DreamWare

May 2023 - June 2023

DreamWare was a replayable and short 3D platformer collectathon! Heavily inspired by Super Mario 64, Odyssey, A Hat in Time and Luigi's Mansion!

There would be 3 "worlds" (think of it like the different floors in Super Mario 64) with 4, open and non-lenear levels each!

Each level would contain 10 "pilliows" (the stars/moons of this game), which you can freely get at any order by finding them or doing quests/challenges.

Each level would also contain a set amount of yellow (most common), red and blue coins (most rare) which you would just permanently collect.

To 100% each level, you would need to collect all pillows and coins!

The game would also have 3 main bosses, each one being fought after getting enough pillows to go to the next area. I did not think of what bosses they would be, but the 2nd boss would be a floating head (I think you can think of the inspiration...)

One thing that I was really excited to include was a ranking system! Based on what you would correct, you would get more and more score until getting the max score!

STORY

The catch-phrase of the game would be: "NOTHING CHANGES"

The story would be that you would play as a girl who re-experiences the same dreams over and over again, eventually getting tired of it and wanting to put a stop to it, and this the game begins.

The problem was that she forced herself to be a child as a 16 year old, thus never actually growing up and staying in the past. This would be revealed at the end of the game (or after 100%ing it? I don't remember).

Oh also, the levels would be based on one of three themes::

Happy Memory
Imagination/Fantasy
Nightmare (the most interesting!)

DEVELOPMENT

It all started when I was on a 4-day school trip to Volos (a greek city).

On a lengthy bus drive to a specific place near there, I decided to watch this Super Mario 64 retrospective video.

It was inspirational.

So much that I wanted to make my own game like Super Mario 64! So I kept thinking and came up with this:

The game's structuve would be more like Mario 64/Sunshine. You would select a scenario which would have its own rules and objects, with its own coins, and you would collect its only pillow, which would bring you out of the level.
There would be 9 levels, with 5 pillows each.
At the end of your playthrough, the game would take into account all the collectables and coins that you got from each initial (first) scenario playthrough that you would have completed across all courses, and use them to rank your save file. Depending on the rank, you would get a certain amount of "special currency" which you could use to buy various stuff like costumes on the main menu.

But later on, I decided to change it to what I wrote above, to be more Super Mario Odyssey-like.

In hindsight, I kinda wish I kept it as it was. It would make the game more replayable and give actual meaning to the ranking system.

One problem that I had with the game though was that I could not think of any interesting platforming mechanics!

I remember asking in my friend group's Discord server for ideas and I sadly did not get any.

Oh also, as you can see in the video linked way above, the game was extremely jittery! I tried fixing it and just couldn't. (The movement system was so messy...)

But I continued on, until, again, realizing that the scope of the game was too big for a single dev, which in hindsight, it probably wasn't that big.

Also I kinda felt stupid for how I handled talking about the game in my friend group's server. I tried being as secretive as possible (to try to maintain motivation) but I was still talking about it, making game design related polls about it that never got responses, and also in between updates I would mention the not-good state of my mental health at the time.

Would I work on the game again? Honestly, probably?

I don't know if I want to work on a collectathon at the moment, but a 3D platformer with interesting platforming mechanics, maybe.

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