Crayta: Cursed Galleons Showcase World

How a simple visual catalogue turned into a mini-adventure in its own right!

Cursed Galleons, Crayta’s latest season, went live on 6th April. With it came a brand new Showcase World to demonstrate some of our latest new features and show off the slew of new pirate-themed meshes, props and cosmetics.

We’ve created showcase worlds for most of our previous seasons — they’re a perfect way for our users to jump into a fully designed world and see the new models and voxels in a real context. They were effectively 3D catalogues of all the cool new stuff.

However, for Cursed Galleons we went a few steps further than that and added some additional features to make the showcase a truly interactive experience.

In creating the new showcase we had a few really important goals:

• Show off the brand new NPCs as a high-priority feature in themselves, and as adverts for the costumes that the players will eventually be able to unlock.
• Take the player on a tour of the world itself — showing off all of the new assets in an interesting way.
• Give the player a sense of direction. This can be really helpful for players who feel a bit lost in a less-interactive ‘shop window’ style showcase.
• Inspiration — every player should come away with both knowledge of the new assets, and some inspiration for interesting environments, build techniques and stories to bring to their games.

To achieve this we created two distinct worlds based loosely on the in-game sets we built for the Cursed Galleons trailer. The first is a tropical paradise we call Galleon Bay, and the other is the gloomy, mysterious Skull Island!

NPCs

One of the biggest and most exciting new features in the Cursed Galleons update is the arrival of NPCs. These characters have the capacity to add a vast new extension to the creativity of the community, as well as add an incredible sense of life to all of the Crayta game worlds.

For this reason, we put NPCs at the front and centre of the new showcase. However just having NPCs standing there looking like shop mannequins wasn’t going to be quite enough; so we decided to get them talking, and actually give the player tasks to achieve. So, in the classic tradition of RPGs, the NPCs in the showcase world will communicate through speech boxes, which brought the first design challenge.

With NPCs in their very first iteration, they don’t yet have a built-in speech box UI or any sort of dialogue manager, so we had to create that from scratch along with a text manager backend. This system doubled up as the quest manager, handling all of the logic to operate each quest, greatly adding to the complexity. Fortunately, everyone in the community gets to benefit from this additional work as we’ve packaged up the dialogue/quest handler and the UI itself into free packages that any user can import directly into their own worlds and start using in their games.

Whilst that system was still in development, we also started writing the quests. Since everything was essentially a dialogue chain, the actual dialogue needed to both carry quest instructions and also tell a little story. For the bright and breezy Galleon Bay environment, we decided to avoid the classic pirate clichés of Cornish accents, a desperation for doubloons and cackling laughter, and go for a much lighter story of a group of pirates with a strong community spirit but no real interest in the buccaneer lifestyle.

A short quest chain sees the player visit each of the pirate crew, passing on messages and eventually convincing them all to rejoin their pirate captain, and maybe even turn their lives around!

The Skull Island environment is where the fog has rolled in, and the more sinister side of the pirate world can be found. This is where we really did lean into the pirate clichés that many people love. It’s all rattling bones, cackling laughter, piles of treasure and even a hidden Kraken.

Mesh Scaling

One of the most widely requested and hotly anticipated features in Crayta history has been mesh-scaling. Placing a group of tree meshes in your world, for instance, and giving each of them a slightly different scale can really help create much more natural-looking environments. Or, as seems equally popular, you can make an entire game out of wildly oversized ice creams, and pineapples the size of tower blocks.

This new feature was invaluable in creating the wonderful, natural landscapes seen throughout both Galleon Bay and Skull Island. Just take a look at the impressive Skull Island centerpiece — a terrifying gigantic rock skull that is actually made from just two different base assets, all scaled and rotated to different extents.

Building the World

As we mentioned above, the showcase worlds usually start life as simple ‘film sets’ created for the season’s trailer. And, in common with most film sets, they are designed to look great from a small number of angles. However, converting a film set to a fully functional game world is a pretty significant piece of work.

Thankfully, Crayta is a fantastic environment for collaborative work, and it’s worth pointing out that all of our trailers and showcase worlds are created entirely in Crayta, using precisely the same toolset that every player has access to.

On the last few days, before we went live, there were often up to four team members all flying around the showcase world, fixing and improving different areas. Some of us were finessing the landscape, some completing technical functionality, and some doing the really important job of adding a ton of fun little details, environmental storytelling and surreal Easter eggs. There’s tremendous energy with this sort of cross-team collaboration, especially when you can see the improvements in real-time.

The result is a terrific world that hits all of our primary goals. It is a true team effort, it is the most ambitious showcase we’ve ever done. We certainly plan to do some updates to it in the coming weeks, adding new content, discoveries, and definitely a few more crazy Easter eggs.

We hope you enjoy exploring it as much as we did making it, and we’re looking forward to seeing what you all build with this latest season of content.

Crayta is FREE to play and create on Stadia and Epic Games Store!