More Dreams -- Symazing and Dracula's Castle!

I had kind of been agonizing over this past week's community jam project in Dreams. The topic at hand is "Symmetry," and I went completely brain dead . . . right up until yesterday.  I made a long ramp that bent like a pool noodle and thought . . . I bet that's fun to run up.  So I took it and made several clones where you could go up and down it like chutes and ladders.  Then I turned it black and white like keys on a piano, then cloned that again and made it face the other direction like it was a mirror image . . . and viola, I had an idea: Symazing!

Welcome to the noir world of . . . symazing!

Basically it's an obstacle course with a symmetrical left and right hand side. The object . . . get to the finish portal!  In the process of turning one of the pool noodle ramps white, the cat character I had downloaded for the playable hero of the maze not only turned white, but also glowed!  Having a cat for a hero demanded that I had a dog for an enemy and someone had already made the perfect evil dog enemy. Thank you, Dreams community! All I needed to do was tint the dog a little black and it was perfect.

I also gave the world two suns that change from a dark black to a pale white and they switch on and off every seven seconds. Stylistically, I'm loving how this level turned out. 

The first problem I was facing was my pool noodle ramps were very hard to jump up to, so I gave the cat a mega jump.  Perfect.  After this I found a couple of nice "balance" quotes and used them in the level to give it that personal touch.  

Loved the way this one turned out.

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During the off week for the Dreams Game Jam, I decided to remake an old fashioned haunted house ride from the amusement park I used to visit as a kid. Behold Dracula's Castle, the real thing!

Unfortunately, that's just too many poly's to remake and the models they had for Dracula and Frankenstein existing in the Dreams library were enough to kill the ride remake just around the first bend.

So, instead I tried to match the themes of the ride to the track I had made, i.e., hall of pictures, whale bones, Frankenstein, headless horseman, Dracula, wolves, torture, electric chair, undead miner, etc.  It kind of fell apart at the end, and I just wanted to make sure I got the rotating tunnels. whew that was a lot of work.

Behold, Dracula's castle, the dreams version!

I spent entirely too long making this thing.  The first part was laying down all the track and getting the walls put up.  It was a lot of work.

Here's a top down view of the ride path inside Dracula's Castle

Building a ride that cue'd certain things happening as you traveled the path meant building a HUGE timeline to go with it.  This was really the first hurdle and I learned a lot about using pathing blends to make the cart turn at certain spots.

The amazing timeline of Dracula's Castle

I pushed the limits on a lot of memory constraints in this ride. Dreams only lets you put "so much" into a level. I wish I could have put in a lot more!

I tried . . .

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed my dreams.

Happy Dueling!