Crea is a game that looks very similar to Terraria, with its main difference being a focus on implementing mods easily. The Kickstarter even has links to basic and expert modding tutorials, allowing for donators to see just how easy it is to modify the game. The commercial advertises how to add different races, items, and elements into the game The artistic style is slightly more refined, with very simple promo artwork that shows off the game’s light-hearted character. While it is already fully funded at roughly $17,000, there are several stretch goals over the next few days that still haven’t been met.
As far as gameplay is concerned, very little of it is visible in the commercials. Described as a 2D Platformer Sandbox RPG, it seems to be a mix of different indie games, with its major inspiration being Terraria. It’s obvious that you can acquire resources and build, as you would in Terraria, and the gameplay blog explains that the crafting system will be very similar to Terraria as well. However, there will be an emphasis on building contraptions—such as monster traps or item generators—so red stone lovers of Minecraft will likely have more fun with this game. The most interesting part about this start-up’s gameplay is seeing how Jasson McMorris—its lead developer—will create different systems of machines and support the game in its updates.
Gameplay aside, the ease with which users can mod it is obvious in the two commercials focused on modding. It’s as easy as acquiring new graphics, dragging and dropping them into a folder, and then copying and pasting information in a pre-made chart. Just as its slogan pitches, the game really is designed around modders—and every game comes with all the modding tools necessary for the job. The difference between this encouragement of mods shown by Crea’s developers and the allowance of mods shown by other game companies is just the difference of difficulty modders have—if someone wanted to create a mod for Terraria, they would have to go deep into the game’s code, while someone creating a mod for Crea would know exactly what folder to go in and how to modify it, as well as a plethora of tutorials to help them along during the process, all provided by the development team. Whether this approach to mods is advantageous to the game or not, looking at the success of other mods like DayZ and Tekkit, it will probably make the game more popular.
Crea’s graphic style is very charming, and hopefully says a lot about the game’s customization—the avatars of each of the game’s creators are almost spitting images, so hopefully there is a huge selection of cosmetic items to go with the large amount of tools and building materials. Because its sprites have more detail than Terraria, character customization might actually be worth questing for. Overall, the impression of the game is good: I enjoyed the music the commercial and the preview have to offer, I like the pseudo-pixel art sprites they’ve used in the game, and I like the ideas Jasson has detailed in the blog. It’s worth keeping an eye on Crea as the game enters into its second stages of development and begins to move away from Terraria concepts.
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