Challenges don’t have to be challenging
Making Creator Challenges work for you
One of the key things to do when making a game in Crayta is to decide what “success” looks like to your players. In some games it might be picking up spawning collectables before other players, in shooting games it might be getting a number of kills regardless of whether your team wins. Importantly, the Crayta platform doesn’t dictate to creators what it is that your games should consider success, it’s entirely up to you as a game designer. Implementing Creator Challenges in your games gives our players a consistent place to find achievable short-term objectives, to define what a successful session of your game looks like, and to aid with retention of players within your game.
We’ve had Creator Challenges in Crayta for a little while and many of our best games implement them very well. At the moment, Creator Challenges are edited on the website once a game is published. In our next major release of Crayta (due on 10th March 2021) these challenges will be editable directly on the “Game” tab of the advanced mode editor, making it much easier to balance and develop them. The challenges (and leaderboards) from your edit version of the game will automatically be made live at the point where you publish the game. It’s a much nicer system.
This document doesn’t cover all of the practical implementation of challenges in much detail (check out some of our YouTube tutorials for more on that, especially this one). This document covers what we consider to be a “good” challenge. This is going to be important to creators soon since we’re going to be introducing a new Battle Pass progression model that relies on us being able to “judge” that a challenge is fair (not too easy, not too hard) and rewards players for completing challenges in any game (check out our recent announcement for more info on that). We’re also doing work to enable you to easily see which of your challenges are working well and which need a bit more work. This is available now on the developer website and when the challenge editing moves into the game editor we’ll put the rating in there too. We’ll work over time to improve the algorithm we use for judging challenges based on how many of your players complete them and how quickly they do so. For now it’s pretty basic but keep an eye on the website as it should get better over time. In general though, my first advice is always to be generous to your players.
So what makes a good challenge?
Challenges should be single-session. Generally we find that the best challenges are completable in a single session of a game. This doesn’t necessarily mean a single round in a round-based PvP game, but in as many rounds as people, on average, want to play before moving on to the next Crayta game. Think of the way you play Crayta — how long do you stay in a game that you quite like? That should be roughly the maximum amount of time a challenge should take.
Challenges are only known on the day you do them. The daily challenges are picked at random from the available ones each day so they should never involve any kind of setup in previous sessions. For example in Tumbleweed Ridge a good challenge is “plant a seed”. “Harvest a seed that you somehow knew to plant yesterday” would not be.
Challenges should reward the less-traveled paths through your game. If your game includes several different activities, make sure the challenges are spread out between them to push people to deepen their engagement with your game. Sometimes a challenge is a great way of telling players they can do something they didn’t know about. “Collect 3 apples by shaking trees” would be a good challenge if people might not think they could do this in your game.
Challenges should be self-descriptive. You should in a few words be able to describe what it is you’re asking the player to do in a way that won’t require further in-game assistance. However occasionally breaking this rule is good if you’re pointing people towards more unusual features (“Visit the secret basement”).
Challenges can unlock automatically sometimes. It’s okay for some challenges to unlock automatically just for joining in (“Play 3 rounds” in a shooter would just happen for you sticking around and this is okay). But to do so it should be joining in for a whole session rather than a quick route to completing challenges. Challenges that complete too quickly will be flagged by our system as exploitable and we’ll make them less rewarding to players in the new progression model.
Challenges should be a variety of difficulties. When a player joins a game they would generally expect to complete one challenge fairly easily, one challenge for persevering and perhaps one for really pushing themselves. If in doubt, err on the side of being generous. If you think collecting 20 apples in a session seems reasonable maybe make the challenge 10. People who play your game are, on average, not as good at it as you are.
Don’t confuse challenges and achievements. Achievements are usually unlocked over the lifetime of your game in many play sessions. Challenges should always be unlocked in a single session. If you want us to implement a Crayta achievement system why not vote for it on the feature suggestions board?
Hopefully the above gives you as a creator some good guidance on how to go about putting together challenges for your game.
Implementation Best Practice
There are two key parts of implementing a challenge in Crayta, and getting them working well together is really important. The first one is the challenge events, sent with the User’s SendChallengeEvent() function. This takes two parameters, the event name and a table of whatever conditions you want to add.
The second part of defining a challenge is the challenge definition which you edit on the developer website (as mentioned above, we’ll move this into the game editor soon). This defines a challenge as a number of occurrences of a particular event. So to implement “Win 1 round” I could send a challenge event called won-game and define the event to look for 1 occurence of that event.
But there’s a better way of doing this involving conditions. If we instead change our game code to send finished-game and send rank as a condition we can make all sorts of challenges. For example we can now make “Win 1 round” as 1 occurrence of finished-game with rank equal to 1. We can make “Play 3 rounds” as 3 occurrences of finished-game. We could make “Finish in the top 3”, etc, etc. By generalising our challenge events we can data-drive our challenge definitions and multiply out the number we support without changing the game-code.
Conclusion
By now you’ll have seen the news about Crayta’s new Battle Pass based progression system. We’re really excited about this and we hope you are too. Creating fun games with exciting Creator Challenges right now is a great way of getting involved in Crayta’s future, as well as making sure your creations are eligible to be featured in-game and to win our monthly prize fund.
