Crayta ❤ Global Game Jam
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As January hurtled past us at excessive speed, it brought with it a celebratory prize for getting through the gloomiest month of the year in the form of my favourite game jam event: The Global Game Jam.
Game jams are friendly competitions aimed at developing your game creation skills, be they coding, art, audio or any other skill. They typically last between 48 and 72 hours but can range from an hour to a year depending on the jam. The aim is to build a complete game from scratch in the allotted time, based on a theme provided by the organisers. From vague thematic prompts to abstract images and sounds, the theme is open to each individual’s interpretation of how to build a game around it. For example, Ludum Dare’s “small world” prompt spawned titles such as an adventure game set in a snow globe, a game about guiding a swarm of bees to safety, and a platform game with literal tiny planets, all of which demonstrate that the range of creative solutions inspired by game jams is very wide.
Popular engines such as Unity, GameMaker and Unreal are used extensively during game jams, taking care of most of the technical backend and providing creators with high-level coding APIs and even visual development without the need to write a single line of code. These are great for building games in a short time. However, a lot of work is still required to get a jam entry or small prototype up and running. Fundamental game logic, art assets and sound all take up precious time which could be used to develop your actual game idea instead.
A Creation Toolbox
Cue Crayta entering the scene, with bags of pre-built assets, music and game mechanic templates. You can rifle through the library and create any combination of meshes, voxel terrain, mechanics and visual/audio effects extremely quickly. Our goal with Crayta is perfectly aligned with that of game jams; to make creating games as quick and easy as possible for everyone, from a coder to an artist, to the non-technical, all working collaboratively in the same world to realise a game in the shortest amount of time.
Prior to the Global Gam Jam, we had been testing Crayta internally for the best part of half a year while running weekly game creation streams on Mixer. The small community that had grown with us were eagerly using the platform and sharing valuable feedback. The Global Game Jam provided the perfect opportunity for us to to continue to push the limits of what Crayta is capable of, as well as learn about how we could further refine the creator experience going forward. It was also an opportunity for us to see how one member of our game jam team, who had no game development experience, would use Crayta both individually and within a team, to design and create a game.
Your Game Idea Is Definitely Too Big
Come the Friday evening, we gathered up our laptops, notebooks and heads full of ideas, and drove over to the University of Warwick where we nestled in for the long weekend.
The main point I repeat in my talks about game jams is scope which is a crucial aspect to consider for any game to succeed in terms of both production and actual enjoyment value — it is all the more crucial for game jams. With 48 hours on the clock, every minute is critical for ensuring the game gets completed on time: a poorly defined plan of what your final product will be and how you’ll get there is the main killer of game jam projects.
With that in mind, we spent the first couple of hours sketching out some game ideas and arrived at a few promising concepts we all agreed with, eventually whittling it down to one solid and well-rounded scope.
We then halved it.
And halved it again.
No matter how small and achievable you think your initial scope is, always cut it down. Getting something built with a fun core gameplay loop is the highest priority in game jams. Other gameplay elements, visuals and “wouldn’t it be fun if” are all additional nice-to-haves and can be put off for the time being. It’s much more important to focus everything on coming up with the absolute bare minimum gameplay.
The Chasm Between
We wanted to push and test Crayta’s abilities as much as possible in the game jam, so we ensured our scope would be achievable yet tricky. Our core gameplay loop would involve building, resource-gathering and an element of danger to keep players engaged throughout. Sticking to the theme, we eventually decided on a family that was physically separated by a chasm. Each side of the map would have unique resources — wood on one, stone on the other — which both sides needed in order to build and survive. The loop would involve each player gathering resources and exchanging them between the two separated groups via a pulley system. At the same time, the player would need to carefully manage each group’s needs and safety (both groups had to keep out of the dark) and eventually build a bridge thereby achieving the game’s goal of a reunion.
Collaboration Is Key
Crayta’s powerful collection of voxel tools allowed us to rapidly prototype the game’s level and get a better visual representation of which gameplay elements would need to be created. Given Crayta’s collaborative nature, two members of the team were able to focus on getting the core game framework built and running in lua as the terrain was being built and sculpted around them.
Within a few hours, we had the basics of our visual game world laid out using the wide variety of voxels and meshes available in-game, and the fundamental aspect of our gameplay loop (resource-gathering and building) built at a basic level. Being able to instantly flip between Editor and Play modes to test, tweak and refine, allowed us to hone our initial game experience far quicker than if we’d been using Unity or Unreal across five computers.
Each member of our team was able to help each other out in real time — either running around the map to ensure scale, jumping into a particularly tricky lua script and coding collaboratively to solve a problem, or checking in on some UI work to ensure it integrated properly.
Fueled by coffee and pizza, by the end of Saturday we had finalised the map, created the building voxel templates and brushed up the core mechanics to include storage, transferal of resources between sides and the mechanic of taking damage in the darkness.
We were ahead of schedule based on our initial estimate and compared with previous jam experiences, having put together most of the game much quicker than we had anticipated; it was clear that Crayta was performing well for the rapid creation of a game.
With the final day underway, we set to stamping out bugs, refining the core loop and patching up the last remaining bits of our MVP. Coffee came and went, and the room was quiet but for the barrage of clicking keys as everyone rushed to finish their game. Confident in our progress, we started adding in some fun final touches — a hidden room here, a flaming skull there and a mysterious snowman in the rolling landscape.
We encountered some gameplay setbacks later in the day when the transfer system broke, but some expertly applied fingers to keyboards resolved it in the nick of time. The GGJ website was as slow as the M60 on a Saturday afternoon due to everyone submitting their games — we created our project page, uploaded our info and, with a collective holding of our breaths, hit “submit”.
We were done!
Uncovering Challenges
The main purpose of taking Crayta to the Global Game Jam was to see how well it would perform in a real collaborative development environment in order to see where the cracks, if any, might appear.
With the game finally submitted, we headed to the pub with a notebook and pen in hand to debrief and gather our thoughts on what we had learned, and what could be improved with Crayta for the future. Being able to switch between the Edit and Play modes was great for rapid testing and iteration and worked well internally with a couple of people in the same game. However, once that team expanded to five people all working on different aspects of the game, it became a little trickier to find a balance between testing the game versus uninterrupted development.
A potential solution to this could be improving and utilising the Travel To Preview Server, which was initially designed to prevent interruptions across larger teams. However, due to the technical requirements of needing to spin up another server, this meant using it could add 30+ seconds to each Edit -> Play -> Test cycle. This doesn’t sound like much but could stack up if you’re changing and testing a particular bit of code multiple times a minute.
Spinning up a second Preview instance when a game is being edited, and having changes propagate immediately once Ctrl+S is hit by anyone in the Editor could be a great solution.
We scribbled down other observations, ranging from minor UX up to larger technical aspects we encountered. You’d generally assume a page of issues would be disheartening, but the opposite was true here.
The game jam provided a brilliant test environment for finding these challenges, which we might otherwise not have found so quickly with internal testing. To us, the notebook full of scribbles and ideas was a great success. We now knew more about how to improve Crayta than we did just 48 hours before. The takeaway was that this had been a decent case study of how field testing, even when carried out by staff who have worked on the product, can provide extremely valuable feedback.
Crayta has proven to be a fantastic platform for rapid prototyping, taking away most of the tedious legwork involved when developing in game engines. The collaborative nature of the platform allowed our team with its varying skills and expertise to work together across design, code and content. From dipping in and out of lua scripts to assist each other, to giving opinions on level design and content population, all within the same world.
We learned a lot about Crayta and how we can make it even more awesome than it already is, and importantly for a game jam, had lots of fun while doing so. I’m looking forward to using it in another jam, as so much has already been added and improved in the time between GGJ and this post!
