Allow a "Dream within a Dream" to exit to the parent dream
"Dream within a Dream" is something you can turn on for a dream you've imported to a parent dream. When the player is sent to the nested dream, they are actually being routed out of the parent dream entirely and into the nested dream to play it. This means the nested dream can have its own entirely separate persistent variables and scoreboard, but be accessed via that parent dream seamlessly.
You can actually link an exit doorway the nested dream has into another scene or whatever in the parent dream. However, these links do not function properly.
Exiting the nested dream it kicks the player out of all dreams entirely, and leaves them on the cover page of the first nested dream they visited. This leaves them a touch on the "dazed and confused" side of things, looking at the cover of a dream they didn't enter. And from the creator's point of view, the link they specifically added was not respected.
This has even been a problem for Dreamscom. In its first year, nested "Dreams within a dream" was used to allow creators to link to demos of their work, and (theoretically) back to the player's Dreamscom experience. And it was even hooked up in exactly that way. But because of this problem, going to any demo meant you'd lose your place, and get kicked out of Dreamscom entirely after a demo. So it was safer to not visit any demos, even if they looked amazing. Which of course led to people forgetting to look for those demos later on, and the demos were sadly largely ignored by the sounds of it.
The way things currently work really feels like a bug, which has been there for years now. But fixing it (or changing its design if this was intentional) would really allow creators to do so much more with Dreams.
This issue means that we cannot do things like have a hub world/menu linking to all our games, and our games linking back to the hub so the player can try another one of our games. We cannot extend how many scoreboards we can use by splitting things up into separate dreams and linking between them, or the same for persistent variables. We're really just sending them off into the ether knowing we'll never see them again. So people tend to not want to use this feature at all, because it's not fulfilling the promise of what it seems like it's meant to be doing. Which is a real shame.
Please fix this issue, or make it work as it seems it should, to allow the more prolific creators (shoutout to oooDORIENooo) to keep players playing, and help promote their work, and get this feature more use.
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Making Dream within a Dream work this way is also the missing piece for creating programming puzzle games. That genre traditionally has multiple scoreboards per level - one for each solution metric e.g. number of instructions or number of cycles - and also saves a player's best solution for each level. Those features require a dream's worth of scoreboards and persistent variables respectively per level when the number of levels is large. Some creators have had some success with programming puzzle games, but they haven't attempted to implement those features. Most likely because of the gameplay flow and progress recording - telling the hub dream whether the player passed or failed a level is another thing a dream within a dream can't do - that get taken away when you make each level a dream within a dream.
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Expanding on my thoughts about a dream within a dream communicating a level pass or fail to the hub dream. Dreams within dreams have their own isolated set of persistent variables, so persistent variables won't be usable for that communication. If Mm make this change, the identity of the entry doorway through which the player entered the hub could be used to encode pass or fail with the hub having saved the ID of the attempted level in one of its own persistent variables. But that still uses an extra doorway, and those have the smallest of all thermo limits. However, there's one more communications channel for passing information through scene transitions - the name of the last possessed controller sensor, which selects a controller sensor with a matching name to be auto-possessed in the new scene. Using that channel can save a doorway, and it should be enabled for returning from a dream within a dream if this change is made.
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Ah, great points. That stuff working would be very good as part of this update.
Of course, the other option is to give us 1024 scoreboards ;P
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My game Possession 2 works like this. You can play all the dreams in sequence and it allows you to seamlessly move to the next game. My sub-dreams have exit doors that link to the next dream and I enter a cave and then the next dream I’m at the cave entrance.
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