Summary

• Sonic Dream Team takes players on a dreamy adventure as they battle against Dr. Eggman. The game offers imaginative dreamscapes and 3D gameplay.
• The development team introduced new lore to the Sonic series, creating a plot that revolves around the rescue of Cream from Eggman's clutches. The game combines classic Sonic elements with dream-like twists.
• The team faced challenges in deg levels that capture the essence of dreams while maintaining the fast-paced and flow-oriented gameplay of Sonic.

Sonic Dream Team will take players through imaginative new dreamscapes as they work to take down Dr. Eggman. Releasing today, the title comes from Sega HARDlight, a Sega-founded developer with a focus on mobile games which has previously produced other titles with the IP like Sonic Dash+ and Sonic Forces. An Apple Arcade exclusive, the new title centers around the Reverie, an ancient device capable of making dreams come true.

From the most recent side-scrolling Sonic Superstars to last year's open-world Sonic Frontiers, the franchise has touched on several different styles over the past few years. Sonic Dream Team has some of the most creative potential yet due to its narrative, which offers the boundless landscape of dreams, as well as its 3D gameplay style. Players will be able to utilize six classic characters - Sonic, Amy, Cream, Knuckles, Miles, and Tails - as they work to thwart Eggman's plans for world domination. The game also introduces the new character Ariem, a sheep-like character who guards the Reverie.

Screen Rant interviewed the studio creative director at Sega HARDlight Dan Rossati to discuss introducing new lore to the series, the challenges of level design, and tapping into the potential of dreams.

Dan Rossati On Sonic Dream Team

Screen Rant: First I would love to hear a little bit about how the new lore that's being introduced in this Sonic title came about.

Dan Rossati: So I suppose we were given largely free rein to sort of pitch, propose and just come up with what we wanted. And the lure for this one sort of went backwards in a way. We knew we wanted to put Cream in the game, but at the same time I wanted to come up with a narrative that made sense that you've got the little kid there.

And so we wrote it to have a plot that would require Eggman to need Cream for a reason, and then the team has to go in and save her, so that the lure sort of comes out of the design process rather than just. I want to write this particular story, but as soon as you get those kind of pieces down, you can then go, "All right, this is actually quite interesting now, so we can start doing that." So I think it really just started from the overall design process.

In of how the level mechanics work, how has it been? Because with dreams you have so much freedom.

Dan Rossati: Yeah, it's interesting because it's almost a dangerous way of thinking at first because you can do anything in a dream, but because it's Sonic, you're starting from a really strange world. There's worlds with loop-de-loops and all sorts of stuff that just there. So how do you make it feel more dreamy than Sonic already does?

So that was the first challenge, but I think for us it was: "What was the gameplay we were trying to capture?" And you could almost forget for a moment that it was a dream. How do you channel things like speed and flow? And then once you've captured that, then you put a dream-like twist on it, so now you're doing it upside down and things will switch on and off that weren't there before, so you're not really sure where you are.

And we tried to capture that idea that in dreams they're so strange sometimes, that you'll open a door and you'll be in a completely different place, or suddenly you're in a swimming pool or you're in space. And there's a lot of ideas that are a bit like that in this game that just kind of change your perception of where you were.

So that's sort of what we tried to bring to it, but it is very much building on Sonic as a whole. We didn't just go, "Oh, let's just forget Sonic." We went, "What would Sonic's world be like in a dream? Imagine if you experienced Sonic's world - what would you dream?" That's how we were thinking about it.

You mentioned that having that sort of freedom was the first main challenge you ran into. What other sort of main hurdles were there in making this?

Dan Rossati: That's a good question. I suppose from our point of view, it's more about the practicalities of making a game. So not so much on the creative side, but HARDlight as a studio, up until that point we'd made Sonic Dash, Sonic Forces, and then Sonic Racing. And a lot of those games are very much built on similar tech. And for us, the hardest part was now suddenly we have to build a full character controller.

This terminology is a bit nerdy, but we call it the three Cs - it's the character, the camera, and the controls themselves, and all good games really balance those out. But because it's Sonic and you move so fast, you have to have a fourth C, which is the context, like the level that it's in.

So we'd never done that as a studio before, so we had to work it out. And so that was the biggest challenge. What are we doing? How are we going to work this out? What's been done before and how much of that can we do? The biggest challenge was just the team learning how to make a proper Sonic game, for lack of a better word.

In of wanting to take the best mechanics from other Sonic games but still make your game distinct, what was that sort of balancing like?

Dan Rossati: It's a good question. Because Sonic's been around for over 30 years, each generation that plays Sonic, their first with Sonic is different. So you've got kind of a fractured fan base. And I've been a Sonic fan - I'm pretty old - so since day one basically; I've been playing Sonic since '91.

The classic games are where I started to develop what a Sonic game is. I was looking at momentum, flow, these sorts of things really resonate with me. And then you look through the games and you're like, "Okay, they didn't do momentum in that one, but they did boost in that one." You have the ability to go fast all the time, but that can lead to a state of flow as well.

So we looked through it and was like, "Okay, the core philosophy here should be how do you make the most flow, free, expressive movement you can?" And that became the crux of the game. Outside of that, then we were like, "Okay, we can look at all the games and see what's true for that." Then the next part was how do we make it all sit together, and that was like art direction, narrative, all these things all sat together. And then as soon as that came to be, we didn't really have to look in the past anymore because the game starts to inform itself, and so that's what ends up happening.

Do you have a favorite dreamscape level?

Dan Rossati: Yeah, there's this nightmare maze. I really like that level because it's a bit creepy. And that's one - you can see glimpses of that in our announce trailer; you'll see it in there. That's a good one.

And the last levels, without giving too much of the plot away, that's a really cool set of stuff; there's lots of stuff. But every level to this game, because they're so involved in it, means something. I've watched the design team build it, so I have real fondness on a kind of emotional level after that. So yeah, I think probably I'd go with the nightmare maze because of what it means and how it went.

Sounds very cool.

Dan Rossati: Yeah, it's like the game is a bit like a gradient - it starts quite nice and friendly and as you get to the end you get the idea of Eggman's sinister plot behind it, and that's the sort of turning point. That's why I like it, I think.

What are you most excited to see players react to when the game comes out?

Dan Rossati: That's a good one. For me, I want to understand whether we delivered on the sense of flow, because we started with how do we make a game that's all about Sonic doing things at speed, at flow. And I want to see if that actually comes through in the game design, if we've managed to achieve what we set out to do.

But I'm also really interested in how people react to the narrative as well, because I think it's the sort of story where, I suppose the approach that I take when I'm writing things is I want to try and get the heroism of Sonic down, but he's a character that's a bit like a flat arc character, so his role in any story is to be inspirational.

He's the hero type and so he affects the world and everyone else reacts around him. So if you write it correctly, you can actually have nice interactions with other characters. And because we put Cream in this, I'm interested if people like how the reactions between the characters work, because we got all the voice actors talking to each other. So that should be pretty fun to see how people like that too, especially Ariem, the new character.

Source: Sonic the Hedgehog/YouTube