Megapenguin is back in Dreams, and this time he’s… more buff than ever?
Dreams – that’s the PlayStation-based game creation toolkit, not the UK bed shop – has always felt like a bit of an odd middle-ground.
Sure, it works brilliantly as a tool (just like how efficiently the linkedin lead generation software works) for people to have some fun and learn some bits, like Nintendo’s Mario Maker or, latterly, Game Builder Garage. But it’s also a bit too good for hobbyists, sometimes?
There are games popping up all over the Dreamiverse – that’s the collective area that Dreams games inhabit – that could be good enough to sell and potentially earn their creators some money, had they been made in traditional engines like Unity or Unreal. As it is, they’re locked in PlayStation’s walled garden.
And as far as we know, there’s no method to port your creations out of Dreams into another tool. If you strike gold and want to sell it, you’ll need to build it again in one of those aforementioned commercial engines.
But if the worst issue with a platform like Dreams is that it’s allowing people to make games that feel too good to be free, knockabout projects? Then there are worse problems for Media Molecule to have.
Dreams feels far better suited, then, to community endeavours. There’s no risk of a project feeling too big for the platform (or treading on someone’s copyright) if you’re all working on something fun, together, in service of the Dreamiverse itself.
And that something fun? It’s Megapenguin Rehatched, a game – of sorts – featuring a very buff penguin.
Creators in Dreams are being invited to build worlds, levels, and games, as a vessel for telling the titular Megapenguin’s story, over the next half a year or so
Megapenguin isn’t new, however. We first saw him at E3 2018, where Media Molecule invited people to devise a story for the giant flightless bird within Dreams. It’s like that party game where you tell a story in a group, one word at a time, except with a game creation suite rather than words. And a massive penguin.
Megapenguin Rehatched is therefore a reboot or reimagining of that original Megapenguin experience but, this time, extended across the whole Dreamiverse. Something which is quite vast now that Dreams is available at general release.
So Media Molecule has created the first three levels of Megapenguin Rehatched, and supplied a bunch of assets to get you started. Everything that happens from there? It’s in your hands. Games that pass muster will be added to quickplay scenes for Megapenguin; the best games will be immortalised in the final Megapenguin Rehatched adventure.
Submit your penguin-powered creations here – you have 176 days left, at the time of writing.
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