When he was a little boy, a Dreams creator who goes by the handle ‘Danikaka’ made the journey from Syria to the U.S. with his family. He had been born with a spinal condition that was currently untreatable in his home country due to a lack of resources and confidence to pull off such a complicated procedure.
Fortunately, his aunt learned about a charity-funded hospital in America that was willing to treat patients from other countries. At just three years old, Danikaka and his mother flew halfway across the world in order to undergo the surgery he needed, before returning to Syria due to the fact their visas were only temporary. His family would eventually bring him back to the U.S. to monitor his health more closely, at which point he went through high school before completing a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and starting a job as a web developer.
While Danikaka took this job, his dream was to become a game designer. Unfortunately, he soon realized that making his ambitions a reality would be no easy feat. The vast majority of job postings demanded several years of experience in the field, which he paradoxically couldn’t obtain on account of the fact that nobody was willing to offer it. Up until this point, most of his work in games development was limited to a handful of school projects.
“It was demotivating to get rejection letters before even getting to the interview process,” he says. “So when I got a call for a web developer position, I didn’t think twice about accepting it.”
Danikaka would soon receive a stroke of luck. In early 2020, he was introduced to Media Molecule’s Dreams, which is as much a game creation tool as it is a game. Danikaka immediately became fascinated with its vast array of tools, and soon started experimenting in ways that quickly garnered attention from the surrounding community.
It’s important to provide some context for this. Danikaka has always had a passion for mathematics, and won national competitions that encouraged learning outside the prescribed Syrian curriculum in fourth and fifth grade – these victories even led to him meeting the country’s First Lady. His first game created in Dreams was Binary Bash, which tasks players with bashing blocks against one another to create binary sequences that represent decimals. The project won in the Hidden Gem Creation category of the 2021 Impys, drawing Danikaka into the spotlight of the Dreams community – the kind of games development collective he had always wanted to be part of.
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His new game, Nine Equals, is similar. It’s been played by over 1,500 people so far, which includes people who claim to ordinarily have no interest in maths. It’s also been nominated for two Impys – Most Original Gameplay and Excellence in Innovation. Danikaka considers the nominations alone a “badge of honor,” given how many “original and innovative creations are released by talented dreamers every week.”
“When it comes to Nine Equals, I’ve always been very fascinated with the idea of randomization,” he says. “I’ve been a fan of other math mobile games like 2048, so I wanted to make another math game with a new concept that I would enjoy playing personally.
“It started with the idea of having a list of numbers and an operator, and the player needs to sort them to make them equal to a number. After experimenting with that concept further and getting feedback from the Dreams community, the concept kept growing and design changes needed to be made in order to make the game more strategy-oriented than luck-based. The outcome was to have a grid with nine equals signs where the player has multiple slot options to place the numbers and strategize.”
As more people played the game, Danikaka started to implement new features like power-ups in order to increase the depth of the concept. Once he recognized the game’s appeal, he decided he should make it more readily accessible to people, and so he dusted off his Unity skills and started remaking the game using that engine. His long-term goal is for Nine Equals to become popular enough to be used as an educational tool in schools, incentivizing kids to participate in mathematics in a more naturally enjoyable way – a premise probably fostered by his own academic success in outside-the-box competitions as a kid.
He also firmly believes that brain exercise games are healthy for people of all ages: Kids can use it to practice their arithmetic, while adults can treat it as a game to pass the time while they’re waiting on public transport.
None of this would have been possible, however, without the Dreams community. While Danikaka has wanted to be a game developer since he was a child, it wasn’t until he found Media Molecule’s unique engine that everything started to piece itself together.
“The collaboration and reusability aspect of Dreams is one of its biggest strengths.” Danikaka says. “Using existing assets made by the community has helped simplify the game development process so much.
“Additionally, having a helpful community has contributed immensely to the success of my games. My main strength in Dreams is creating and developing gameplay mechanics, but I must admit that design is not one of my strengths. So I would like to acknowledge the graphically talented creators who saw the potential in the initial stages of my math games and offered to help with the design aspect. Specifically, PayOffWizard helped out with Binary Bash and 800PixelGorilla helped out with Nine Equals.”
Among the various projects Danikaka has been inspired by in Dreams are paintings, sculptures, and educational tools pertaining to subjects as vast and varied as chemistry, astronomy, math, and even amateur paleontology.
“I love the creative toolkits because it inspires dreamers for more ideas and it gives them a head start on their creation without having to start from scratch,” he says. “There are dreamers with a variety of talents – there are painters, sculptors, animators, musicians, and logicians. Those toolkits allow the creators to focus on their strengths. For example, a person who is a great level designer but struggles with logic would benefit a lot from a toolkit that already has the logic included in the kit.”
That point is much more significant than it may seem at face value. Because Dreams offers a comprehensive package covering all aspects of development, from asset creation to audio editing, people can experiment with different disciplines to discover where their passion lies. As a result, Dreams becomes an approachable gateway to other engines, simplifying the creation process while simultaneously introducing aspiring developers to the kind of conceptual work that they can then translate to other modes of production. It also functions as a great means of building a quick proof-of-concept prototype.
Danikaka himself can testify to the effect of all of the above. As we said, he is redeveloping Nine Equals as a mobile game in Unity. While this will drastically expand the reach of the game, it’s also been a much slower development cycle due to the fact it’s harder to collaborate with other people. Danikaka also finds Unity less intuitive than Dreams, meaning he’s forced to spend a lot more time researching how to make certain ideas work.
Still, he is driven by his mission to bring Nine Equals to mobile devices. In his eyes, the difference between the amount of people with access to a phone and the amount of people with access to a gaming console is astronomical. By catering to the former audience, he can make his game significantly more accessible while also providing a web version. You can check out his work-in-progress here.
It’s been a long journey for Danikaka, a young man who chose his handle by combining his own given name – Dani – with the name of his favorite footballer, Brazilian legend Kaká. From traveling across the world for spinal surgery as a child, to eventually revisiting the U.S. with what seemed like an impossible dream, his ambition and perseverance are admirable.
“I believe that every life event no matter how big or small helps with drawing the foundations for someone’s future,” he says. “My birth, living in Syria, my degree and career choices, and finding Dreams have all played a substantial role for who I am as a person, and all these aspects get reflected in the types of games that I create.
“Dreams has been a major part of my life for the past two years. I’ve spent thousands of hours creating and playing other people’s creations and I’ve enjoyed every minute of those. I also owe it to Dreams that I got the chance to meet a lot of amazing new friends. I’m very honored that my creations have been recognized by the community and Media Molecule, and I’m thankful that I got the chance to share my story with you.”
You can tune in to this year’s Impy Awards at 12pm ET on Sunday, Feb. 27 to see how Danikaka and his fellow dreamers fare.
Written by Cian Maher on behalf of GLHF.
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