Cambrian Development Blog - June 2023

A look behind the curtain with the Cambrian Team.

Hi!

An update from the Cambrian team on how we are progressing in our mission to make game creation faster, easier and more powerful. Cambrian is a games platform and editor where every game is open source and designed to be remixed, making it easy to get building from proven foundations.

Current Product

As you may have seen, our current product lets you create and remix simple card games based on Top Trumps. This was built by a small team over a two-month period. Its aim was to demonstrate how we could make game creation accessible through remixing and AI.

This editor has successfully shown how games can be built in less than a minute. Over 3,000 cards have been made, along with hundreds of games!

The game engine we have used is Scratch. Scratch was designed by MIT using the Blockly no-code framework. As an open-source project, it has allowed us to create an accessible and adaptable game engine from day one. 

What we have learned from the initial product 

1. Making games is fun! People really enjoyed building decks of cards based on their experiences and interests.

2. The AI filters are too strict. Our initial AI content filters were too strict, which meant users could not create cards of real people. Not being able to make football teams or Russell Crowe placed unwanted restrictions on card generation.  

3. Editing the games remained too hard. Once games are created, Scratch does not make it easy enough to edit and personalise them. Scratch is great for a beginner writing a simple script from zero, however, its lack of hierarchy or structure means that editing code in Scratch presents unnecessary challenges.

4. The game isn’t enough fun to play. Top Trumps was chosen as it is a simple game with high possibilities for personalisation. The game was not overly appealing on its own and struggled to retain players. Making cards and games was more fun than playing them.

Cambrian going forward

These limitations were not unexpected. We have been busy preparing for the next stage of Cambrian. The team has grown, Ned (gamer, modder, and start-up CTO veteran) has joined as cofounder, and in the coming weeks four developers will be joining the team.

The priority for our new team will be building the Cambrian editor and engine to replace Scratch. This will be an editor optimised for remixing and editing. It will open the door for more fun and varied games, with all elements of the game as easy to create and edit as cards are in the current product.

The first games will be 2D and turn-based. Think Chess variants, Worms, Advance Wars, XCOM, Hearthstone, Sim City, Terra Nil, or any board game you can think of. The possibilities in 2D turn-based games are massive and will allow us to retain simplicity for building, editing and playing.

We look forward to sharing our progress as we build! Together as a collaborative community, we can enable us all to build faster, better and more diverse games.

Check out the current card builder for a taste of the future.

Thanks for your support,

Cambrian Team