Hello Dreamers!
We're starting a blog here on the site to provide the go-to source for DreamWorld content and feature updates. We've done this in another form on our Discord for over a year now, beginning with our Prototype launch on August 14th 2020. DreamWorld has been updated with new features nearly every week since!
- DreamWorld has only been in development for 1 year and almost a month at the time of writing (10/05/2021). We were 2 devs part time for the first 8 months, and have been 3-4 people full-time for a little over 4 months now.
As Einstein once said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - We'll be including as concise a summary as we can at the top of every blog post to save you time!
Summary : DreamWorld's first map and feature set were small and barren, but our humble beginnings didn't stop our players from having an incredible time creating and building community together.
[Writing about DreamWorld's Prototype Release on 08/14/2020]
Our prototype was initially a small static map where you could place assets and search for hidden easter eggs. It was incredible to us just how engaging that limited feature set was!
This was one of the first pictures we ever took in DreamWorld! (above) This used to be our spawn location. It was very manicured, nothing in the small map was procedurally generated. We wanted the player's first impression to be a peaceful fade-in from black to a shock of color, a feeling of smallness in a world of wonder, and a vision of far-off grandeur they would be inspired to move towards, with an archway through which they would be visually pulled to start their adventure.
In the first day, players could place any of only 9 3D models by scrolling through their hotbar and right-clicking. We had fun issues with physics on the z-axis that would make builds with overlapping assets jiggle and jump before sometimes zooming off into the sky like house-shaped rockets. *Sigh* the halcyon days of youth 😂
Pictured above is the FIRST EVER BUILD IN DREAMWORLD! (I think we need to remake it and put it somewhere in the world permanently as an easter egg (EE from now on)). It was such an unbelievably cool feeling to watch as other people created with what we'd created, and that's really what DreamWorld will always be about - enjoying and inspiring creativity together. The next thing we really wanted to do was go experience those builds in person, but DreamWorld would remain single player for some time as we fleshed out more of our core mechanics.
Miniscule feature set, barren map, and extremely difficult downloads - none of these stopped our incredible DreamWorld community from jumping in for the first time and forming an amazing family. Dozens of excited voices filled our Discord chat for over 6 hours past launch as people shared builds, gave tips on finding things around the map, and simply enjoyed the good company.
Writing this now, more than a year later, it's exhilarating to think about how much more full this dream world has become, how many more people care about its progress, and how many more dreams there are to build inside it still.
Here's to building our dreams together.
- In our next post, we'll be talking about design philosophy! -