PlayStation Gamers Are Now Authoring Their Own Games With 'Dreams' For PS4

dryriver explains the new buzz around 'Dreams' for PS4 (now in open access). Created by the studio that made PS4's Big Little World, Dreams 'is not a game. It is more of an end to end, create-your-own-3D-game toolkit that happens to run on PS4 rather than a PC... essentially an easy to use game-engine a la Unity or UnrealEngine.'

Dreams lets you 3D model/sculpt, texture, animate and create game logic, allowing complete 3D games to be authored from scratch. Here is a Youtube video showing someone 3D modeling a fairly sophisticated game character and environment in Dreams. Everything from platformers to FPS games to puzzle, RPG and Minecraft type games can be created.

What is interesting about Dreams is that everything anybody creates with it becomes available and downloadable in the DreamVerse and playable by other Dreams users -- so Dreams is also a distribution tool like Steam, in that you can share your creations with others.
While PC users have long had access to 3D modeling and game authoring tools, Dreams has for the first time opened up creating console games from scratch to PS4 owners, and appears to have made the processs quicker, easier and more intuitive than, say, learning 3D Studio Max and Unity on a PC. Dreams comes with hours of tutorial walkthroughs for beginners, so in a sense it is a game engine that also teaches how to make games in the first place.
Back in January Push Square gushed that 'There's simply nothing like this that's ever been done before... This is one of the most innovative, extraordinary pieces of software that we've seen on a console in quite some time...'

'And it can be browsed for hours and hours and hours. It's like when you fall into a YouTube hole, and you're clicking from recommended video to recommended video -- except here, you're jumping from minigames involving llamas to models of crustaceans to covers of The King of Wishful Thinking...'
'It's an astounding technical achievement with unprecedented ambition.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.