BAFTA YGD Idea Generator x Dreams

Screenshot of the BAFTA Young Game Designers Idea Generator created in Dreams, featuring a slot machine style object with headers reading "genre," environment," "goal," and "wildcard."
Screenshot from the BAFTA YGD Idea Generator created in Dreams

A creativity tool for rapid idea generation created with Dreams, in partnership with BAFTA.

While working as the Business Development Manager for Media Molecule (Sony Interactive Entertainment), we realized that while Dreams was a powerful creative tool, many users felt intimidated by the breadth of creative possibilities. Constraints are valuable in the design process, and I wanted to introduce our community to the idea that preciousness isn’t always a friend to creativity. Inspired by a collaborative creative writing game I had co-developed, Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, as well as an episode of The Good Place, I designed a slot-machine-like “idea generator” that could provide endless recombinant prompts for possible things to build in Dreams.

Once I came up with the initial idea of the project, it came up in a chat with BAFTA that their Young Game Designers program also had a card-based creativity tool used for game design, and we decided to team up by combining our tools to make an interactive idea generator within Dreams. The art was created by Martin Nebelong.

We launched the idea generator with a live Twitch stream you can see here. At the date when I added this project to my portfolio, the BAFTA YGD Idea Generator has been played by 3,552 Dreamers, for a total play time of over 5 days.

You can read Mm’s official blog post here.