The Early Days

The idea of building a game out of clay and cardboard came from Erik. I was very skeptical at first, knowing the highly iterative nature of game development. Having to build static sets would force me to pre-plan far more than I was used to, which I didn't feel comfortable doing.

But Erik persisted and, in order to convince me, whipped up these four test environments more or less overnight – painted and all.

As you can see, a lot has happened since then. We don't use primary colors in the way Erik did in some of these tests, instead opting for a more muted desaturated color scheme. And our shape language ended up being much more straight and angular. 

But for a brief proof-of-concept I thought they where damn charming, and after seeing what could be done, I jumped on board. So this is actually the embryo to The Dream Machine.

At this stage, Erik was working as the Producer for various commercials in Gothenburg and I was hired as an Art Director for a games studio in Malmö. Neither of us was very happy about our work situations and saw this project as a chance to get back to the early days, when we worked out of sheer mad determination and passion.

Based on these rough tests and a story treatment, we managed to acquire some money in order to produce a proof-of-concept demo. And the rest, as they naggingly like to say, is history.

And since I'm in a nagging mood: don't forget, the open BETA testing for chapter 1 is still running. If you'd like to participate, just go to http://www.thedreammachine.se/game.html and click the pink "Beta Sign-up" button. That'll give you full, instant access to the first chapter.

We hope you enjoy playing the game!

Cheers,

 - a