In Conversation with Unit 2 Games

At the Interactive Futures gaming convention held at the Leamington Spa Centre I had the opportunity to interview Cristian and Shaun (C and S)about Unit 2 Games’ new game development platform, CRAYTA.  I know nothing about making games other than I someday hope to write the stories for them so a platform that allows you to build games from scratch with no coding knowledge and the potential for expert help was of great interest to me, and I the platform should be able to help others too.

What was the motivation behind the CRAYTA platform?

S – Our CEO Richard Smithies wants to lower the barrier to entry on game development.  Right now, it’s fairly high, you need a lot of technical skill to make a game, but he is keen on improving the accessibility in a similar way to what YouTube did with video making.  We believe that the more people who make games the better. Our aim with CRAYTA was to cater to both the lower end of people with non-technical skill and seasoned developers who want to make their own games from scratch.  Making games is awesome and we just want to get everyone involved.

So, you mentioned in earlier talks that everything is hosted on a discord?

S – We use a discord server for the authentication of a game making account and the most primary communication within the platform.  Discord is popular and its overlay works well with everything so it would be silly not to use it. We have implemented an in game chat as well so that people can chat within the same game servers to better collaborate on games.

How many people use CRAYTA at the moment?

S – It’s in pre-alpha now and last time we checked we had around 300 people sign up on our Discord.  30-40 of those are students from Leamington college. Our target was 150 users by the end of January and we’ve exceeded that so we’re very happy.  Now we’re pushing to make it bigger and bigger. It’s been phenomenal seeing what the community has managed to achieve together so we want to ensure that continues.

All the speakers at this conference have suggested making your own games is a key way to getting into the industry.  Including a link to a portfolio on your CV is really important so it’s great that your platform allows people to do that.

C – Over the last 2 days here we’ve had loads of people asking us about work experience opportunities so it is something we’ll be looking into in a more official capacity.

S – For now though it is just great to see how many fantastic games people have made.  Some of the level 1 and 2 game design students over at Leamington College have made some amazing games so far.  They can just pick that up and show someone and go “look, here is a game I made!”

One of the most interesting aspects of your platform is the community driven nature of it.  You mentioned people could be given permission to just jump into a game and help edit it with someone?

C – Well learning how to code is so much easier when someone is there to do it with you.  Someone with more coding experience can jump in and you can see what they’re changing in real time.

S – Part of the accessibility we wanted from the beginning was making it educational.  We wanted to push a virtual classroom type of thing so that people could learn in a comfortable and encouraging environment.  You can see what people are typing, they can highlight things for you.

C – Learning how to code is scary so even if none of your friends know how, this way you can all learn together, and it becomes a lot easier.

A friend of mine studying computer science always said we should make a game together where he would code it and I’d write the story for it, this seems like an ideal platform to do that on.

S – It is!  My wife wants to get into game writing and with CRAYTA she can make a level, put in rooms, put in a text box and say “if a person enters here, show them this text” so right there you have the beginnings of a narrative game.

C – We have two colleagues whose job it is to create games using our platform and they were able to make a great party game called Meteor Strike in less than an hour while waiting for a conference call.

It does look like a really fun platform to make games on, it almost looks like a game itself.

S – if you’re new to making games opening up an editor like Unity is really daunting so having a game creation platform that feels like a game makes it more accessible, it makes it more likely people will keep using it and keep coming back to it.

So what are the plans going forward?

S – Right now nothing is set in stone.  We had a road map initially, but nothing is set in stone.  We’re seeing what works best and what needs to be changed and we’ll be making regular announcements on our Discord.

Thank you so much for the interview, anything you want to add?

Both – Just play the game!  The most useful thing for us right now is feedback so we can make sure we keep this thing going in the right direction.

I had a chance to play some of the games designed on CRAYTA at the conference and was amazed by how good games created by amateurs could look and feel.  If you want to get into game design I’d highly recommend going to crayta.com and checking out this awesome platform.