (up to eight people can reside there) and play in co-op with another Joy-Con. The camera will track the ‘leader’ (you can switch) and ‘warp’ the guest to the screen if they stray too far. Four people can play together on the same screen in this manner.

Gestures return

Whether they’re learned from Dr. Shrunk is unknown, but a wheel of gestures can be accessed and unlocked in a similar way to Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

Dig up clams for bait

Digging clams on the beach will enable you to craft fish bait. Yarp.

You can pole vault over rivers

In the trailer you can glimpse the player character doing their best Luke Skywalker impression and vaulting over the river with a pole, which should save time getting around the island. Blue milk unconfirmed.

You’ll start with a couple of neighbours on your island

The developers confirmed that you won’t be entirely alone when you land on the island. You’ll have a couple of other villagers (islanders?) who also took advantage of Nook’s Getaway Package, so it won’t be too lonely. They’ll still check with you before setting up their own camp, so don’t worry about them setting up shop where you’d planned to put your greenhouse. This isn’t Civilization, after all.

The game will feature autosaves

Unfortunately (for him), Mr Resetti has been made redundant as New Horizons uses an autosave system. Aya Kyogoku fortunately confirmed that he’s since found a new job, so we can still expect to see the mole pop up elsewhere in the game.

… but Animal Crossing: New Horizons will not support cloud saves

Nope, due to concerns involving ‘time manipulation’ (messing with the system clock to ‘time travel’ for specific items/benefits/events), Nintendo has confirmed that, disappointingly, cloud saves won’t be supported in the game.

It will be compatible with amiibo

In the same interview, Kyogoku also confirmed that you’ll be able to use your amiibo in the game, although she stopped short of confirming exactly what they’ll do.

Tom Nook isn’t such a bad guy

Apparently Nook is working ‘tirelessly’ and reinvesting all his bells in the community. He also doesn’t charge interest on loans and will wait as long as it takes for you to pay off your debt, no pressure. We’re still not convinced.

There’s no direct interaction with Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Kyogoku stated that “we feel they’re two different types of games” and that there’ll be no direct interaction between Animal Crossing: New Horizons and the free-to-play mobile game, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, although there will be ‘collaboration items’.

Only one island per Switch

While up to eight players can share a single island, there’ll only be one island per system and you won’t be able to set up camp on a friend’s island (unless, of course, you share a Switch).

Other details…

The following tidbits have also been confirmed:

How does it look?

As you can see from the screenshots on this page, the visuals are very much in line with Animal Crossing: New Leaf, albeit with a beautiful high-def sheen. Characters appear to be a tiny bit larger than before. There’s a lovely depth-of-field effect and seeing the series in HD for the first time (shh, we don’t talk about Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival) feels similar to the jump from Pikmin 2 to Pikmin 3 – it’s not particularly surprising, but those apples have never looked juicier. All that flora and fauna is a treat for the eyes, that’s for sure, although there’s nothing revolutionary going on.

We glimpsed some new and improved animations (laying paths with a trowel, for example) and the leaves on trees are now animated, reacting to the wind in a pleasing manner. Water – ever the barometer of video game graphics – has been given a visual overhaul, too. The time lapse section of the trailer shows it off best and it looks lovely. The lighting also looks particularly nice – check out the glow of the tent and the changing shadows throughout the day:

Overall, casual players might glance at this game and not see much difference from New Leaf or Pocket Camp, but returning players will notice myriad enhancements and visual touches.

Is there anything we should be worried about?

Of course not! Well, some people might be a little disappointed at how familiar the Switch game looks. On current evidence, the bustling metropolis and various expanded features many have dreamed of don’t appear to have materialised. The devs have gone in the opposite direction, focusing on the ‘local’ angle and developing your village completely from the ground up. It seems to be very much a gentle evolution of the formula. Nook’s taken a leaf from the book of the Fyre Festival organisers, it seems, and planting you on a deserted island removes the possibility of a bustling shared online space. Not that we expected an Animal Crossing MMO or anything of the sort, but some veterans who were hoping for expanded horizons might find New Horizons to be playing things a little ‘safe’.

The lack of cloud saves is another disappointment. We understand the potential for ‘time manipulation’, but it seems like a solvable problem and one that should be solved; Animal Crossing is a game you can easily invest hundreds of hours in, and on a portable system (in 2020!) you shouldn’t have to worry about losing your progress if your Switch gets dropped or stolen. One Nintendo Life team member suggested Mr Resetti’s cousin, Mr Restorri, could arrive to berate you if cloud save-based foul play is detected. There must be a workable solution to this problem that doesn’t penalise players for real-world scenarios where you might have to change your system clock, though.

There are still a shedload of details to come and plenty of things we don’t know. We noticed that you can actually see other islands in the distance at the end of the trailer. Might we be island-hopping across atolls? There’s potential for new features and reveals to come in the nine months until release, so we’ve got our fingers crossed for more, more, more!

What did you think of the Animal Crossing: New Horizons gameplay reveal? Are you excited at what’s been shown so far? Disappointed about the delay? We’ll update this article with more info as and when it comes, but in the meantime share your thoughts and opinions below with a nice comment.

Texas-based developer Retro Studios has tweeted a job listing for Metroid Prime 4. This minor update on the project follows on from April when the company posted multiple job listings on its official Nintendo careers webpage.

Months later, the developer appears to still be seeking an Art Director to lead the collaborative development of the game’s artistic direction. As noted below, the individual will also be in charge of the “artistic vision” and will collaborate between the art team and Nintendo.

Metroid Prime 4 suffered a major setback at the start of 2019 when Nintendo’s Senior Managing Executive Officer Shinya Takahashi revealed the development of the game had been entirely restarted. He explained how this new beginning would see the producer Kensuke Tanabe working alongside the series’ original developer, Retro Studios.

When do you think we’ll get our hands on Metroid Prime 4? Share your thoughts below.

Games like Pokémon GO aren’t for anyone, but I’ve always quietly admired Niantic’s marriage of a popular IP, AR tech and incentive design. Sure, its grindy in the way the worst F2P games could often be, but I explored so many parks and places I’d never seen before when I dabbled in Pokémon GO a few years ago, and the game in general never made me feel pressured into spending money. Plus, you know, Pokémon!

Niantic’s latest foray into IP-based AR will be Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. You get to rock around being a wizard, basically, which I imagine is going to make some people unreasonably happy come the end of the week as the developer have just announced that the magic will start on Friday, June 21^st, 2019. For US and UK-based gamers, that is.

We will be joining the ranks of the Australians and New Zealanders who’ve already been enjoying a soft-launch period for a while, and more regions are due to come online although we don’t have any details on the timetable.

Harry Potter is not my favourite IP – I think I’m actually a bit more excited about the Minecraft one – but I’ll probably jump into this for some tinkering on my shiny new Pixel 3XL, and you can expect more coverage from us going forward as this is something we want to keep on top of, at least for the short-term.

Harry Potter is due for release at the end of this week on iOS & Android.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from video game industry ‘watcher’ Simon Carless (GDC, Gamasutra co-runner), rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend.

This week’s roundup includes all kinds of E3 neatness from Los Angeles, including discussion of Nintendo’s announcements, the PC Gaming Show, Microsoft’s xCloud vs Google Stadia (or not!), as well as another 10+ links that aren’t about E3 at all. (Just in case you got a bit overloaded.)

Hope this helps you understand the week a little bit!

Until next time…
– Simon, curator.]

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Building a Pirate’s Paradise in Sea of Thieves (AI and Games / YouTube – VIDEO)
“In this first episode I interview three developers – Andy Bastable, Rob Masella and Stuart Holland – about the early days of the games development, the underlying AI architectures and the procedural mission generation and balancing systems.”

E3 proved that video game publishers want to become Netflix (Julia Alexander / The Verge – ARTICLE)
“With the first details coming out around the next Xbox and PlayStation, you might expect those upcoming consoles to be the buzz of this year’s E3. But instead, subscription services have become the talk of the show, as seemingly every console maker and game publisher looks to shift the way that games are sold.”

EverQuest’s long, strange 20-year trip still has no end in sight (Andy Patrizio / Ars Technica – ARTICLE)
“Twenty years ago, a company in Southern California launched an online game that would go on to serve as the model for many more titles to come in the massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) space. And unlike many games that sought to replace it over the years, this one is still going today.”

Nintendo’s off-kilter approach to the generation game just let it storm E3 (Martin Robinson / Eurogamer – ARTICLE)
“Nintendo’s always marched to its own beat – it’s what makes the company so fascinating, and just as often so frustrating. Sometimes that approach falters, sometimes it soars, and this week’s E3 was a prime example of the latter.”

The Real Life Landscapes of Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and Fallout: New Vegas (Noah Caldwell-Gervais / YouTube – VIDEO)
“This is an experimental travel project where I tried to follow in real life the maps and landscapes I’d digitally journeyed down in the original Fallout games and New Vegas. [SIMON’S NOTE: a little late on this, but it’s 90 minutes long and the landscapes are gorgeous.]”

Dota 2 Majors are not guaranteed profitable events (Michael Cohen / Torte De Lini – ARTICLE)
“With that said, the public discussion about tournament brands earning a profit on their events has been troubling in recent years. This article seeks to reveal the range of costs and revenue for tournament brands as well as the challenges they face.”

The best games, demos, and tech of E3 2019 (Sam Machkovech & Kyle Orland / Ars Technica – ARTICLE)
“This year’s E3 was the most thinly attended iteration we’ve seen in years—but that was by no means the fault of the games on offer. We left E3 2019 impressed by a variety of games old and new. While we’re still working through a backlog of hands-on impressions, the Ars gaming braintrust is already ready to name its favorite games of the show—all of which were games shown with real, live gameplay.”

For Men Who Hate Talking On The Phone, Games Keep Friendships Alive (Cecilia D’Anastasio / Kotaku – ARTICLE)
“It’s a little heartwarming, then, that the men we spoke to said they rely on online games and voice chat to achieve the interpersonal closeness that can feel contrived or heavy-handed in a prearranged phone call. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to the apparent paradox—phone, bad; game, good—but the men who took a stab at answering it had some interesting explanations.”

The PC Gaming Show Is the Best E3 Press Conference (Cameron Kunzelman / VICE – ARTICLE)
“This isn’t a single company sharing its vision for the next few years through the single-minded alignment of projects from internal studios and external partners. This is hosts Sean Plott and Frankie Ward wrangling independent developers onto the stage and talking to them about their weird creations as an ad-hoc, freewheeling survey of what’s to come.”

‘Alt-Frequencies,’ a radio drama for the social media era (Todd Martens / LA Times – ARTICLE)
““Alt-Frequencies” plays with this timeless tension, having players vacillate between amplifying the drama or searching for truth. It’s a critique not just of media but of what we the people want from our news sources. Each radio station in the game — players on mobile phones will swipe rather than turn a dial — brings us to another opinionated viewpoint.”

How Top Gamers Earn Up to $15,000 an Hour (Patrick Shanley / The Hollywood Reporter – ARTICLE)
“A decade ago, Benjamin Lupo’s hobby of playing video games was just that. Today, a gamer like Lupo could earn as much as $15,000 an hour broadcasting his gaming to the nearly 3  million people who follow him on live-streaming platform Twitch. Lupo, who goes by the online avatar DrLupo, says it took him “two full years of streaming 40-plus hours a week” while working a regular job before he felt comfortable gaming “full time.””

Why Fashion in (Most) Games Sucks, and Why You Should Care (Victoria Tran / GDC / YouTube – VIDEO)
“In this 2019 GDC talk, Kitfox Games’ Victoria Tran explores the recent history of fashion in games and provides multiple tips for making your own character design runway-worthy.”

Xbox boss Phil Spencer on the future of gaming: ‘The business isn’t how many consoles you sell’ (Andrew Webster / The Verge – ARTICLE)
“The head of Xbox just unveiled a new console, but Phil Spencer isn’t too worried about selling you one. “I don’t need to sell any specific version of the console in order for us to reach our business goals,” he told me in an interview yesterday, the day after Microsoft held its annual E3 keynote. [SIMON’S NOTE: also see this Matt Booty interview via Eurogamer on Microsoft’s strategy.]”

Watch Dogs Legion is the most impressive E3 demo I’ve played in years (Samuel Roberts / PC Gamer – ARTICLE)
“Watch Dogs Legion has no default protagonist. Those rumours about being able to play as any ‘NPC’ in the game were true—while it takes a little work to recruit each individual to Dedsec, you build up a pool of swappable playable characters. [SIMON’S NOTE: here’s more on this from Kotaku – and congrats to GDC board member Clint Hocking, who looks on track to ship his first game since Far Cry 2, and in style!]”

Meet the angry gaming YouTubers who turn outrage into views (Ian Sherr / Cnet – ARTICLE)
“Starting last year, a new cadre of negative YouTube gaming commentators came to prominence. Almost in unison, they each enjoyed spikes in audience and view counts, attracting hundreds of thousands of subscribers. That translated into millions of views a week as they dissected the video game industry’s missteps, misadventures and controversies.”

The economics of making indie games are wack (Jake Birkett / Grey Alien Games / Patreon – ARTICLE)
“I’ve been doing this since 2005, so 14 years, and I’d love to continue for a long time because I enjoy the lifestyle and I love making games, but… wow, it is hard to make a living from this. So anyway, I wanted to explore some numbers so you can see why I think the economics of making indie games and selling them on Steam is wack. [SIMON’S NOTE: you can quibble elements of this, but it’s true that it’s tough out there.]”

Stardock and Star Control creators settle lawsuits—with mead and honey (Lee Hutchinson / Ars Technica – ARTICLE)
“”We solved this problem like most problems—with booze and bees,” joked Stardock’s Brad Wardell in a phone interview earlier today with Ars (he was joined by Reiche & Ford on the line, as all three are in Los Angeles for E3 at the moment). [SIMON’S NOTE: this is mainly a news story, so I wouldn’t normally include – but those settlement stipulations!]”

Stop worrying about timed exclusives and worry more about games industry consolidation (Graham Smith / RockPaperShotgun – ARTICLE)
“Microsoft might be a changed company since those days, but some of these pressures seem like the inevitable consequence of having been purchased for a lot of money by a much bigger company. Even if everything goes perfectly, what are the chances of more niche games like Pillars Of Eternity, Wasteland and Hellblade continuing to emerge from these larger structures?”

Cyberpunk 2077’s E3 demo: the good and the bad (Charlie Hall / Polygon – ARTICLE)
“This year’s demo of Cyberpunk 2077, the highly-anticipated role-playing game from CD Projekt Red, looked both better and worse than the demo shown last year. The scope and scale of the game world on display was extraordinary, but the team is clearly still finding its way with the game’s combat. [SIMON’S NOTE: more here from Eurogamer.]”

Against Gravity is building a VR world that won’t stop growing (Lucas Matney / TechCrunch – ARTICLE)
“The quest to create a social auditorium in virtual reality has eaten many VC dollars over the years. While plenty of contenders have emerged, it’s likely Against Gravity’s Rec Room has been the most creative in its approach to capturing a niche market while plotting how to build a sustainable business based on users in VR headsets talking to one another.”

The History of Roguelike Deckbuilders – From Playing Cards to CCGs and Beyond (Extra Credits / YouTube – VIDEO)
“We cover the evolution and history of cards as games! From playing cards, to trading cards, to Magic: The Gathering, to Hearthstone, and beyond…”

Developers don’t want to show gameplay at E3 anymore, and who can blame them? (Jeremy Peel / VG247 – ARTICLE)
“Game developers try to show, not tell, when teaching you about how a game works. But on the stages of E3 this year, they haven’t been showing very much either. Some conference reveals were short films… others were sizzle reels… But far rarer was the seamless gameplay footage that purported to show off exactly how a game would play, moment by moment.”

Microsoft’s xCloud can’t and shouldn’t be compared with Google Stadia right now (Nick Statt / The Verge – ARTICLE)
“I do have hands-on impressions with both Stadia and xCloud: They both work, they’re both impressive, and I’ll share more below. But you can’t properly compare xCloud with Stadia right now, and trying to do so is unfair to both Microsoft and Google. Here’s why.”

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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at tinyletter.com/vgdeepcuts – we crosspost to Gamasutra later, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra & an advisor to indie publisher No More Robots, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

Media Molecule’s hugely ambitious creation engine Dreams is unlike anything else you’ll find on console. Not content with simply letting players use a database of pre-existing templates and assets, the studio wanted to give individuals the tools to record and remix their own audio, sculpt their own models, and animate their own characters, among other features typical of a standard game engine.

This proved to be a significant undertaking for the studio, though, in part due to the PlayStation 4’s limitations and the difficulty of making a fun and intuitive toolset. Yet, it is a challenge the studio has managed to overcome, arguably through its culture of jamming, combined with years of iteration and playtesting.

In Dreams, individuals are able to play through a ton of user-generated content in the Dreamiverse or make their own creations. Dropped into a new project, players have access to everything they’ll need from a menu at the top of the screen, including tools for creating animations, smearing or stamping down shapes, and retexturing and recoloring items.

Recently, we spoke to Media Molecule’s senior principal artist Jon Eckersley and communications manager Abbie Heppe to find out more about the process of how the studio designed tools for Dreams and how they plan to improve upon them following feedback.

Dreams initially began life as a sculpting tool, created by the programmer Anton Kirkczenow, and was born out of one of the studio’s many game jams. The sculpting tool uses a technique called CSG (constructive solid geometry) to piece together a collection of very simple shapes and edits to create more complex sculptures. This forms the basis of how objects are created in Dreams. But Media Molecule initially struggled to find the ‘painterly’ art style that they have today.

“For a long time, when we first announced Dreams, all we could do was the tight end of sculpture,” explains Eckersley. “Kareem Ettouney, the art director, was always wanting to push and push the fact that the concept art that we were painting in-house and the concept art that you often see for games is usually marginally more compelling than the actual game. And he was like, ’I want it to look like that.’ And we tried and tried and tried to do that with our original sculpting engine and we had many tests.”

Alex Evans, one of the technical directors at Media Molecule refers to this tighter engine as the Brick Engine in an Umbra Ignite 2015 talk, named ‘Learning from Failure.’ In the talk, he recounts in great detail the numerous modifications that the sculpting engine went through, and how it seemed better fit for artists than the average player.

To solve this, Evans and the team tried a number of different solutions, before finally coming up with a splats-based engine — later renamed to the BubbleBath Engine. This new engine allows players to easily achieve Dreams’ smoky, impressionistic art style, regardless of their experience with the tools and gives the game an identity distinct from other more technical engines, like Unity or Unreal.

Dreams pretty much developed outwards from this sculpting tool. A notable example of this in the game is that players are able to use the same primitive shapes to paint objects as they do to sculpt them, providing players with straightforward manuevers to memorize.

“It kind of holistically grew out of that,” says Eckersley. “Things that we’d used in one tool ceded another tool. And there was kind of a back and forth between the different suites.

“The MO from the very beginning was we wanted to create a suite…where absolutely everything was made using Dreams,” he adds. “Which was obviously vastly ambitious for such a small team of people to work on. And I guess in a way the sculpting tools were the first kind of hitback. And after we realized it was entirely possible to create all of our art with our own thumbprint. It was always the plan to do it with audio. Always the plan to do it with animation. Always the plan to do it with logic, but they certainly did come after.”

This back and forth between the tools was possible for a number of reasons, with the main one being that members of the team would often shift across to other departments, bringing with them their own expertise and ideas. Alex Evans, for instance, who worked on the graphics engine for the game, also contributed ideas to the audio engine, working alongside the rest of the audio team at Media Molecule.

A big consideration that weighed heavily upon the team while creating Dreams was accessibility for newcomers. With Dreams, Media Molecule wanted to try and demystify the idea of creation, encouraging those who don’t usually create to pick up the tools and make something new. What this meant was designing a toolset that didn’t require a technical background to use.

“It was about how can we empower people that are creative to make things that aren’t necessarily technical,” says Jon Eckersley. “For the longest time, you’ve had to be quite technical to use tools. And we were really pitching it as something where we don’t want that at all. So, we’ve had some people that had very little experience with 3D tools and that kind of packaged suite thing that historically has been in the industry for twenty/thirty years and they have made some of the best things that you can see in Dreams. And that was, again, always the ambition.”

To achieve this, the team strayed away from excessive menus or sliders, opting for a more gesture-based control scheme. As an example, players can press both move buttons simultaneously and then move the controllers apart in order to zoom in or press both move buttons while an object is positioned between their two imps (the game’s equivalent of mouse cursors) to increase or decrease their reach within the 3D environment.

“We want to empower people,” he says. “You want to give them the options. The things that, for me, make traditional tools really intimidating are endless menus, and endless sliders, and endless settings…That does make it very powerful, but it shrinks the amount of people who can use it. Because most people will open that up and immediately balk at it.”

Another philosophy at the heart of Dreams is the idea of “Stealth Create”, as Eckersley calls it. It’s a concept the team at Media Molecule originated for games like Tearaway, and is all about encouraging players to go deeper with the creation tools.

Eckersley points to a particular challenge from Tearaway as an example of this. In this challenge, players are tasked with customizing a pumpkin, only for that design to then reappear later in the world on different items. The idea is to present players with a relatively simple task, to then subvert their expectations and show them that — contrary to their own beliefs — they’re capable of creating some great art. The hope is they will then become more confident in their abilities as a result and be more willing to create.

How this represents itself in Dreams is that the game and its tools are all designed to lead players down a path towards creation. To give an example, a novice at the game may simply create a scene with items they find in the Dreamiverse, to begin with, before moving on to alter and transform those pre-fabs and models using the tools. This will then hopefully encourage them to have a go at making own models and sculptures over time.

“Audio is [another] great one,” says Eckersley. “At the very highest level, you can find a track that someone else has made and place it in your game, your film, or whatever. The next part of that is finding individual stems and putting them together in the sequencer. Then you can go down a level and perform that instrument. And you can go down a level and you can create the instrument. And you can go down a level and make that instrument, you know, procedural or hook it into hardware. And we tried to approach that for absolutely [everything].”

Sculpting wasn’t the only idea that came out of a game jam. The studio continued to jam throughout the development of the game, producing features like the clone repeat function that lets players quickly copy and paste objects in an environment to build platforms and staircases.

“It was to make fractals, I think,” explains Eckersley. “I can’t remember who suggested it. They said, ‘Why don’t we actually clone it to a point?’ So if you start with the top stair, then repeat it, you can create a perfect staircase every time. And that just came out of one of those little game jams. And it was a constant, ‘Oh, that feels really good. That feels really fun that it always goes to the right height.’”

A lot of these ideas were implemented in order to add some fun into the toolset and give players tactile ways of creating. The color tumbler, for instance, was another idea to emerge from a game jam and lets players select a bunch of different colors from a menu to then cycle through them as they paint.

“Rather than just picking a color…we were trying to think of a way to make that more playful,” says Eckersley. “So a way we did that was our color tumbler…and that was a way of being able to manipulate color in an interesting way for people. Because a lot of the time color can be kind of intimidating.”

With the game having been released in early access, the team have also had the benefit of community feedback in order to shape the tools. Already, they have received tons of suggestions for features, alongside tweaks to make the game easier to access.

“It’s been really interesting,” says Heppe. “Because there’s like a lot of things that we wanted to add in support to Dreams and it’s really helping us prioritize what some of those things are.” She continues, “So, on one hand, you have very very specific instances of tools or feature tweaks like for the most hardcore of creators. You know, the people who have like really gotten into the tools you know deeply. And then, some of it is for people who are coming in probably from more of an angle that I came into it, where [it is] helping to onboard them and helping them find their pathway in.”

As an example, one important piece of feedback they’ve received, particularly around accessibility, is the game’s reliance on motion controls. According to Heppe, the team are already working on a motion-free alternative for players in order to address this problem. However, there is no timeframe currently available on when this will be released.

To close the interview, I asked Eckersley what advice he would offer to developers planning on making their own creation tools. Here’s what he had to say to those daring enough to take on the challenge.

“It’s really hard is probably the first bit of feedback,” he says. “But it is incredibly satisfying to empower people. You’ve got to iterate a lot. You’ve got to get people to try it out, try it hands-on. Get feedback and listen to it, and have confidence in what you’re doing. But it is really hard and it’s just – I can’t say anything more than that.” He continues, “I admire anyone who tries to do something in a similar way. And I think we all do it for the same reasons. That we all love creating and the idea that we can allow people that didn’t think they could create to create, especially on the PlayStation 4. That is the bit that makes it worth it.”