Madeline Grenier - BreakaBull

BreakaBull on SteamInspired by the phrase "Bull in a China shop" you play as a bull running a tea shop, brewing drinks for adorable animal customers! Running a store on your own comes with a few responsibilities but a bull like you can certainly manage. Easy right?

BreakaReel.mp4

Producer | VR & UI/UX Designer

August 2025 - May 2026

This VR game was created in Unity in the span of 2 semesters, starting as a team of 8 and onboarding to a team of 16. I handled all Scrum Master responsibilities, took business opportunities through social media and partnerships, created the main UI/UX for the game, and tested each week to ensure an easy to understand playing experience.

How I Handeled Production

What mattered to me most for my team was accessibility. Documentation is a necessary yet difficult part of game development and I wanted to ensure that those steps were easier to allow developers to focus on game development and being in engine making those important changes. One of my first steps for this change was to conquer the challenge of finding documentation. With so much work all over the place ensuring that it was organized and easily found was a top priority, so I created a flowchart that shows exactly how it's organized so you'd know right where to look. This small portion of effort was loved by the team and helped them find the information they were looking for throughout the semester.

Weekly Updates Made Simple

This table is what I've lovingly dubbed the "Scrummary." This table shows our weeks for the first semester at a full glance, knowing the number of weeks, sprints, any potential deadlines that may be popping up, and weekly updated that show our overall progress of work so we can see what's mainly changed and keep notes for what has and hasn't worked. Additionally once we were able to get our full roadmap planned out we can list what tasks we wanted complete each week to see if we were on schedule. This gave me additional time to reflect on each week as well as allow our team to look back and see what we've done if there's anything we needed to apply or catch up on.

UI/UX Design : The Chalkboards

During the first semester the only UI we had was our 2 chalkboards in the kitchen. When thinking about menus for this game I had 2 major goals. 1: Make them easy to use, and 2: Keep them immersive. My first thought for this was to keep the menus diegetic through chalkboards which could easily solve my two goals. Making them chalkboard menus allows them to fit well withing the theme so they're made fully with aesthetic in mind, and since they're up and out of the way they are within easy reach at all times but still fully out of the way to allow you to focus on the main game mechanics when needed. I started off with a couple sketches to get an idea of what they could look like, and I wanted the buttons to feel like you were ordering them to select in a way, and add some stylistic flair through fonts and the frame.

Now that we had an idea about what the chalkboards would look like I could get into the logistics. I needed to make sure they programmers new what I wanted to see in our controls for accessibility, especially since we are a VR game and having accessible settings are an absolute must have for motion sickness and other problems. Once the settings were defined it was time to add them in engine, find a font that was cutesy but still legible, and see what testers thoguht. Overall testers really enjoyed these menus, find them cute and enjoyed the options to make the game playable for them

I also got to take cafe of the ordering tablet to take orders in the store. Making it a tablet similarly kept a fun artstyle while displaying the information you needed. This sketch was created as temporary assets for the game, with the tea color changing depending on the order and ingredients displayed on the side, inspired by the tickets from any of the Papa's game series. This is one of 2 places you're able to see tea orders as tickets are displayed on the back chalkboard as well.

Business - Presentations and Presenting Opportunities

Throughout the year I was able to connect and establish a lot of connections to our team presented as opportunities. I give the presentations for our professors and industry professionals to take criticism and assist in creative direction for our game. We got to meet with developers from Bungie and a developer behind the game Wanderstop to allow us to learn how to really focus on our core game loop to make the game feel rewarding and fun. The end of the first semester seniors of Champlain College go through an event called Greenlight, where all 16 teams present and show off their game to faculty, alumni, and industry proffesionals who work together to decide which games go through and which ones get cut and added on to the next semester. I was able to be one of our team members who pitched our game and overall had a great presentation!

Overall some of my proudest achievements are the opportunities I was able to provide to my team. The first was a talent show hosted outside GDC called the vertical slice, where we were able to bring our game trailer and talk a to an audience about which ended up as an amazing opportunity to meet great connections, see other games, and overall have a great time! Another opportunity was for us to be able to partner with OVR to use their Omara, a scent device for games to add immersion. This opportunity has allowed us to add scents to our game trying out a new technology and create conenctions with a workspace right in burlington vermont. These were opportunities that I searched and went for entirely on my own for the sake of my team and ended up reaping amazing positive results overall.

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