Crayta, part of party games center, party game creation tool, seems like the ideal candidate to share beta testing status. The upside is not only making it easy to exchange games when you play, but also collaborating with other Stadia users to create entirely new games. Then, once you’re done, you can share a direct link to your creation, without the need to browse libraries of other people’s creations. For the record, you can too.
It works as simple as advertised. I joined states via Discord and Messenger apps, and as long as I spell their passcode correctly (something that ensures randoms can stay out of their games), there’s practically nothing to mess up. I think that’s where the Google Docs analogy comes in. There have been collaborative working tools for decades, but GDocs keeps it simple. State participation must cling to this simplicity, and Google needs to include it in more games, even if they are not as complicated as Crayta.
Crayta
I got in and out of a couple of shared games and tutorials last week, and I was definitely overwhelmed by the creation part of the game. Some other Stadia users in the same instance as me were already creating new game levels, completely up to date with the system, while I just threw giant dinosaur skulls and tried to create walls and layers with my Stadia controller, not the keyboard and mouse he could have used (To his credit, the team even did a tutorial on how to create worlds only with the controller.)
So it might not be a game maker anytime soon, but what about the rewards of these tools? In these early days, the game is seriously launched later this week, there are already an interesting number of games that have drawn ideas from other games. Some worked well, others, well, less. To your credit, with many Crayta games it feels like you’re controlling a Fortnite character in a different type of game: it’s easy to learn the basics.
(Don’t expect everything to look like an over-the-shoulder shooter, though. The authoring tools offer a lot of camera freedom, so you can create that isometric game you’ve been dreaming of.)
The team behind Crayta, Unit 2 games, had several games available to try out at this early stage. There was a Overcooked clone, some games from ‘Capture the Flag’ and another title where you had to overcome a giant wall that is rushing towards you and the rest of the competition. My personal favorite is ‘Prop Hunt’. If you’ve never heard of it (and games like this have appeared elsewhere) it’s like a dumb version of Dam where you can transform and hide as random objects while other players try to hunt you down.
Crayta
The potential here could be great ideas that are easy to execute with CraytaThe tools of. The team has gone out of their way to offer plenty of tutorial content and guidance to help learn the ropes here, and there is plenty to go through.
Some of these early titles performed less well. Huddle for Warmth, where you are tasked with destroying air conditioning units that are freezing you and the world, is quite confusing and not so much fun. Your health meter is your body temperature, and the more you explore the colder you will get. With that limited time (you can always warm up next to your campfire), you have to go out into the frozen tundra to dump trash into a little air conditioning.
Whether you see another player depends on whether you spawned in the same camp or whether you were lucky while you were wandering around shooting flares for help. Without someone by your side, unsurprisingly, it’s not much fun to freeze to death repeatedly. Other games played a little wobbly, but these are early games in a new tool. Can i be patient
CraytaThe premium edition launches on July 1, with 500 in-game currency credits for skins and items. The team also promises “seasonal post-launch content” for the rest of the year. It’s free for Stadia Pro subscribers, but if you’re on the free tier, the base version costs $ 39.99.
