March 2021 Newsletter

How has everybody’s March been? As usual, we’ve been keeping busy at Mm Towers - it’s been a delightfully noisy month, what with our audio Molecules tinkering with your gnarly Battle Of The Bands tracks for Mashup Four, us shouting about your incredible Dreams creations on the Mm Blog’s new Dreamview Weekly Roundup, and the excitement of awards season!

You’ve been just as industrious this month - we’ve been particularly loving all the super-original concepts coming out of the latest CoMmunity Jams. Are you feeling inspired by some of the latest challenges? Do you have some feedback for us, or an idea for a jam you’d like to suggest? As ever, we’d love to hear your thoughts via our social channels and feedback forms. For now, here are a few of ours on the month just gone, for your reading enjoyment!

Guest Artist: j_plusb

Unless you’ve been living under a rock this month, you’ll know that the Dreamiverse is slavering over community designer Jamie Breeze’s highly challenging new creation, pictured at the top of this newsletter: a sausage launcher. We caught up with the avant-garde artist himself for a sizzling exclusive...

Where did the inspiration for this avant-garde masterpiece come from?

The history of this dynamic installation is twofold. As a wee bairn I would often throw sausages around like tiny chubby javelins. Years later I realised I could remove myself from the equation and make the process more efficient, and here we are.

Also, our very own Martin Taylor said we should make one, and I will never deny a request from a man so iconic.

How important was it for the launcher to be functional for this piece? How did you achieve that functionality?

I'd argue the launcher being functional is the piece; without launch, no sky full of sausages! That said, it's all smoke and mirrors. All you truly need are emitters tweaked to launch a sausage at ten metres per second every 0.1 seconds, keyframes powered by the output of the emitters to simulate recoil on the launcher sculpt, and a dream.

What particular kind of sausage was the subject of the piece based on, if any?

The legendary hot dog sausage, of course. I wanted a sausage with notable wobbliness. We had plenty of other sausages in the running - frankfurter, I will make a missile of you yet - but early tests turned into a bit of a nightmare. For example, the Cumberland sausage had ridiculous air resistance and would simply bolt into space and freeze, and the curves of the Polish kielbasa led it to spin on launch, creating an aerodynamic imbalance that often threw it on a circular path and returned it to the launcher.

In addition to being extremely tasty, sausages are a powerful symbol with many latent meanings. What do sausages mean to you, personally?

The only good sausage is a sausage in motion. In a world full of motionless sausages, be a launcher.

What's Happening at Mm's Many HQs

It’s Raining Trophies! (Ow...)

It’s been a bumper month for the office trophy cabinet - and yours. We are so delighted, and so grateful, to have been honoured with accolades and awards recently. Not only did Dreams take home SXSW’s Matthew Crump Cultural Innovation Award, but it was nominated for six BAFTA Games Awards - and won the BAFTA for Technical Achievement! Our studio director Siobhan Reddy was the very first woman to be presented with a prestigious BAFTA Fellowship for games. In addition to that, we’ve started to see some of our Impy winners receive their trophies... Congrats again!

You’re One In A Million

Three cheers for Art’s Dream - our made-in-Dreams adventure game passed a grand total of ONE MILLION PLAYS! Thank you all so much for jumping, singing and point-and-clicking your way through our tale.

Surf’s Up!

DreamSurfing got a bit of an overhaul this month, as we work on further curating and displaying all of the awesome things creators have been making in Dreams. Here’s one example of a change we’ve made: low-level players will see overall highly-rated creations, while higher-level players will be presented with newer dreams. For more info, you can check out this thread!

CoMmunity Happenings

Have A Crack

We’ve had a couple of dreamers release some templates so that you can decorate your own eggs! Check out duckenomics’ more traditionalist effort here, and ryan1987ward’s chocolatey sculpt here. Whether you celebrate Easter, enjoy eating chocolate, or just really love the concept of eggs, this is well worth a go!

Iconic Behaviour

After some larking about on the team Slack, we decided to kick off a fun little game on Twitter, in which we challenged you to ‘tag yourselves’ using Dreams’ in-game icons. The results were very, very silly - and sometimes quite sweet! You can catch up here - and do let us know if you’d like us to invent some more ideas for CoMmunity social media shenanigans...

Meet MasherButtons!

A talent for both music and comedy makes MasherButtons a real CoMmunity favourite! We caught up with the creator of the beautiful For The Dreams I Can’t Remember, and the hilarious Horsey, to learn more about them.

What do you like to do in the Dreamiverse?

What don’t I like to do!?! I live in there! Sculpting, building little games, painting, making tunes, playing everything! If I am a hamster, Dreams is my pellet. GOTTA HAHH MAHHH PELLETS!!! Actually the only thing I don’t do a ton of is curation.

If you could give other member of the CoMmunity a piece of advice for their time in Dreams, what would it be?

Don’t limit yourself by your own limitations. I personally suck at logic. If I’m the shiny, steel cladded, bumbling, knight of chaotic good, then logic is Ocnus the ghoulish Fire-O-Mancer who’s stolen the town’s cherished golden amulet of protection & easy-read magazines. Every day I work to conquer it. I don’t let his smoke fog, flame spear, lava blasts, and horrid stench of pungentness discourage me. For long. There’s too much information, great help from fellow dreamers, tutorials, videos, etc to ever tip the scales in Ocnus’ favour. Never stop trying to smite your nemesis Ocnus!

What was the first thing you created in Dreams?

I sculpted three little flowers in a bunch! It was euphoric. I was immediately hooked.

Favourite food, movie and song, in that order. GO!

Food (in real life and Dreams): A Greasy Meal

Real life movie: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Dreams movie: Impception

Song (in real life and Dreams): You Do You

How can people find you in the Dreamiverse?

First star to the right, and straight on till morning! Or search for the Hot Dog Song in DreamShaping. Or on Twitter @MasherButtons, or catch me sporadically watching and engaging with Dreamers as they stream the streams they dream to stream.

Which creations are currently your Top 10 in Dreams?

Preface: The following is just a tiny sample of my favourite creations in Dreams. I am, every day, Every. Single. Day. Gobsmacked at all of the talent and incredible experiences to behold. Picture like a fire hydrant. You ever seen one of those things turned on? That’s how much greatness blasts out into the Dreamiverse every day!

PIC-GONE - Nonogram Puzzle Collection

Art’s Dream

Metal Eagles: UC

Coldo - For some reason I can only find one of the funniest little dudes ever created on vimeo (@swatpaz), but I am sure Coldo was built in Dreams (there’s no way to tell, and you cannot change my mind).

Who’d you like to get to know in the Dreamiverse? We’ll ask them some questions for next month’s newsletter!

Well first off, my sincerest thanks to venwave for picking me for this. Ven’s an inspiration to us all. A huge like and massive thumbs up, also, to the folks at Media Molecule. We’ve been given such a gift.

Second off (no-one uses second off, but I like it) - lately I have been picking the brain of an incredibly intelligent man. If I’m the shiny, steel cladded, bumbling knight of chaotic good, then this guy’s the freaking king’s wizard! I picture him sitting in his library of handwritten tomes, quill in hand, plotting out the universe and its infinite intricacies, giggling to himself all the while. His name is TAPgiles. Tell us how it is, Tap!

This Month's Wallpaper

Senior principal designer John Beech’s incredibly realistic carpet went viral and attracted widespread attention this month - the DUST! The HAIRS! - and so there could only be one choice for March’s free wallpaper, which you can download here. We’ve also got an extra treat for you: the magician’s own words on how he achieved this remarkable feat!

How on earth did you make this carpet?

The carpet itself was very easy, using lots of little spheres to get the texture (varying their colour of course) and then using the flecks that Dreams is known for to get that hairy detail. The loose hairs are just simple paint strokes, but what really sells it is the lighting and high depth of field combined with a narrow point of view.

What are your accessible top tips for making realistic textures in Dreams?

My number one tip is: always think of the backstory of the item, where has it been, how is it used. That helps you know where to put scratches or colours, and tell its story - even carpet tiles have stories to tell. But the more practical tip is to look at references, photos, images or the items around you right now.

Why is it important to you that your train game has such a realistic art style (and such grubby carpet)?

I really wanted to ground this project in reality, to make it feel believable and lived in - thus by extension it feels fantastical, it's about that suspension of disbelief. Seeing something magical in a fantasy environment feels expected, but seeing something magical in a humdrum environment feels exceptional!

We're on the lookout for new Molecules to join in the fun and make Dreams the best it can be! Follow the links below to read more about our current vacancies at Mm Towers!

Stay up to date on our jobs page

Current positions

That’s all for March, folks! Keep us posted with your thoughts on the changes to DreamSurfing and the CoMmunity Jams - and keep sending us your creations on Dreams so that we can feature them on our Thursday Twitch streams and in our Weekly Roundup on the blog.

Same time next month, yeah? See you then!