Our goals and future update ideas for Dream Cycle!

Folks, I'm posting on behalf of Toby who wishes to share some updates and thoughts on Dream Cycle today, enjoy!

Hello!

It’s been a little while since I last posted here. After the winter break, we are back hard at work on the next big update.

The high level goal for Dreamcycle has always been to create a portal into infinite adventures. At the close of last year with Update 1 under our belt, it was a great time to take stock of the game. Thanks to community feedback and discussion, it is clear to me that Dreamcycle is falling short on a few fronts. While that’s to be expected in Early Access, one particular issue stands out as not a result of roughness, but as a fundamental design problem, and that is the lack of meaning.

As we continued work of story adventures, it became increasingly clear that the other levels started to feel like filler. Because they only offered basic objectives to encourage exploration, the lack of story points by comparison ended up with the unfortunate sense that there are 10,000 filler levels and only X real ones. This was absolutely not the intention.

Every Adventure should be worth playing, so the way we implement the story needs to be reworked.

This has sent us back to the drawing board at a fundamental level. Update 2 will be focused on giving every Adventure its own Context, Story and Objectives. Each Adventure will be a mystery you are there to solve, with the addition of a ton of new interactables, puzzling and other gameplay surprises, we hope to make every one a satisfying story of its own.

To support this new focus, the map is being reworked. It will be much simpler, the choices less overwhelming and more informed about the type of experience you might expect. Despite this simplification and paring down of the map, the upshot will actually be a total lifting of restrictions. Every adventure will be replayable any number of times, generating a new story and layout each playthrough, legitimately delivering not 10000 adventures but an infinite number of them.

I look forward to revealing more specifics about this major change as well as a host of other features we will be adding in the next update. As always, thanks for supporting the development of DreamCycle and I hope to see you in the Beta when it opens soon!

Toby