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

Second Beta Crunch

Erik just put the final touches on our most ambitious build to date, and it's glorious. We wish we could show you more, but we don't want to spoil it.

We're still working hard on the gameplay for Chapter 2 and assets for coming attractions. I guess you could say we've entered crunch to get the second chapter feature complete.

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.

In the interest of full disclosure, we have a system running discreetly in the background, that registers statistics for how many players actually solve any given puzzle in the game. If we note that we have a significant drop anywhere, we can add clues or re-think the problem entirely. We want the game to be challenging, but if we lose 30% of our players on one puzzle, we have to do something about it.

We also note different interactions the player attempts, that we didn't think of. If enough people try to use, say, the baby oil with the apartment key, we go in and write a response for that. Our hope is that, in the end, every possible interaction will have a proper response, instead of the boring default "That doesn't seem to work".

So even if you don't take the time to send us detailed bug rapports, you are in fact helping us make the game better just by playing.

And we thank you for that.

Cheers,

 - a