Summary
Inspired 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?
I was invited to the team in order to focus on creating and adding the games new economy in alignment with the vision of PO. During this project, I was focused on creating systems such as diagetic computer for buying decorations and ingredients; an economy calculator to more accurately tune game progress to the desired pace; and worked on improving some mesh colliders in the project to allow the player to interact with them more naturally.
Project Timeline | January 2026 - May 2026
Engine | Unity
Team Size | 16 Devs
Computer
Since Breakabull had no system to buy ingredients or decorations when I joined the team, I had to create a physical interface to look at and buy items. In order to meet this requirement, I quickly decided that a computer would feel most natural in the setting. Although a variety of control schemes for the computer were explored, a simple arrow key and confirm button layout were selected for their ease of use and familiarity to the user.
The next focus was the visuals of the store. Due to the fact that there was already a tablet in the game for taking customer orders, I decided to use a similar design style with a sleek and modern appearance.
The early creation of a wireframe allowed me to quickly create and iterate on how the pages would be handled in engine. Using a three-tiered heirarchy of managers I made an easy-to-use system to quickly add new pages and content within pages.
Economy
When I began to work on the game’s economy and progression, I began by speaking to the established members of the team to develop a timeline of when different aspects of the game should be introduced to the player. Using these insights, I began developing a economy calculator which I could use to quickly estimate when items could be bought without needing to test for every tweak.
Using a number of variables (customer’s appearance probability, order preferences, order prices, etc.), I could calculate the minimum, maximum, and the likely amount of money a player could have at various points in their playthrough. When I changed variables such as ingredient price I would be able to quickly see its affects on player progression and adjust to my liking.
Meshes
One of Breakabull’s most interesting traits is the inherent clumsiness of not being able to grab objects as you would usually in VR. This introduced a challenge with colliders. To use Unity’s physics system a convex mesh is required, however this eliminates the ability to grip an object by its handle.
Some plugins were explored to try and replicate a concave collider, but each one tested a noticable impact on performance or collider accuracy.
After experimenting with optimizing plugins for the game’s use case, the kettle and teacup (both small assets), I developed a workflow using Probuilder which allowed for highly accurate colliders without a significant sacrifice in performance quality compared to a single mesh collider.
