Having settled on an intended release date for the very first tech demo for end of January, some additional aspects besides the pure game come into the spotlight:

• A final game name and logo
• A company name and logo
• A recognizable communication theme
• Accounts on social media and discord
• Accounts on software distribution sites & Analytics
• Media assets, cover art, icons
• Level names, tag lines, Twitter posts
• Descriptions of multiple lengths
• Music and sound effects

I’ll update this page regularly as I progress. Let’s tackle the first six for today.

Names & Logos

In the past I used to design logos for my software myself. Some were ok, some really bad. Design is probably not my strength 😉 This time I contacted designers on fiverr to generate logo proposals and it worked out much nicer, in record time (1-3 days). I tested them with some friends and settled on two.

The company name was the easy one. Due to my legal company status I am not permitted to have made-up names (without my name in them) in Germany and therefore Wetzold Studios was the obvious choice.

Now the fun one: the game! Maze VR was of course just the working title. May I introduce instead (fanfare): Out Or Dead. The game name came to me one evening and even after some weeks I still liked it, which is a very good sign to me. I hope.

With these I have two wide labels. While they work in many places, every now and then one needs a much smaller square version, e.g. as avatar for Twitter or channel image on Discord. I decided to pick the “signature” parts of the logos:

From these it was easy to create a favicon version for usage in my website and blog. I typically use some online converter like https://convertico.com/ to get an ICO from a PNG file:

Theme

Whenever I write a blog or do an introduction on my website and in quite some other contexts I often need preview images. For consistency-sake I decided to settle on bitmoji for now and will use these wherever they make sense. Positive side-effect: they save a lot of time and often have a nice message already 🙂

Social Media

If you want to follow the project from now on, check out the new channels below:

• Dev Blog on new consolidated wetzold.com domain, bye bye deweloper.de
• News on dedicated Twitter accounts (@OutOrDead & @WetzoldStudios)
• Chat on Discord
• Page on Facebook
• Channel on YouTube

One feature that is super helpful on Twitter is being able to log into multiple accounts at once. This way I can separate my personal account from my game studio account.

Software Distribution

Oculus Store and Steam would be great platforms to be listed on. It’s still quite a journey though to get there and I want to have a really solid product first before applying.

As an intermediate step I grew really fond of the platforms below:

• itch.io: A great platform to discover & showcase software projects of all sorts, especially games, with many features like dev blogs, downloads & analytics
• Sidequest: The definite way to get content for free onto the Oculus Quest and into the hands of thousands of enthusiastic gamers

Since I am planning for others to be able to mod/contribute to the game, I need a platform to host a manual and also the SDK. The obvious choice right now is GitHub so I went ahead and also registered this also already:

• Repository on GitHub

Analytics

To get an overview of all user activities I always set up analytics. It’s one of the first things I do so that I’m able to judge the impact of my activities. Google Analytics is my weapon of choice. For websites I own I register DNS tracking entries. For all others (Word Press, itch.io..) I use the tracking Id.

In rare cases it can be worth to hack it, e.g. on github pages to have all analytics data consolidated. There is even a way to have Unity report to Google Analytics through a special plugin which I haven’t trued though yet. I’ll first check how far Unity Analytics will bring me.

The Road Ahead

Next up I’ll need to work on the remaining assets and I’ll keep y’all posted on the progress.