We got the moves!
We’re excited to announce that in our latest update to Crayta (live now!) we’re introducing our brand new animation system. It’s a complete rebuild from the ground up and we can’t wait to see what you all think of it!
Our fantastic art and programming teams have totally overhauled how all of the standard character animations look and feel, making them much higher quality and more fluid than ever before. And they’ve also added some great new enhanced character movements that will enable all sorts of new gameplay mechanics and fun ways for players to interact with their environments.
Existing players will notice the difference as soon as they jump into their favourite games because all the improvements and the new moves will be enabled by default.
Let’s take a look at those new moves!
Mantling
Mantling is the term that describes your character’s ability to clamber over ledges or obstacles in order to reach an otherwise-unreachable area. It looks great and also adds a lot of character to your movements as you explore a world.
Combat roll
The combat roll is that roll you’ll do to break your fall when you come in to land after a big drop, or simply to help you roll out of the way of an incoming hazard. It’s another great one that adds more variety to how players can navigate a level, as well as opening up different gameplay mechanics.
Sliding
We love the sliding animation because it really helps to bring environments to life as your character is affected more realistically by the terrain they’re moving across, as well as adding that extra perception of momentum when transitioning between fast and slow movements.
We’ve prepared a brief Quick Guide video to help you implement and adjust how the animations work in your game, and you can see it here: https://youtu.be/acwma0-H0BE
And you might also want to watch our more detailed reveal of the animation system in our livestream here: https://youtu.be/brQXRyuq3qE
Crayta is obviously a live service that will continue to evolve, so it’s always good practice to re-evaluate your games whenever a major new update like this goes live. You might want to tweak the gameplay to take advantage of the new features, but it’s also worth double-checking at this point for any changes in behaviour that might arise.
Feature Requests
We also wanted to take this opportunity to talk a bit about our approach to updating and evolving Crayta in general.
We’ve said all along that we welcome suggestions and feedback from the community on the future direction of the game, and if you haven’t come across it yet our feature request board is here. You’ll notice that there are a LOT of things on that board! We look at it regularly, but we do have to prioritise what we decide to work on or none of us would ever sleep!
We weigh up which features seem most sought after, which of them add the most value, whether they’re major functional additions or just quality-of-life improvements, and simply what we have the time and the resources to implement.
We obviously have our own wishlist of things we’d like to add over time too, so all these ideas are weighed up against each other before we decide what we should tackle next.
In the case of this latest update, we were aware of a lot of comments about the look and feel of the animation in the game from the moment we launched. We always knew it was something that we would work to improve over time, but when we saw the strength of feeling around this area we felt it was important to bump this significant overhaul further up the priority list. We’ll continue to add to and improve it over time as well (look out for ragdoll effects, extra grips and other interactive movements coming soon!), but we feel it has already had a profound impact on how the game feels for everyone who plays it.
We recognise that we’ve not communicated as well as we might have done about how future feature decisions are made internally, so it may have looked a bit like we were just ignoring all the great ideas you were adding to the board. We can reassure you that’s not the case!
Every new suggestion is being looked at, assessed and then added to the list if we think it will add value to the game and its community of players and creators. It then goes into the scheduling pot and is weighed up against other work the team need to do.
We obviously continue to add new functionality and improve things under the hood too — some of that work may not be quite as sexy as things like the animation, but it’s all vital to ensure that Crayta continues to improve over time, and runs as smoothly as possible.
We’re working really hard to bring you tools and features that you’ll love and appreciate, but we’re also in it for the long haul so sometimes things you’ve suggested might not be as urgent in the big picture as others. For us, this is a marathon and not a sprint!
So please bear with us and keep giving us your suggestions! We’ll make sure that we get better at acknowledging them and feeding back on things, if you folks keep bringing your enthusiasm, fantastic ideas and passion for helping make Crayta the best it can be!
Now go have fun with the new animations!
