Item — HN Reader

What a whimsical article, I had totally forgotten about Dreams!

Also finally a good excuse to buy a PS5: Build a 100% fun time LISP interpreter in VR! No Meta creep stack required!

Let's hope the new US run Sony / PlayStation doesn't axe Media Molecule for excessive efficiency reasons like they did with Studio Japan. It's crazy outlier teams / projects that made PlayStation special / what it is today.

3 comments

I want to revisit my LISP interpreter someday because I have a few ideas about how to implement it more simply. The weird thing, which I only realized after the fact, is that it's less like "building a LISP" and more like "building a LISP machine". One thing I'd like to try for that system is a shared "memory bus" that can be used to allocate and fetch data - right now each node in the system has data-fetching logic built into itself, and it's massively complicated as a result.

I believe Dreams actually runs even better on the PS5 (I’ve heard when running Dreams in a PS5 the “resource” that limits the size of worlds you can build is much larger).

I do wish that Sony would release a free “player” version of Dreams automatically installed on every PS4/5 so that everyone could access what you build. Right now Dream’s creations have a hard time going viral because you have to buy and download a copy to access them. I also wish that Sony would make the tools available on the PC.

I hadn't heard about that, what a shortsighted decision, most of the exclusives that ever made me buy Sony's consoles were either made by Media molecule or Japan studio...

Japan Studio made my favorite game of all time (in collaboration with From Software): Bloodborne.

I had no idea they shuttered Japan Studio, that makes me sad...and even more depressed that Bloodborne will likely not get a PC Port or PS5 patch it rightly deserves.

Considering how similar Bloodborne is to other From Software games I assumed it was developed 100% at From with Sony as the publisher. But I have no idea what the reality is. Did Japan Studio do development work on the game too? If so, I’d be curious to know how they split up the development work between teams.

Japan Studio is credited in the game and actually pitched the original concept to Hidetaka Miyazaki because they specifically wanted to work with From Software. I’m not sure how “collaborative” the actual development was though. I guess the way I worded my original reply made it seem that Japan Studio was the primary developer but I’m pretty sure it was primarily From Software.

https://youtu.be/oiGPTI06fn8