Introducing Stadia State Share Beta with Crayta

Introducing State Share Beta with Crayta

One of our main goals for Crayta has been to remove as much friction as possible. Partnering with Stadia removes the need for installs and patches, allowing near-instant play of games across your favourite devices.

But our Crayta community will need more: Crayta’s game makers will want to directly promote their individual creations to audiences, and our social players will want their friends to be able to join them easily in each game. State Share Beta, an early version of the Stadia Enhanced Feature (SEF) called State Share, makes this possible. You’ll be able to use it in Crayta when it arrives on Stadia this Summer.

When we started working with Stadia we were able to take a closer look at their SEFs, all of which appeal and could be applied to Crayta in various ways, but State Share in particular caught our attention. The ability to click a button and leap into any ‘save point’ that the developers had set up was the missing link that we had been looking for.

By working closely with the Stadia engineering team we were able to take State Share Beta and wrap it around our Share Codes feature to create intelligent, instant-access hyperlinks directly into Crayta games that can be shared and clicked through from anywhere on the web.

How it works

At the highest level, what we’re talking about is the ability to generate hyperlinks that allow players and creators to load into individual games and game sessions within Crayta. Under the hood there’s quite a bit more complexity, so that game creators and players can request a link at any time and Crayta will know which type to generate. Let’s look at the main use cases:

• A player who has made a game can share a link on social media. This link launches Stadia and takes them directly into a session of that game on Crayta.
• Someone making a game over a number of sessions just wants to launch directly into create mode each time they launch Crayta, so they create a link to save as a Chrome bookmark.
• A streamer is having fun creating a game and wants to get more people involved. They generate and share a temporary link that takes people directly into their edit session. When the streamer finishes the link expires.
• A YouTuber wants their viewers to come and join in their play session, so they generate and share a link in chat. People clicking on the link will be taken to the exact session that the streamer is in (note: if the server is full they will be taken to a new instance of the same game).

As far as the player is concerned the process for all of the above scenarios is:

Generate Link->Share Link->Another player joins the game

But behind the scenes there are a few different types of link being generated.

Showing some detail

You know when someone shares a link on social media and the link expands to preview some of the destination’s contents? That aspect (called unfurling) is also something that we will also be supporting. The links will actually travel through our creator portal where each game has its own automatically generated web page, and then launch into Crayta. By taking this approach the search engines will be able scrape these game web pages to generate the unfurling data for the links when they’re shared in Twitter, Discord, etc.

Instant access

We believe that State Share Beta means that you can have high quality experiences coupled with the accessibility of launching web-games, which will benefit both players and game-makers alike.

Hopefully the above has provided some useful details on how we plan to use this feature, but if you have any questions feel free to drop us a line in our Discord server (https://crayta.com/discord).