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Crayta was a collaborative game creation platform that released in July 2020 and was shut down in March 2023. During those roughly 2.5 years, I was an avid game creator and active community member. I learned a ton using the platform and it will always hold a special place in my heart ❤️
Quick disclaimer: Since I was making games for fun in my spare time, I'm only sharing the general concepts and highlights below. If you'd like to see proper product design process, Prompt AI or Seeit are better case studies to see how I usually approach product design, if that's what you're looking for.
It's worth taking a moment to talk about Crayta – what it was, what it could do, and how I used it. Crayta was an online collaborative game creation platform that allowed players to create games and publish them for others to play. It featured a voxel-based world builder with preset assets and extensive Lua and JavaScript scripting.
I was one of the early adopters of the game and quickly became a prolific creator. By the time they shut the servers off, my 40+ games had garnished ~210K plays, I'd contributed to hundreds of collaborations and packages, and 2 of my games were featured on the front page of Facebook Games.
Below are some gameplay videos I recorded before the servers went offline. Note: I am most definitely not a video editor so my apologies in advance for the crappy editing.
Duo Slide was a deceptively simple puzzle game. The player used the directional input to control 2 blocks within a space – the catch was that they move together. Additionally, there were special blocks and tiles that could catch, move, and teleport the moving blocks. This allowed for a nearly endless supply of levels and challenges.
Overall Duo Slide gained ~56K plays, it was featured on the front page of Facebook Games, and it won second place in a game jam. It featured 99 handcrafted levels of increasing difficulty and took the average player 4+ hours to complete.
Word Shift was another puzzle game I built in Crayta and it was based on a mobile game I built. I've actually got a fairly detailed write up about the mobile version here.
The general concept of Word Shift is pretty simple: the player has different letter blocks and they must shift them around to spell the given word. All of the blocks move together so the player must use the stationary blocks to change the order and properly align them. The goal is to spell the correct word in as few moves as possible.
This was my third most successful game and ended up with ~25K plays overall. It was also featured on the front page of Facebook Games and had a total of 99 levels to beat.
Rainbow Racer is a classic obstacle course game that features 8 courses in different colors. The obstacle course genre was extremely popular in Crayta and this one was no different. It got ~36K plays and won the monthly "most played" game award 8 times.
The unique aspect of Rainbow Racer, compared to other obstacle courses in Crayta, waas that there were mulitple races and they all contributed to the player's overall ranking. This meant a player needed to optimize all of their race times to be crowned the best. Additionally, each race was resigned to take less than 2 minutes so it was perfect for quick plays and casual gamers.
Hyper Light Runner was my first successful game in Crayta. It was born from a simple idea to build an entire game using only the "neon" type of voxels. It's a standard obstacle course with massive rooms, tricky traps, and a global leaderboard. It got 10K plays and won the monthly "most played" award twice. I eventually made 2 sequels which gained another ~22K plays collectively.
Death Co is another obstacle course that features huge realistic traps all set within a fictional labratory setting. This game was a real pleasure to build and decorate because all of the obstacles are intended to look like real mechanical objects. It only got ~5K plays overall but boasted nearly ~72K collective deaths among its players.
Impossible Balloon Hunt is another game that came from an extremely simple idea – the player has to find and pop 99 ballons that are hidden throughout a huge dreamlike M.C. Escher-esque map. After initial play testing, I realized it was too difficult for most players and added an "Easy Mode" which made the balloons glow. I also added a "Practice Mode" where players could try to pop as many balloons as possible in 2 minutes.
This game did fairly well, gaining ~6K plays and winning the monthly "most played" game award once. It was regularly refered to as one of the most beautiful and relaxing games, by the developers and community at large.
Crayta Ninja Warrior is a short obstacle course modeled after the TV show American Ninja Warrior. It was born out of the idea of making the most difficult obstacle course in Crayta. If featured obstacles that required twitch reflexes, coyote time jumps, and miniscule mid-air adjustments.
Overall CNW only got ~4K plays but those dedicated players managed to master it so well that they could run through the course in under 2 minutes. I, on the other hand, never managed to finish it in less than 20 minutes and hundreds of deaths.
Since Crayta has been discontinued, I'm currently searching for another game building platform. I've dabbled in Unity and Unreal Engine, as well as a number of 2D and mobile cross-platform engines. Making games is a passion of mine and I'm really looking forward to doing it again.
