The Joystiq Indie Pitch: The Dream Machine
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, Anders Gustafsson and Erik Zaring explain how hallucinogens and Roman Polanski are making their award-winning PC and Mac title, The Dream Machine, “better than sex with Jesus.” What’s your game called and what’s it about?
Erik: Our game is called The Dream Machine and it’s essentially a point-and-click adventure game, but we’ve handcrafted all the graphics using materials such as clay and cardboard.
Anders: The story revolves around a young, pregnant couple that’s trying to establish a new life in a new city. While they’re getting familiar in their new home, they uncover a seedy mystery involving the other tenant’s dreams.
What inspired you to make The Dream Machine?
Erik: Believe it or not, back in 2008 I was driven by some kind of altruism. I sincerely wanted to give something back to the world rather than being on the consuming end all the time. I had a passion for games, handmade objects and lots of pent up frustration to fuel the development of this endeavor.
Anders: While at animation school, I read a lot about John C. Lily and his experiments with LSD and Ketamine. He had this notion that he was visiting an alternate reality during his drug-induced hallucinations, a place he thought had a coherent geography. Once he regained consciousness, he would draw maps of what he had experienced, noting down things like landmarks, geographical features and coastlines. He thought that if he had enough map pieces and then spliced them together, he would be able to slowly chart this new reality. To me, that idea just sounded so naïve and beautiful. In our game we approach dreams in a similar way.Gallery: The Dream MachineContinue reading The Joystiq Indie Pitch: The Dream MachineThe Joystiq Indie Pitch: The Dream Machine originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 26 Jun 2012 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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