Now we have launched on Facebook Gaming, we now have a new virtual controller for players that are joining via mobile devices. The first thing to point out is that if you’re using the stock Crayta blueprints, you won’t need to do anything to assist with this unless you add a new button input to your game. However, if you do add a new button or you have a custom game, then you will need to run through this process to make sure it’s configured correctly. The good news is that it’s fairly straightforward, and you should be familiar with some of the concepts already if you used Crayta before.
Getting Started
For the tutorial we are going to use the Basic Tutorial : Mobile Controls blueprint, this can be found by selecting Create from the main Crayta menu and then selecting Create A New Game. If you select the Basic Tutorial: Mobile Controls and then select the Create A New Game option. You need to go through the setup process until you enter the editor mode.
If we load into Crayta on a mobile device and preview the game, then you should be able to move around using the virtual thumbsticks. You should be able to see a treasure chest in the middle of the island, but the interact button wont work. You may also see a lot of extra buttons that don’t make sense given the context of this game.
Adding a Control Scheme
So, how can we fix this? Well, we need to go back to the PC version of Crayta so that we can access the advanced mode. If we load the game back on the PC, we then need to move to advanced mode by pressing tab. Once we are in the advanced editor, we can then select the Game tab from the right-hand side of the screen.
At the top of this menu is the Help category, you may need to expand this to see all of the options contained within.
Instructional Help
Want to add some basic help information about your latest game? Why not use the built-in help pages that we provide from the Crayta menu system.
From within the Game tab in the Advanced Editor you can use the Pages array to add useful help pages to your games, this will appear in the main Crayta menu alongside any control schemes you have set.
We need to set the control scheme to have the correct buttons displayed. You can either create a control scheme by selecting the + icon or if you have an existing element you can edit an existing scheme. If you expand the control scheme element, then you should see the option to Edit Input Labels and if we click on that a new window will appear.
Now we are on the input window, we need to make sure that we are correctly setting the buttons we will be using in our game. For the case we have, we have a single interact button that is needed so we can open the chest. To add this, we can either select the empty Label field next to the interact binding and then type in Interact or we can simply select the drop-down to the right of this and select Interact from the pre-populated list.
Finishing Up
Once that is done, we only need to close this menu, and that is it! We should now be able to load this on a mobile device, and when we preview the game this time we should only see the movement controls and the interact button shown. If we go up to the treasurer chest we should now be able to open it by pressing interact. As you can see, this is a relatively simple change to your games, but makes the experience for mobile players much better. If you have older published games, then consider adding this change and republishing them to allow for a wider audience to play them.