The Maker of Dreams

The Maker of Dreams was one of the entries for the IGMC (Indie Game Making Contest) for 2017. As one of the judges of the competition it is my pleasure to share my thoughts on the game. This review will basically just be the notes I took cleaned up. It will be based on the competition version of the game, so certain aspects of the game may have been changed, and thus I won't be giving an official star score (unless otherwise asked to, though I will be including an unofficial score).


Presentation
Despite the graphics being a mix of different packs and free resources with the RTP files it all fit quite well together, except for the portraits who looked a lot like they would fit better in a romance visual novel. They were a little jarring, especially the mother's portrait who looked very... young and sexy. The mapping was decent for what there was of it, but as you only had two maps to see, there wasn't really a showcase of ability. It was fine for what it was, though.

Sound was used decently. There wasn't really much going on when it came to atmospheric sound but what was there wasn't jarring and did the job. The same with music - there weren't many tunes but the ones that did exist didn't get old over time and they fit the various scenarios well enough.

Writing was quite good. No issues with spelling, grammar and punctuation that I could see. The dialogue was alright but didn't really enhance the characterisation of the characters much, however that wasn't really a big point of the game anyway.

The story is more suited to a simulation so there really wasn't much more than framework. That said, it made sense and worked for the scenario.


Gameplay
The general aim of the game was to complete a game and to aim for $10,000 to be made from sales from it. This was a difficult task first time around as you weren't sure how things interacted and what you'd need to do in order to get your skills up. In fact, I didn't find a way to make money until past midway through the time (60 days).

The game gave you three options of difficulty, which was nice.

You basically had a set amount of things you needed to do in order to complete the game, and each took a set amount of time to do. However, to create a game good enough to reach your goals you needed to have the skills to enhance your game, so you need to devote some time to skill building as well as popularity and advertising.

So you could choose to build up your overall skills in an area, or devote time and money to one particular skill. And you had to fight stress levels, so you needed to make sure you rested or engaged in stress relieving activities as well.

There was an autosave feature (as well as manual saving) that activated at the start of each day.


Engagement
It was a bit frustrating at times when you wanted to do one thing but didn't have enough time or you were too stressed, especially as there was no way to know what level of stress was too much for certain activities. It was also a bit annoying that certain activities didn't remove stress when they could have - for example, playing an instrument or watching youtube videos and the like should have removed at least a bit of stress. It would have been nice to have some extra stress-relief that also helped build up some positives instead of being continually depleted in everything, even if it unlocked at a later date.

Overall, though, it was an interesting simulation and I was looking forward to seeing how I went when I finally released my game. ...Not well, apparently. But them's the breaks. Knowing how to play, I'd probably do better a second time around.


Theme
The theme of the game basically focussed around creation, and it did a decent job in conveying the struggle and grind to get good at your chosen hobby, especially when it comes to making your name commercially in that market. It also touched on time management and following your dreams, which were also well conveyed in both mechanics and story.


Bugs