"Henson, not Pixar."

That's Media Molecule co-founder Alex Evans, describing the studio's officially unofficial mantra. He's referring to his team's appreciation for the improvisation that springs from the art of puppeteering, and how that informs the studio's next project, Dreams.

"Both can be incredibly expressive and wonderful," Evans said, referring to the mantra's implied division. "But if we had to pick between the two, we love the idea of performance."

Sly beginnings

Performance was at the heart of Media Molecule's initial, stealthy reveal of Dreams, which was untitled and framed as a tech demo when Evans took the stage at 2013's PlayStation 4 reveal. He spoke glowingly of the potential contained within Sony's wand-like Move controllers, giving a peek at 3D sculpting tools and the puppeteering of a virtual rock band.

"That was Dreams as it was two years ago," Evans said during a recent chat with Mashable. "The cool thing about the genesis of that presentation was when [technical director David Smith] was like, 'Animation should be like a kid doing a puppet show.' That was the foundation for our animation in Dreams, the idea that you can grab some part of the world and shake it around."

The studio's in-development PS4 game was formally revealed at E3 2015, with little more than a teasing trailer, a title and a promise of more details to come at Paris Game Week in October.The little we know at this point suggests an experience that builds on some of the ideas in Media Molecule's creation-oriented LittleBigPlanet games.

Little bit Planet

"If you wanted to think about it in those terms, [Dreams] is literally LittleBigPlanet evolved," Evans said. "That's one of the things we started out with: How do we evolve LittleBigPlanet [without] using tech and next-generation blah blah blah to add more knobs and sliders?"

Specifics will have to wait until October, but the PlayStation Meeting video provides some tantalizing hints. Accessibility is key for Dreams, Evans said. Too often, LittleBigPlanet players engage with shared content while shying away from creating their own.

"It didn't have that immediacy, which we're really going for [in Dreams]," he explained. "The first thing we built was the fun, quick sketch moment where you just move your cotroller and you've made a change. That was in LBP, those seeds were there, but we've taken it way further."

Evans wants to be clear on this point, however: Dreams isn't just an evolved take on LittleBigPlanet. It's more of a spiritual successor. The core idea of allowing players to create and share whatever they like remains, but the acts of content creation and consumption both are distinctly different.

"In LBP and any other user-generated content game, you're collaging pieces made by the original developer," Evans said. "The really innovative thing about Dreams is, [what] you're piecing together ... they're extendable by the community. It's [user-generated content] all the way down.

"If you've just made a sculpture of a fingernail and uploaded it, it might be the best fingernail in the universe. Thousands of people are using the fingernail as a canopy for a gigantic building, or something. Who knows how it'll get used? That's the sort of 'everything is a remix' culture which I think gamers of today are completely fine with."

Poke, prod, discover

The act of creation is a key differentiating factor in Dreams. LittleBigPlanet plays out in 2D-ish environments that have foreground/background depth. Creative fans have come up with inventive subversions in what they've built, but that's a hard-set limit. Dreams shifts creation into a 3D space.

"We were really nervous about moving into three dimensions," Evans said. "2D is such a useful constraint. The sculpting tool [in Dreams] was the first tool that ... felt really natural.

"We use the gyros and accelerometers to give it a real sense of three dimensionality. Sculpting plus LBP evolved was the starting point [for Dreams]."

The sculpting tool's ease of use then empowers the game's overriding philosophy: anything that someone creates can be appropriated and repurposed. And since the sculpting tools are designed to be intuitive — you just poke and prod a thing, reshaping it like clay — the hope is that everyone will do it.

Then comes the sharing, the discovery and consumption of content created by others in the community. Again, Dreams strives to evolve ideas laid out in Media Molecule's earlier efforts.

"LittleBigPlanet hsa this feeling of a hub-and-spoke model. You play a level and it's kind of funny, then you go back to your hub and you look for another thing to play," Evans said.

"Dreams is much more exploration and MMO-like," he continued. "I want you to get lost in Dreams. Rather than constantly returning to a home screen; instead, it's more like Wikipedia. You search for cucumbers and you end up in Ohio farming and then you get to Batman.

"That feeling of going through links and portals and finding yourself in new territory, new gameplay experiences."

Living the Dreams

There's already a sense of that meandering exploration in Dreams' debut trailer. which blurs genres as it transitions from a nighttime piano-in-the-forest scene to polar bears in the snow to sci-fi hoverbike heroics to a teddy bear smashing zombies with a hammer.

"The whole thing was done in about two weeks," Evans said. "We took some playable levels and some non-playable levels, basically a cross-section of the content that we had. For example, the polar bear sequence comes out of a snowboarding game crossed with a guy who was building this polar bear character for his daughter.

"It was like a microcosm of what we want Dreams to be. People started mashing up different elements and we very quickly pieced together this collage that was intentionally broad, all over the spectrum, a little bit 'what the fuck,' but visually appetizing and different from traditional games."

It's also indicative of how Dreams is meant to flow, particularly when you fire it up for the first time. Much like actual dreams, there's no story, no continuity that ties everything together. You turn on the game and you play through some dreams. It all starts there.

"The idea is that you explore," Evans said. "So you travel through this sequence of dreams of dream-like— I hesitate to say 'levels,' but initially I think they will be game-like levels."

The experience then branches out from there based on which facets of the experience jump out and grab different players. Much like the E3 trailer, there's an organic — if inscrutable — flow that weaves in and out of different experiences. If something sticks out, you grab onto it and see where it takes you.

"At some point you might see an element in a dream and you're like, 'I could take that purple elephant and [turn] it into my own creation. So we're hoping for this Lego-like moment where you realize that if you don't quite like how something works, you can mash it up and make it your own.

"That's the vision," Evans added. "You play and kind of get sneaked into mucking around and creating at the same time."

The road ahead

Dreams represents a major moment in Media Molecule's history. "This is our 'moonshot,' in Google terms," Evans said. "This is what Media Molecule is gonna do for the rest of Media Molecule."

That's why Evans took the stage at E3, more than five months before the Paris Games Week deep-dive. There was a desire to make the project "real" for Media Molecule's community of creators and consumers.

"I wanted to get their brains going on what they felt they could do," he said. "Right now, the team at Media Molecule is working on a beta trial. We haven't got the details of when and what, exactly; that's what comes at Paris.

"Even the high-level overview is enough to get our high-level fans absolutely cranking in their own minds about what they want to do. And then, as soon as we get to the details, we don't have to do that exposition part. It's already sunk in people's minds."