Hytale Creative Mode
Hey everyone! I am Ktar, the Creative Mode engineer on Hytale. I'm excited to show you more about the creative side of Hytale! By swapping to Creative Mode in your world, you can fly around and explore, create, edit, make things explode, and more! We are focused on creating an immersive experience that feels uniquely 'Hytale' while supporting all players and creators with the features they need.
It's best explained visually, so here is our first video showcasing our Creative Tools that will be available for the upcoming early access!
Now that you've seen the magic tools, let's dive deeper into everything you saw!
Scripted Brushes
The first thing that I do in the video is take out some of the Scripted Brushes that ship with Hytale. These are simple asset-defined brushes that any modder or user can create more of. Simply drag and drop them into your inventory to create mountains, grassy paths, procedurally generated ruins, and more! You can even edit these scripted brushes in the Hytale Node Editor.
Creative Mode Quick Settings Panel
The Creative Mode Quick Settings Panel allows you to quickly edit your Creative Mode settings like flight speed, inertia, and more. It also expands and changes depending on the item in your hand to allow you to have even more customizability of your tools.
Player Model Changer / NPC Browser
You can see our list of over 100 models that you can spawn in your creative world or remix however you want. In this case, I wanted to become a Corgi model, because dogs are the best.
Prefab Browser / Prefab Editor
I briefly opened the prefab browser on my way to the Prefab Editor. The Prefab Editor is a separate editing environment where you can load a selection of different prefabs into an empty world where you can edit them, select them, or just browse the prefabs visually. In the video, I just go in to select the prefab ruins that I want to paste into my small environment.
Paste Tool
I now use the Paste Tool to move the prefab to the exact spot that I want before pasting it in. The Paste Tool allows you to precisely place a loaded prefab, or even use a prefab like a brush. You can use the arrow keys to easily make detailed, precise placements of multiblock structures.
Machinima Tool
Next, I grab the Machinima Tool that looks like a camera, and I create a Camera actor that allows me to specify keyframes to animate the camera movement. After placing all my keyframes, I can adjust the speed and other settings to get the right control I want. The Machinima Tools have a LOT more features that aren't displayed in this quick video. Not only are there many features that I don't show in this video for the tool, but the Machinima Tools are scheduled for a massive upgrade in functionality and user experience in the coming months after launch.
Flying Modes
Flight in Hytale is very customizable! You can change the speed, controls, flight mode (hover or directional flight), and even the inertia! If you like to stop suddenly, or drift around at high speeds, Hytale is here to support you!
Shape Brush
The Paintbrush allows you to paint many different shapes of any size into the world. You can do pyramids, cones, squares, and more! You can change the materials, shape, density, wall thickness, axis locked to, masks, and more! The Paintbrush is a very customizable tool that you can use for many purposes, and we hope to only make it better with time!
Selection Tool
The Selection Tool is another versatile and customizable tool. It allows you to select 3d spaces and perform many different kinds of operations on it. It allows you to save prefabs, paste tons of blocks precisely, move entire objects, define regions, regenerate chunks, extrude, and more! We're looking forward to adding selections that support any shape after release, as well as a "magic wand" tool for automatically creating selections by clicking on materials and selecting all of the same material nearby.
Ruler / Laser Pointer Tools
The Ruler tool allows you to measure distances or mark outlines by placing lines into the world. The Laser Pointer tool allows you to show your friends where to look when words just aren't enough.
Help Menu
Our development pace is so quick that we've already made last week's help menu screenshot old! The new and improved help menu lets you find creative commands much more quickly and discover new features easily. We hope to continue improving command support via help and new features.
Creative People Using Creative Tools
Now, for an example of what professional creatives look like using the tools, here are some talented builders with a timelapse castle build that showcases many different types of blocks, flying, brushes, and the Hytale Machinima recording tools. This is an hour of building condensed into about three minutes. Enjoy!
At the start of the video you can see a lot of terrain being created using the different Creative Mode brushes and tools. First the builder will greybox some terrain using the Stone material on a sphere brush. Then they smooth it and refine the shape using the Smooth tool and some manual building. The next step you'll see is that the builder begins to apply layers of material with multiple brushes and techniques to apply the right colors to the terrain.
For the castle building, the builders used the Selection Tool, copy, cut, paste, and rotate commands to speed up the building of the shape of the castle. Then, they use the brush tool with a mask (so that it replaces blocks instead of adding new blocks) to set the base layer materials and color of the castle. Then they go in and add all the details by hand.
Currently, the creative experience in Hytale is focused mostly on tools to support content creation. However, we are actively designing a more casual and unique experience to cater to audiences that aren't looking for an editor-like feel, separate from the Adventure and Exploration modes. This additional creative experience will focus on playful interactions over editor features.
Creative Mode allows you, the players, to do so many different things that we can't even explain them all. We can't wait to see you in game!
Community Support
We are working relentlessly to deliver you a great experience as a creative in Hytale and will keep doing so for years to come. We plan to expand our creative tools team to meet these goals, and we'll work alongside you and the community to improve our tools and features based on your feedback and suggestions!
I hope to see you in our Hytale Discord's #creative-mode channel, where I'll personally be present, and sometimes pop in to chat with fellow creatives to read your input!
Together, we will shape the future of Creative Mode for Hytale!
-Ktar
