Createrria – Crafting Your Own Platformers On iOS

Over the past few years, our smartphones and more recently our tablets have stolen a huge chunk of the time we spend playing games. While clearly not to everyone’s tastes, and perhaps not a replacement for other ways we enjoy playing (you can have my console games when you pry them from my wizened, arthritic hands), mobile gaming is a busy, expanding area of innovation and ingenuity that is enjoyed by an ever-growing number of people. But I’d never considered it a platform for creating games before now.

Createrria has come along, from new Polish studio Incuvo, to change all that.

It’s ostensibly a kind of iOS version of LittleBigPlanet, it’s much easier on an iPad, with the extra space it affords, but everything can be done on an iPhone if you’re nimble-fingered. There’s a create option off the main menu that allows you to build your own levels. Alongside that is a Play option that allows you to play the developer-built levels, as well as those constructed by the community that has grown up around Createrria.

Some of those levels are impressively complex and well designed and the game does a good job of curating and surfacing the best ones – although there is the usual ambiguous interpretation of copyright involved in some of these. Levels featuring Nintendo-owned Pokémon and Kirby characters as background “pixel-art” were plucked from the user-created masses and presented, for example.

It’s obviously geared towards allowing users to make simple 2D platformers and slingshot-based games similar to Angry Birds but that’s perfectly understandable, given the popularity of those genres on this platform. As with other similarly creative games, users are stretching those parameters to make some quite remarkable levels. A lot of levels currently curated in the Editor’s Picks section are decent platform levels with a great piece of pixel art built from in-game coloured blocks. Some of the levels, though, show a flair for level design and some great imagination rather than simple artistic skill.

Creating your own levels is fairly intuitive and simple. You’ve got a toolbox and a few tutorials to make use of and there’s plenty of extra bits and pieces to add to your kit. This is purchased using in-game coins and gems. These can be earned over time but you can also buy them if you want to get your hands on the good stuff without any grinding. The game itself is free and these purchases are entirely optional – you can build great levels with your starting tools.

It is only really a level editor though. Although it’s pitched as a way to create your own games, the lack of logic switches or AI options and the fixed viewpoint mean that Createrria is limited. It’s a level editor that allows for plenty of imaginative uses but there’s no way to escape the rigidity of the platform genre and even the slingshot elements feel like they need a little more work to flesh out the options available to make them truly useful as anything other than a quirky way to get your platforming protagonist through a destructible-blocked route.

So what we have with Createrria is something that feels like an excellent start. It’s not comprehensive and it doesn’t achieve all of its apparent goals but it does show that a smartphone or tablet can be used as an intuitive tool for building levels. The next natural step on from that is to introduce more physics options, more logic options and some basic programmable artificial intelligence.

We might be a long way off from being able to craft entirely bespoke videogames of our own on a smartphone but Createrria certainly feels like a step in the right direction. Hopefully its engaging music and attractive appearance will entice enough amateur level designers to make it successful enough to warrant an upgrade or sequel.