From the tabletop, role-playing version to the digital, 3D rendition, a wide variety of changes were made to adapt Bready Or Not! into a complete, playable game. Many hours were put into creating both versions, but the final iteration is an ambitious game with heartwarming characters, adorable animations, and much more interaction with both the in-game objects and other characters. Coming in 2023, Bready Or Not! is about to be completely overhauled into a brand new, wholesome gaming experience unlike any combat game before.

A major goal when creating Bready Or Not! was to create original characters and animations for them, which was partially achieved for the game’s trailer, showing one variation of the protagonist running, jumping, and picking up objects. This character - a bread swordsman known as a Slicer - was modeled and rigged in Blender, given custom animations, and exported into Unity to join the rest of the game. Despite some technical difficulties, this process worked overall, and is being pushed further for the final game release. The new Bready Or Not! will not only have more characters to play as (such as the Ryfleman, Starcher, and Breadic), but will also include non-player characters such as Queen Luna, the villagers, and enemy molds to fight, all modeled, rigged and animated in-house and able to be interacted with by the player. There will also be custom prefabs used in the landscape, objects, and buildings rather than relying on assets, pulling the aesthetic of Bready Or Not! together as a cohesive, low-poly experience.

Object interaction is another key feature that our team (cough cough, me) has been working on. Now that we have more cool characters and animations, we need our characters to be able to not only pick things up, but use them to hit other things! Concepts like the Satchel for storage, the health and points systems are currently in development, which will make weapons usable and effective between characters. In the most recent version, while creating Queen Luna’s castle, we  also added a doorway to a separate room, and placed a bookcase in front that the player character can walk through. With a little bit of extra programming, we would be able to have the books slide open when a lever is pulled or a character crosses a certain threshold, similar to how lights turn on when the player enters the castle. Finally - as was one of the main themes of Bready Or Not! - I ensured that this game truly depended on teamwork in its mechanics. Disadvantaged players are forced to rely on those who have stronger characters, roles play a big part in what players can do, and enemies like Mold Zombies are designed to require cooperation and dialogue between those fighting them. A major inspiration of mine was the video Designing Journey from Jenova Chen’s 2013 GDC speech on how his team at Thatgamecompany created their game. A major theme was teamwork and making connections between players, and I wanted to provide that same experience in my own games. In his talk, Chen said, “Having competition is great for online games, but that’s not the emotional connection I’m thinking about” (Chen 2013). He told a story of a girl who felt torn between exploring her environment and the pressure to improve her skill levels in a cooperative game, and how that inspired their concept of “Collaboration and Flow” (Chen 2013) in Journey to prioritize teamwork and building relationships and trust between players. The player cooperation in Bready Or Not! uses the same ideas and forces people to rely on each other and communicate.

Overall, our team (me) is very proud of what we’ve (I’ve) accomplished with both the mechanics and aesthetics of Bready Or Not!, but there is still much to do. We look forward to our final release and showing off all the changes we’ve made!

Thanks for reading,

Teo (@teo.swf)

Works Cited:

Chen, Jenova. GDC (2013). Designing Journey. Retrieved April 19, 2022, 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGCkVHSvjzM.