Unit 2 Games – realizing their vision for UGC games with the help of CL tech

NEWS

1/8/2019

Alexandra Ivanov

One of our main goals at Coherent Labs has always been to make game developers’ lives easier by streamlining and simplifying UI creation. When we saw the same ambitions to create an intuitive and easy to use tool, that would enable more people to create the games they want in Unit 2 Games’s new project Crayta, we were thrilled. So we chatted with Andrew Shenton, Technical Director at Unit 2 Games about Crayta and the way they used our tech to realize their vision.

► What was the inspiration behind the idea for Crayta?

We had a vision that everyone would be able to create, share, and discover UGC games easily; to build a game which was profoundly driven by player UGC as its primary feature allowing players to create new types of game genres, experiences, and personalized content.

► What can players expect from Crayta?

By combining innovative industry technologies to empower our players we offer them a new experience with unparalleled levels of freedom and ease of access. Players will have the ability to express themselves through building games together in a new and engaging way and will have the opportunity to discover and explore novel and compelling game types.

► Why did you choose Coherent Tech for your UI?

In our previous titles, UI had always been costly and unwieldy. We began experimenting with WebKit and were impressed by how using a browser basis streamlined the workflow for both our in-house and player-created UI. Unfortunately, the performance coming from these experiments was insufficient for our needs. 

We surveyed the landscape for a similar solution and tried out Coherent GT2 which significantly improved the performance and provided enhancements to our workflows. With GT2 as our foundation, we managed to support UGC UI at manageable performance limits in our production builds without needing to spend significant manpower on wholesale optimization. We’ve since migrated to Coherent Labs’s next-generation product, GameFace, which has even further improved UI performance in Crayta.

► What do you see as the greatest strengths/benefits of our tech?

The main advantage is putting control in the hands of our content creators. The web-like nature of the tools has also allowed us to recruit from a more standardized skill-set than was previously possible.

In combination with rapid performance and cross-platform support, the tools have accelerated our ability to deliver on Crayta’s vision for a UGC-powered future for games.

► What would you say is the overall contribution that our tech made to your project?

Helping us extend our vision for fundamental User Generated Content to player UIs through the accessibility of the HTML/CSS /JS stack. It also provides pipelines and experience to ensure that we can always accomplish our goals in a comparatively short time-scale

► Where do you see Crayta in the next 3-5 years?

We hope that as Crayta matures our community will create and discover popular new game types, genres, and sub-genres, similar to how modders created Defense of the Ancients (DotA) from Warcraft 3, and Auto Chess in Dota2. We would like Crayta to be an environment where these new games, their player community, and content creators can grow and thrive together.

Just about everyone at Coherent Labs is an avid gamer and we have all played player-made content, so you can imagine how excited we are for Crayta’s release and for being a part of it. 2020 can’t come soon enough!

To keep up with all the details on Crayta’s progress follow the official Twitter page and check out the Crayta website.

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