Stadia’s ‘Crayta’ is Like Google Docs For Video Game Creation

Crayta is simple, yet powerful. Crayta is a game-making platform that launches on Wednesday, July 1st. Its a Google Stadia exclusive where you can create your own rules, levels, and entire games. You can then share them with other Crayta users. It uses blocks similar to Minecraft, and kinda looks like Fortnite. Crayta enables the creation of games that are very different from what we’ve been seeing on Google’s Stadia streaming service thus far.

It’s also going to demonstrate a long awaited Stadia feature: state share. State share is the ability to jump into a game at the same exact point as your favorite streamer or friend. State share will work without requiring a game hubs setup or friend list addition. It’s all done entirely through a single link that can be shared anywhere.

So, Crayta is part game creation tool and part party game hub. It really is the ideal environment to beta test something like state share. Crayta will make it a lot easier to share games and collaborate with other Stadia users to create entirely new games. After you create a game, you can generate a link to your creation that you can easily share. So, there’s no need to pour over libraries of other people’s games. But if that’s something you are into, you can do that.

State share indeed does work as well as advertised. The easy link sharing feature is where it’s a lot like Google Docs. State share holds onto that Google Docs type of collaborative simplicity.

These are only the early days, and there is already a decent amount of games that have been able to use features from other games. A lot of these examples worked well and others, not so much. In a lot of Crayta games, it’s like you’re moving around a Fortnite character in a different game, so there is a relatively small learning curve.

Not everything will have to be a third-person shooter, though. Crayta offers more than enough camera freedom to even create an isometric RTS (Real-Time Stratagy) masterpiece.

Unit 2, the team responsible for Crayta, had a handful of games available to test during this early stage. There were several CTF (Capture The Flag) style games, a clone of Overcooked, another game where the player has to overcome a massive wall that is barrelling towards them and other players. One tha we liked was called ‘Prop Hunt.’ If you arent familiar with it, it’s like a whimsical version of ‘Prey,’ where the player can transform into random objects and hide while other players try and track them down.

There is a lot of potential in this tool, and Crayta makes ideas easy to execute and share. Crayta’s developers have done a lot of work to provide a large amount of guidance and tutorial content.

You can sign up for Crayta’s premium edition on July 1st. The premium tier includes 500 credits of in-game currency for items and skins. The Crayta team is also promising ‘seasonal post-launch content’ for the rest of the year. For Stadia Pro subscribers, that’s free, but if you are using the free version, the base version costs $39.99.

Featured Image Credit: [crayta]