Weekly Wisby 8: Changing my name to Shae to sell our game



If you’re reading this, I am dead. The last sentence in this blog was written moments before I collapsed from exhaustion. This week has been a lot of work on Break It, usually spending a bit of overtime because I wanted to. But you know what: I’m happy where we are, and I’m happy to tell you all about it!



Monday started off strong with me giving a presentation to the team about my community plans! Now, I totally stole the format from Mike Rose, but that’s ok because he encouraged viewers to do so. There is basically 3 steps to it:

  1. Set up a discord server.
  2. Use your beta as discord-bait.
  3. Run a meta-game to keep people engaged.

You’ll want to set up a discord server as your main community hub where you can talk to people about your game. You should start attracting people as soon as your server is ready, however the real haul is in the beta-bait. As you release your beta, you post it on as many forums as you possibly can. However, you don’t post the beta… you post your discord server, and tell people they can get the beta there. True, this might turn some people off on it, but everyone who joins that beta is now part of your community… which you can hype! And that’s step 3: you run a meta-game in your server. The meta-game is something simple, like weekly tasks, that you loosely connect to the game you’re working on.


In our case, we’re dividing our users into 3 groups: home-crew, work-force and park-peeps. Each group has their own little quirk. Home-crew is for cozy and comfy dialogue, the work-force likes to share news and memes, and the park-peeps are a little more nurturing. Each week, they’ll get little tasks like draw fan-art, write a poem, or make a cute picture of street lights, and whichever team makes Shae the happiest wins! Who’s Shae? That’s me, on a separate discord account, roleplaying as our main character. They’ll be a little bit sad at the beginning of each week, and hopefully feel a little bit better after it.


I’ve got everything in place now except for some tweaks to a discord bot. Attracting people to the server should begin in 2 weeks. I’m excited… and scared. But we’ll see how it goes.



Sleep deprivation: can’t life with it, can’t life without it. Among the craziness that was last week, the stress that kept me awake and the time and effort I put into food, somewhere my soul got left behind. After skipping out on enough rest you’ll be walking around like the living dead! Not feeling energized, unsure if you’re funny or a jerk and losing basic motor abilities are all symptoms of sleepy-sleaze-syndrome. The other day I was just texting someone when I suddenly couldn’t feel my hands! I know it’s almost Halloween and all but that’s in too deep for me.

But hey, hey, here’s what you do. You want some return on that deficit of nap-time? Start making yourself packed lunches. They’re hella quick and that hour you would be spending on getting cafeteria food is cut to 10 minutes, allowing you to work more during the day. Do the same for dinner. Creamy Peri Peri Chicken 35 minutes what-the… you trying to win any prizes over there or something? Boil up some pasta at the same time you’re heating up the sauce; some crushed tomato with Greek Yogurt gets you anywhere and from there you just relish.

Here’s another one: bacon, hotdog, same pan, you’ll haven’t spent 10 minutes before your plate’s ready. You can also go the noodles-route, what’s important is that 15 minutes should be your maximum cooking-time. Cutting usually takes most of it so unless you’re some kind of Sous-chef I suggest you get as much of your veggies precut. Trust me, if you’re busy enough, the extra money’s worth it.



My last day of the week was pretty fun! Pandi (our developer) set up a public github where I could access the Break It project and Unity, my baby, I must say I’ve missed it. I’m still too afraid to do much gameplay programming… wouldn’t want to get any ‘Nam-flashbacks… but it’s nice to go in and play with its settings again.

Quality settings is what I’ve been experimenting with to make sure our game will look as good as it can. It basically came down to adjusting shadow fidelity. Here’s the 3 different settings I’ve got now:

“Low quality. Makes as many compromises as it can without losing the visual style. Shadows are a much lower resolution.“

“Medium quality. This is what we’ll be using as our base for benchmark-testing. Shadows look nice.”

“High quality. For absolutely stunning visuals. Shadows looks crisps and there’s a little more color fidelity.”

With this visual-work, it gets me itchy to see it working on Sophie’s (our artist) models. When the time comes, I’ll be sure to share it with all of you as well.

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