Dreams? DEMO
A downloadable game for Windows
DREAMS? — DEMO
Welcome to Dreams?, a small RPG project made by a sleep-deprived 16-year-old who probably should have gone to bed instead of adding another feature.
🌙 What is this?
Dreams? is an RPG with bullet-hell combat, weird characters, questionable decisions and a story that started as a school project and somehow evolved into an actual game.
The demo contains Chapter 1 of the game.
The final game is planned to contain 4 additional chapters, for a total of 5 chapters, alongside translations into:
- 🇬🇧 English
- 🇪🇸 Spanish
- 🏴 Catalan
The demo is currently English-only.
And yes, the combat is currently heavily inspired by Touhou-style bullet hell.
In the full game, however, there will be different kinds of boss fights: some bosses will use Touhou-style bullet hell, while others will use Undertale-style turn-based combat.
Basically:
“What if I put several different things I like into one game?”
That is more or less the development philosophy.
💀 “BRO THIS LOOKS LIKE DELTARUNE”
Congratulations.
You have successfully discovered water in the fucking ocean.
Yes, Dreams? is similar to Deltarune in some ways.
There is a reason for that.
This game is an extension of a project I originally made at school. It was never intended to be some gigantic commercial masterpiece trying to revolutionize the RPG genre.
I'm making it because it's fun, because I like these games, and because I want to learn game development by actually making games.
So yes, you may notice similarities.
No, this is not some secret conspiracy to recreate Deltarune with seals.
...Although there are seals.
🧠 IMPORTANT: THIS IS A LEARNING PROJECT
I'm fully aware that the game has rough edges.
There may be bugs.
There may be questionable design decisions.
There may be code that I wrote three months ago and now have absolutely no idea how it works.
There may even be something that makes me stare at the screen for 20 minutes wondering:
“WHY THE FUCK IS THIS VARIABLE DOING THAT?”
That's part of the process.
I'm learning.
This project exists primarily so I can experiment, improve my programming, make stupid ideas into actual game mechanics, and hopefully become a better developer.
🗿 THE HATE SECTION
If you download the game just to comment:
“This is a Deltarune ripoff 🤓”
I have some devastating news for you.
I already know.
You have contributed absolutely nothing.
If you genuinely don't like the game, that's completely fine. You are legally allowed to close the page and continue with your life.
If you still decide to write an entire essay explaining why my silly little game is bad, I will probably assume you're a frustrated unemployed guy sitting on a sofa, staring at your monitor, while a bag of chips slowly becomes your only meaningful relationship.
And then I'll go back to programming.
I am 16 years old.
I am making a free game for fun.
I am not going to lose sleep because some random person on the internet wrote:
“bad game + deltarune clone + ratio”
Brother, I literally have school.
I have more important things to worry about.
Like why my fucking fade system broke because an Instances layer was invisible.
🆓 YES, IT IS ACTUALLY FREE
DREAMS? WILL ALWAYS BE FREE.
If you see somebody selling this game somewhere:
DO NOT PAY THEM.
Seriously.
The game is fucking free.
If some suspicious website says:
“Dreams? — $19.99 PREMIUM ULTRA DELUXE EDITION”
NO.
That is not me.
Do not give random people money for something that costs €0.00.
The only official website for the game is:
[https://alek0dev.itch.io/dreams-demo]
🌐 COMMUNITY / DISCORD
If you join the Discord, please remember that it is a game development community, not the world's worst group chat.
Please don't:
- Spam “DELTARUNE RIPOFF” 400 times.
- Send porn.
- Spam unrelated garbage.
- Start arguments over fictional seals.
- Attempt to summon Satan through Discord emojis.
You can absolutely discuss similarities to other games.
Just don't turn the entire server into:
“OMG DELTARUNE OMG DELTARUNE OMG DELTARUNE”
I have eyes.
I have noticed.
⚠️ COPYRIGHT / INSPIRATION
Dreams? is an independent fan-inspired learning project.
I'm not claiming ownership over characters, concepts, mechanics, music or other elements that belong to their respective creators.
If the game ever receives a formal copyright request from the relevant rights holder, I will deal with it appropriately.
Until then:
I am making my stupid little game.
❤️ THANK YOU
If you actually play the demo:
thank you.
If you find a bug:
please tell me.
If you have constructive criticism:
please tell me.
If you like something:
also tell me because dopamine is a valuable development resource.
And if you don't like it?
That's okay.
You can simply close the game.
I promise the uninstall button will not chase you down the street.
TL;DR
Dreams?
- 🎮 RPG
- 💥 Bullet-hell combat
- 🌙 1 chapter in the demo
- 📚 5 chapters planned
- 🗣️ English demo
- 🇬🇧 🇪🇸 🏴 English / Spanish / Catalan planned
- 🆓 Always free
- 🧠 Made primarily as a learning project
- 🐟 Probably contains several questionable programming decisions
- 🦭 Contains seals
- 💀 Yes, it resembles Deltarune in places
- 🗿 Yes, I already fucking know
- 😴 I'm tired
- ❤️ Please enjoy the game
Now go play it or something. I need sleep.
Download
Install instructions
How to Install "Dreams?" Demo
- Download
DREAMSDEMO.7z. - Extract the 7zip file wherever you want.
- Open the folder created after extracting it.
- Run
DreamsDemo.exeto start the game. - (Optional) If you want easier access, create a shortcut to
DreamsDemo.exeon your desktop.
That's it!
You don't need to install anything else to play "Dreams?" Demo.
Comments
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Hello! So I played the demo today, and I wanted to give some feedback as someone who is also learning game development! I promise not to hate blindly, and I think indie devs who are learning should help each other! So I'm not going to critic like you've done this for years (I don't really have the qualifications myself anyway lol).
Firstly, I see that there's a decent amount of aggression in your game description above towards the potential people playing the game. I can totally get why you'd get frustrated with people saying it's a Deltarune ripoff instead of other aspects. However, I feel like it also can make people who do want to check out the demo turn away. I'm unsure how consistent the comparison has been mentioned, or how negative the feedback may have been elsewhere, but I think keeping it unmentioned on the game's home page would be best.
Now onto the game itself. Yes, it's a heavy mix of popular Deltarune stuff. But I think it's more important to talk about what that actually consists of. Story, exploration, fights, puzzles, characters, dialogue, etc. All of those things are HARD to get right. So much so that I haven't even tried to do stuff related to writing (I'm a mostly self-taught programmer who sucks at that stuff lol). But I do think that the story and overall progression of the demo was hard to follow. I didn't feel like there was something pushing me forward or guiding me very well. The 2 times I felt like I had something keeping me progressing was the elevator key puzzle to floor 2 and 4 (I actually didn't talk to mrluxe since I was exploring and found the key that way). Aside from that, I felt a little lost, or didn't have a motivation to move forward? I guess to compare it to Deltarune, Kris and Susie got stuck in the dark world and wanted to get back to school. Here, we fell asleep and are moving forward to a goal that isn't there (unless I missed the dialogue giving a reason?)
I think another reason I felt a little loss is because I had access to really big rooms with a lot to look at? I instinctively explore what's open to me and see what isn't accessible yet. I assume this was to give the player an area to look for the floor 2 elevator key, but I think it's a bit too big of an area? And there seemed to be a lot of rooms to access in general that were empty? I'm assuming that's because this is a demo, and they'd have a purpose in the actual release? I think having access to the empty rooms made it feel a lot less fleshed out.
With that being said, I understand that this is a learning experiment, which is good! It's good to try and recreate games you enjoy when learning and putting your own ideas into them. That's a great way to learn. However, I think you could learn by taking smaller parts of it and trying to polish them more. That way you aren't spreading the effort across a giant project that took Toby Fox himself ages to make. Though, with this project, I'm sure you saw how hard it can be to manage when things start to grow in size. Especially with organizing code (I myself am still pretty bad at documenting code lol). I saw that your Instagram bio says the game is already cancelled, but I hope you take what you learned from this project and apply it to a different one! You aren't defined by one project or by an attempt of a larger one. Start with a clean slate, maybe reuse some code and see where you can do better! Completing a lot of small projects can and usually do teach more than a singular large one!
Also I'm unsure if this was a bug or simply an ending point of them demo, but I couldn't complete the Oliver floor 3 quest. I looked everywhere for the knife, but I couldn't find it anywhere. So I got the UndertaleModder and set the completion flag to true. That let me get to the Mrluxe fight, which again, I'm unsure if there's a proper end screen to the demo beyond that. But I didn't see anything else to do after it. I already made this comment really long, so I'll end it here 😭. But I do hope you continue game dev beyond this! Good job publishing something you made! (Most people never post anything)
Thanks for the detailed feedback! Just to clarify, though, Dreams? is no longer planned for a public release. I'm still keeping the project around privately for myself and some friends, but I've moved on from developing it as a public game.
I still appreciate you taking the time to play it and write all of this!
Can you publish the game maker file? Please?
I'd love to publish the project, but the project contains a LOT of my own artwork, and I'd also need to properly document the code before making it public. I simply don't have the time to do all of that 😭
However, if you want to take a look at how something works, you can decompile the data.win with UndertaleModTool. And if you get stuck or want to know how I made something specific, feel free to DM me on Instagram: @alxk0.png__. I'd be more than happy to explain it!
Also, fair warning: my code is HORRIBLE and half of it probably makes absolutely no sense 💀
Hola hola pasa pasa