What if you could explore the vivid depths of your own subconscious? Bynine Studio’s Cavern of Dreams is a sincere attempt to bottle the lightning of childhood memories through the medium of a throwback platformer. After watching with interest from a distance, I gave the free Steam demo an hour of my time and was quickly convinced that this game is destined to make an impact when it lands.
Bynine provided a trio of exclusive screenshots for Postmode, which you’ll see throughout the article.
Cavern of Dreams does look like a lost 3D Rareware game from the mid90s, but this is just one piece of the puzzle. The project is so much more than nostalgia. Controlling its jester protagonist is a kinetic breeze, and collecting eggs across its puzzle-filled worlds is a deliciously moreish activity that rewards thoughtful exploration.
What ties it together, though, is a thick, transportive fog of otherworldly atmosphere. Peaceful riverside hubs bleed into icy cathedrals. Distant skyboxes and low-poly structures suggest a wistful world just out of reach. NPCs are few and far between, and your rescue mission is tinged with melancholy. There’s a loneliness here that can soothe or unsettle, depending on the environment and its soundscape.
Among other memories, it seemed to saturate the immersive feeling of playing PS1 obscurities like 40 Winks and Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time on a chunky CRT in my grandma’s spare room. Desperate to know more about this fascinating cultural artefact, I sent some questions to its developer, Bynine, who was kind enough to answer.
How did you get into making games?
I’ve been designing games in sketchpads and notebooks since I was a kid, but it’s only recently that I actually started developing them. I got my feet wet with ROMhacks – an excellent way to come to grips with how a game is built – and then started making projects in Java with LibGDX as I learned how to code.
What is missing from modern games that you’re trying to capture with Cavern of Dreams?
I don’t think that every game, or frankly even most games, should be trying to reach the graphical standards that have been set by modern AAA titles. I completely understand the appeal, and it works great for certain genres, but it’s so, so limiting to a game’s design and causes an avalanche of constraints – huge teams have to be organized to deal with the massive task of creating thousands of lifelike assets, so creative vision is diluted. Iterating on concepts takes exponentially longer, so safer ideas are leaned on. It’s why I value older games and the indie space so much, where individual creative visions of the smaller developer teams shine clear and bright. Some of the indie games I’ve played recently are my favourites of all time, like A Short Hike, Return of the Obra Dinn, Knight’s Try, and the demo for “Decline’s Drops”. Lower-fidelity visuals also enhance your ability to use your imagination since you’re forced to interpret what you see and fill in the gaps. Kinda like reading a book!
Thousands try to emulate this style and few succeed – how would you describe the aesthetic of Cavern of Dreams?
I was very inspired by Rareware’s 3D platformers for the N64, like Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64. They were very bold with their vertex shading, using bright, saturated colors to make important areas of the level stand out and differentiate parts of each world, and dark shadows and pre-rendered textures to imply more detail than there actually is.
As soon as I booted it up – I immediately got DK64 and Spyro: Year of the Dragon vibes. Later on, a little bit of Sonic Adventure and Toy Story 2 on the PS1, especially in the Treehouse, which feels like a homage. The Coiling Chalice took me right back to the Bowser boss ascents in SM64 too. What did you grow up playing – and what really stuck with you? Are there any vivid spaces or motifs in the games you played that you can recall now?
Banjo-Kazooie, Mario 64, Donkey Kong 64, Ocarina of Time/Majora’s Mask, and, indeed, Sonic Adventure 2 are the big ones. So many interesting places! Particularly little side areas, like Mario 64’s aquarium and Banjo-Kazooie’s level lobbies. I would sometimes just sit there as a kid, pretending I lived in them. What a little dork I was! … and still am!
The adorable main character feels very SEGA to me and reminds me of a Chao mixed with Nights. I love their pitched-up Rareware voice, too! Did it take a while to land on their design?
Thank you! I made a video on the subject of his design:
Chao and NIGHTs are both influences on his design, as is the Pokemon Flaaffy and the protagonist of “Stray Sheep” (a Japanese-only PSX game).
Is there anything outside of games that inspired you to make Cavern of Dreams?
Well, yes and no – this game is literally inspired by my dreams that I had as a child about exploring the worlds of these games. (Hence the name Cavern of Dreams.) I would imagine leaving the confines of the level geometry and going out further into uncharted territory. The recent surge of Mario 64 romhacks about this very same idea made me feel more confident that this is an urge other people experience too! Some of the specific imagery in Cavern of Dreams is directly from those dreams, too.
Can you talk about what’s going on under the hood to make Cavern of Dreams look old school? What’s your pipeline for an asset, usually?
Just in terms of the N64 aesthetic, the two most important aspects are vertex shading – painting light and shadow onto a map’s geometry – and utilizing bilinear or trilinear filtering on low-resolution textures. The game’s textures range from 64×64 all the way to a miniscule 16×16, but the filtering means it never looks jaggy. Naturally, I keep all the models and environments low-poly (the largest world in the game is about 7,500 tris), and sometimes I even skip textures entirely on characters, just using flat colors to avoid them looking too busy.
This game stands out to me because it manages to capture an old feeling that is extremely difficult to replicate now, of limitations creating an unusual atmosphere. I think about the Dream Weaver Home in Spyro or the Hazy Maze Cave in SM64. Liminal areas with impossible architecture, in-your-face textures and low-res backgrounds that provide a surreal quality. How you use your skyboxes, in particular, feels masterful because you never know what to expect behind each loading gate. Were you thinking about this as you were building COD’s worlds?
Absolutely!! And thank you so much for your kind words. I’ve heavily referenced maps from N64 games to get a similar effect. The game also makes a point to have maps not be in scale with one another – for example, the inside of the Church is five times larger than the outside. That always felt very dreamlike to me, so it felt like a natural inclusion.
Not many throwback platformers focus on the hub, an extremely important space that you want to keep returning to. COD pulls this off with style and secrets – what considerations did you have when creating mechanics to keep players returning to this central area?
Whenever you get a new ability, there’s lots more to explore, so you’re always keeping an eye out for places you might be able to reach later, and that makes it feel bigger than it is. I encourage exploration by forcing the player to return to the Sage to get new abilities, as opposed to some fast travel – remembering the space and mastering it becomes important!
One of the teething problems of trying to sell a game like this in 2023 is the speed, but the rolling mechanic comfortably fixes that. Was it always part of the plan?
This game was originally going to be much more like an adventure game rather than a platformer, with a simple moveset and a focus on pure puzzle solving. But over time I realized it’s much more fun to explore these environments with a dynamic moveset, so the protagonist’s capabilities and ability to go fast have expanded a lot. Compared to the demo there are many more options in the final game! I’m really excited to see Speedruns.
Is there something small in COD that you’re really proud of that most people won’t think about?
I put a lot of time into the audio mixing. Specifically, each section of each map has its own reverb. It’s hopefully one of those things that is totally invisible but contributes to immersion!
Are there any systems you tried to put into COD that didn’t work, and you had to scrap?
Absolutely! Health is one of them. I found the game more interesting without it, to be honest. Instead, sources of damage knock you around like a pinball, Smash Brothers style, which can disrupt your progress or even knock you into an instant-death hazard – but you also have the opportunity to avoid your fate if you’re clever, or even utilize the knockback to your advantage.
One thing from your Steam page copy that I found really interesting is that you say, “The game does not have any fourth wall breaks or meta-narratives.” I’m just curious about that—why did you write that in there?
Since the game ranges in tone from bright and cheerful to dark and unnerving (similar to, say, Ocarina of Time), I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. It’s desperately important to me that people recognize that Cavern of Dreams is genuine. Every aspect of the game is built to immerse you in a fantasy world and capture the same feeling that I had as a child when playing those old low-poly 3D games, not to lull you into a false sense of security before hitting you with the “This game is actually a spooky retro horror game and it’s self-aware ooooooOOooooOOO!!” Absolutely no offense meant to anyone working on projects with those kind of goals, but that is not this game’s goal!
Also, do you want to shout out any other indie projects in the space?
Hmm! Well, there are some great upcoming projects with a similar vibe – Winds of Basidia, The Big Catch, and Dirthead come to mind.
