Today the boy shows you a sneak peek at his life and his friends on the island.
Dreamers
DREAMERS Guided Tours S01E01
Today the boy shows you a sneak peek at his life and his friends on the island.
Meet Luca Deriu at DevGamm Fest
here is the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgySFpikeEI&t=13200s
DREAMERS Soundtrack on Steam
If there is one thing that I really love about Steam is how clear everything is.
Not that I dislike other platforms, on the contrary, I like them very much. Steam, however, never fails in the offer for both the developers and the players.
One example is the possibility to distribute the soundtrack of our upcoming game, DREAMERS, to anybody who may be interested in it.
You know, after working so long on a project we can't wait to release it, but at the same time, being this our first massive production, we want it to be impeccable.
So yeah, while we keep polishing the game, the UI, the camera and the localizations, we want to share with you our amazing soundtrack.
How to do so? well, we extended our brand identity by adding the "music publishing class" so that we are eligible to handle such a task, and then we uploaded it on the main music streaming platforms.
Somehow, however, this felt not enough because most of them require some subscription or membership, excluding YT which is nowadays quite rich in advertising between the songs (you gain something and you lose something I guess).
So, the idea was "what if we develop our own audio player?" and yet we did it, but that is another story.
What is relevant to Steam, and what it makes it so amazing is that a soundtrack can be distributed by leveraging on Steam's audio player!
So again: develop, upload and boom. Online!
Were you aware of this feature? What do you think about our soundtrack?
Come on, let me know something in the comments below, I can't be always writing to myself here!
- Luca
DREAMERS Original Soundtrack Released Today!
we are happy to share this news with you and you can listen to it on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.
Here below you can find some official information about it.
DREAMERS Original Soundtrack features nearly two hours of orchestral and
ambient music, created by an international team: composed by Svetlana
Khanina and Irina Slepchenko from Russia and orchestrated by Markus Elgland
from Finland.
With its 31 instrumental tracks, the soundtrack of DREAMERS promises to
transport players in a relaxed and exciting atmosphere, to immerse after a tiring
day and to travel with the protagonists of the game between different worlds
and realities.
Each track has been created to represent best every environment, mood or
place in the game: from the cheerful and fun sounds of the tavern (Track 13 - A
Tavern in the Port) to the darker and stirring themes of the mysterious region
(Track 14 - A Path Beyond), up to those relaxed and cozy on the island or in the
city (Track 04 - Careless Lifestyle, Track 02 - Afternoon in the City).
Steam Achievements and Trophies
From classics to hardcore trophies, we think we have made good work and we estimate about 15 hours of gameplay to complete them.
A core idea of DREAMERS is that "life goes on" and for this reason, there are many, many things missable in the game. Usually, we don't refer to them as missable as it sounds very negative to us, but we prefer to talk about priorities.
For example, you are reading this post and not doing something else, and we thank you for the priority you are giving to us ;)
Motion Capture BTS
Did you know that we used motion capture to make our characters have more fluid and realistic movements?
Even if the low-poly graphic is not photo-realistic on purpose, we still wanted to give our players an immersive game experience, so we decided to use mocap for the animation style.
For example, in our cinematic scenes like the balloon one, you could see how we made our actress use also a VR set to have more real reactions from her.
We shot it in our studio as you can see :)
Developer talk: DREAMERS step system
We used our PlaySys Interaction Framework and the inverse-kinematics technique to make it look as accurate to reality as possible.
But it will be Luca, DREAMERS' game designer and main developer, to explain the details.
So, Luca, how was the PlaySys Interaction Framework involved in the steps' programming?
Thank you Federica for this interview. It feels odd but fantastic to write at the same time on this form with different accounts :)
The PlaySys Interaction Framework is a set of tools that I am developing since the early years of PlaySys. I usually pretend in my articles that it is very stable and consistent, but in reality, it is continuously being iterated.
This happens because we don't have a single style in our projects and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to define objectively everything that may happen in a game.
This is the case of DREAMERS for example, where a lot of functionalities have been designed and implemented for the first time in my profession.
In DREAMERS we have characters, and the game is seen in third-person. Moreover, the game is an adventure so we need to constantly move and fetch something.
So as a result we implemented the PlaySys.StepSystem namespace, that is technically a group of classes and methods used to define everything that may happen in our game and that influences the fact of having feet and being on surfaces.
In this vast system, there is one third-party tool, Final IK, that I want to mention because of the excellent work of its author Pärtel Lang. There are not many plugins in the DREAMERS development because of the risk of a lack of compatibility when developing a project in such a long term, but this is another story.
So the PlaySys.StepSystem provides a quick and reliable answer (about 60 times per second) to many questions such as:
- when you move from one point to another, how is your motion happening?
- when you step on a surface what happens to your feet? and what happens if the surface is not planar?
- what happens if you stand (or move) on a moving apparatus?
- what happens with the collision detection? are the characters colliding with something invisible or are they really colliding with what we render to the screen? what is the fastest method? what exceptions we may have?
What is that you're most proud of, regarding the characters' moves?
In the game, we wanted to give a sense of freedom and for sure the players will enjoy this when exploring what we call in the development "the port region".
Now, this region has multiple zones and areas and, of course, materials.
One element I am very, very proud of in DREAMERS is the sound of the steps. My colleague Elena and I were spending days thinking about how to play a certain, consistent, sound effect when stepping on a surface and we ended up with what I consider a great solution if I can say so myself. it was one of the first "wow, it really works" moments during the development, and the computation is insanely fast.
And once again, this is handled entirely by PlaySys.StepSystem classes.
Also, consider that the sound effect is played together with some particles and these have a size, speed and colour depending on the stepping surface. They are also real 3D particles, bouncing and spreading in the scene for then disappearing. If you look at the gameplay videos you'll see this detail and I am sure it will increase the satisfaction of the players; It certainly increased ours during the development.
Thank you, Luca, for your time! :)
It's very interesting to get to know and understand all these behind-the-scenes details from you and I hope it will be as fascinating for our readers and future players of DREAMERS as well.
If you have any more questions for Luca, please feel free to comment below!
Back-and-forth dialogues
Today we are talking about our back-and-forth dialogues: in DREAMERS, when you interact with the NPCs, you will start conversations that always include an answer from one of the main three characters.
The NPCs don't start talking to say something one-directional where you just have to listen and nod passively, but they engage with you in equal, bi-directional and interesting conversations!
They will gladly help you with your tasks, give you advices, tell you about themselves or their hometown!
We spent a lot of time writing our characters and dialogues to make them more engaging for our audience and we truly think that this is one of our game's strengths!
Have a glimpse behind the scenes
Here for you are some inspirational artworks for DREAMERS' mountain region!
They served as an inspiration and reference to our 3D modelers to visualize and create the maps and quests while the developer worked on the prototype of functionalities.
In fact, we first create a hyper-simplified version of our scenes by using simple blocks or extruded lines, to measure the distances and performance of a scene.
When we reach a stable and pleasurable result, we start populating the environment with details and NPCs.
This way we can be sure that the levels are consistent in proportions and are never too long or too short to be explored.
We're back!
Just passing by to say hi and share with you some great news: the game will finally be released this Autumn, by the end of the year! Are you excited as much as we are?
We're working to fix some minor bugs and to incorporate all dialogues' translations in order to make our game enjoyable for everyone! As a matter of fact, DREAMERS will be released in English, Italian, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese!