Weekly Wisby 7: Family Visits and Butter Burgh’s demise

Going away on exchange is something I can recommend to everyone. You'll learn that living in a foreign country isn't that scary, there's great friends to be made along the way and you can get some time away from the political dramas of the homeland. Most importantly, it's a free pass to escape your family! ...until they come to visit you that is.

After Butter Burgh’s failure to find a motivated group of engineers (even though the concept was great) I felt no shame in joining Break It. Break It is a great concept by its own right; one that I helped shape a bit as well in its early stages. The concept of the game is that the world feels gray and dull, and in fact it will literally start out looking gray. As the game progresses, there are small interactions you can do to light up the world and make it more colorful.

Note that the following images are all mockups and not representative of the final product.

“When you start the game, everything is gray and sad.”

“But opening the window lets in a little light and color, revealing a little plant.”

“If you grow the plant out, it colors out the wall surrounding it!”

It’s not just me though; I brought Tim along as well! I’ll still be working with Tim then, however now also with Sophie and Pandi. As per my wishes, I am not (explicitly) doing any programming on the project. Instead, my role will be that of community manager. That means that I’ll be in charge of finding a community, conversing with them and eventually sell them the game.

Talking qualifications… I have none. Nada. Zilch. All I can tell you is I wanted to do it. There’s a couple of reasons… no small part is that, as I’m getting to the end of my studies, I have no idea how to actually make a living from making games. You’d think that would be something they taught you… however they don’t, and it’s probably why developers are so easy to take advantage of: we have no idea what we’re worth. Past that, explaining our game to people sounds like great fun! More fun than programming has been the last couple of weeks. And if I lose the fun in game development… I won’t really know what to do with myself. So let’s not think about that!

My family came to visit me here in Visby last week! It was super nice to see them all again! …though a bit stressful to be there for them every evening after my studies during the day. Usually we spent it walking around Visby and finding a nice restaurant. One day we walked on the ocean cliffs through a beautiful forest and past a waterfall and Saturday we made especially nice by visiting the Visby caves!

Not like you asked, but here are some of my best pictures. A few actually turned out quite well.

“Magical forest on the ocean cliffs.”

“Probably created by the ladies of the witches circle.”

"Went here with my dad, it's actually just 4 kilometers away from the city so you can totally walk it if you want."

"I think there is something poetic about this lonely tree."

"I mean common, this one can straight-up go in the tourist-pamphlet."

"The only actual good cave-picture I have, the rest are all of rocks in the dark."

"Unless you count the entrance as a cave picture, then this one is also pretty neat."

All kidding aside, it was a great week and I hope you're all doing well back in Holland!

To make the combination of family outings and labor days manageable, I kept myself to a work schedule of 10 am to 4 pm. Not the 9 to 5 that most are imprisoned by, but it made sense to not go all out in my first week, plus it allowed me to get some time with my family. Everyone was okay with it and we still had some figuring out to do this first week anyway.

How we were gonna stay organized for example. The first word that came up was the word that always comes up for these kind of group projects: Trello. Let me tell you something: I do not like Trello. It’s boring, it’s all over the place, it shows me tons of information I don’t care about and I-just-can’t-get-the-hang of it.

Fortunately, there is a different solution, and one that I will defend for any project: Codecks. It kicks butt let me tell you! If you’ve ever played a trading card game then its style will immediately appeal to you. The gist of it is that tasks are cards from different decks that members on your team can take in their hand. Hold on it’s easier if I show you:

This is currently what our own decks look like! There are decks for art, programming, design and community management! The number shows you how many cards each deck holds. Let me show you my hand:

These are the cards I’m currently holding, meaning, these are the tasks I’m currently working on. On the left there is cards I’ve finished. Unlike Trello, I always know exactly where I need to look!

Lastly, my week was spent watching an unhealthy amount of GDC talks on community management and taking 6 pages of notes. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but trust me; when summary-notes on 30 minutes of good advice barely take up half a page, and when not every video turns out to be actually useful, 6 pages takes a good amount of watching to reach.

But the result is that I’m feeling refreshed and strong to start doing this community-thang! Let’s hope I can… I would love to see it happen.