Blog

For the past five months, Bluehouse Group has been hard at work designing and developing our very first videogame. The game has progressed to a point where we are excited to start a development log, where we’ll keep you posted on updates and the game’s overall progress.

Our lead game developer and the sole developer behind this project is Cam Brown. Cam has been the driving force, designing and developing everything we have so far. The rest of the team has played a large role in contributing ideas for game mechanics, characters, and the game’s lore.

We’re using Godot to build the game, assets and sprites have been created using Blender. Our process involves turning 3D models into 2D objects, creating a distinctive art style, and significantly expediting the game art process compared to traditional methods.

The game itself is shaping up to be a Roguelite, featuring three distinct gameplay loops: managing a civilization, piloting a large mech, and exploring underground levels. Set in a post-apocalyptic world filled with Lovecraftian horrors immune to conventional weapons, the civilization serves as a protected sanctuary. The mech, funded by the city, is an investment for exploring the unknown and gathering resources. Players assume the role of a courageous citizen tasked with piloting and managing the mech until their demise. When they fall, a new heroic citizen rises to the challenge, honorably exploring the underground to secure resources for both the mech’s upkeep and the city.

We’ve still got a long way to go! But we are very excited to continue working on this game. It’s worth noting that the game is still in its early conceptual stages, so many of these ideas may change as development progresses. We have yet to determine a release date yet.

Stay tuned for our next development update!

What is a UTM Tracking code?

A UTM tracking code is a snippet of text that can be added to the end of any URL. Its purpose is to track metrics and assess the performance of your marketing campaigns, ultimately helping you determine the most effective campaigns.

UTM Tracking Codes Broken Down

The average UTM tracking code uses three main elements: UTM Medium, UTM Source, and UTM Campaign. Typically, they are structured like this: utm_medium=video&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=black_friday_2023.

utm_medium serves as the broadest and top-level parameter. People typically use categories such as social, video, email, affiliate, and CPC. For our example, let’s choose utm_medium=video.

utm_source is a bit more specific. Examples include Google, Bing, a website name, or newsletter. For example, utm_source=newsletter.

utm_campaign is always the most specific parameter. Here you can add extra details, for example, “Black Friday 2023” or “Christmas Sale”. This is how something like that would look: utm_campaign=black_friday_2023.

Once you’ve determined your medium, source, and campaign, you can combine all three to complete your UTM tracking code and add it to the end of your URL in your campaign. Using the examples above, the combined UTM tracking code would look like this: utm_medium=video&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=black_friday_2023.

Helpful Resources and Tips

While it’s possible to manually write out your own UTM tracking codes, many people use online tools to quickly create them. Google has its own UTM creator that is free to use. However, I prefer using utmbuilder.net, which is also free to use. I find UTM builder to be much more user-friendly and simpler to use.

With UTM Tracking codes, it’s very important to stay organized, especially with your naming conventions. Having one campaign where you use utm_medium=video and then having a different campaign where you named the UTM Tracking code utm_medium=youtube_video is sloppy and disorganized. I recommend using a spreadsheet to stay organized and consistent.

Where do you get the data?

You will need Google Analytics 4 set up for your website to actually see the results from your campaigns that are using UTM tracking. With GA4, you can find your UTM data under Reports → Acquisitions → Traffic Acquisition and filter this section by Session Source Medium, then use the search bar to enter any keywords that are in your UTM tracking code, i.e., “Email”.

Bluehouse Group is getting ready for a day of gaming to raise funds for the UVM Children’s Hospital through Extra Life! Extra Life, part of the Children’s Miracle Network, aims to unite gamers in supporting local communities’ sick and injured children.

This Saturday, November 4th, our team will participate in Extra Life by playing board games and various video games all day at our office. Lately, we’ve been enjoying games like Dominion and Dune Imperium for board games, and for video games, titles like Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, No Man’s Sky, and many more.

Our fundraising goal is $1,500. We’ll mainly reach out to our friends and families for donations. We will also share gaming updates, donation links, and our fun moments on our social media pages during the event. If you’d like to support UVM Children’s Hospital in honor of our day of gaming, please visit our Extra Life team page to make a donation.

For every project Bluehouse Group takes on, we follow our tried and true two-phase approach. Our two phase approach ensures we launch well designed software efficiently. Our goal is to save our clients money and meet rapid deadlines, while guaranteeing highly optimized performance and excellent user experience. We began implementing this two phase approach within the last two years, and since then we’ve completed numerous projects ranging from mobile apps, to websites and website redesigns. Let’s take a deeper look at what goes into our two phase approach.

Phase 1. Discovery & Design

(Average length 6 weeks)

While this phase requires very little development aside from the initial set up, it’s arguably the most important phase for Bluehouse Group. In the Discovery and Design phase we define all of the objectives and technical requirements, conduct research, and sketch wireframes and individual screens.

Objectives, Goals, and Technical Requirements

By collaborating with your team and defining the objectives, requirements, and goals early on, we can prevent any last minute changes, ideas, or curveballs that could derail the project. Understanding these details also helps Bluehouse Group choose the best tech stack that will make our build efficient and create a positive user experience after launching.

Research

Who are the competitors? How do they operate? What features do the competitors use? If you have a current user base what do they like about the software, app, or site? What would they change about the software? Researching these questions can help influence the technical requirements and influence the overall design of the software. Our research varies from project to project in the past we’ve reviewed Google Analytics 4, created surveys, and conducted user interviews.

Initial Wireframes

Once the technical requirements and research are complete, we begin creating wireframes. Our wireframes are a culmination of what was explored in the objectives, goals, and technical requirements along with researched based design decisions that influence the design. It’s very important to note that when we create wireframes we always create many different versions and iterations, and that your team will always be able to suggest changes and be very involved in the wireframe process.

Phase 2. Development & Launch

(Average length 10 weeks)

This phase is all about writing code, creating the final designs and polishing everything up for the final product and launch.

Final Mockups

Wrapping up final designs and mockups usually goes hand in hand with development. While we deliver the last mockups of the software, the developers are simultaneously focusing on developing the functionality. Once the designs are completed the frontend developers apply the design to the software.

Development

The Development stage is always going to be the most time consuming. Many factors go into development, especially if it involves working with different plugins and integrations, and complex databases. During development we will typically create staging environments where clients can explore the software, staging environments are also very helpful for testing the software.

QA & Testing

Quality assurance and testing is very important for our process. As for quality, we always make sure our software performs well with fast loading times while also having a modern, sophisticated and accessible design. The testing phase is crucial for ensuring what we develop works well and as intended. More complex software requires more testing, while something like a basic marketing web page requires much less testing time.

Launch

Bluehouse Group takes launch days very seriously, we never truly know exactly how things are going to shake out once we launch. Ideally a launch is smooth and seamless, occasional there can be issues that we did not anticipate. The team is always on standby and monitoring our software following the launch, ready to jump in and fix things at any moment.

This week, Bluehouse Group hosted another UX/UI Design Jam Meetup! This time around we helped Nancy Stetson, Senior Policy and Data Analyst and Warren Rich, GIS Coordinator and Asset Manager for the City of Burlington. Recently the City rebuilt the Open Data Portal website (https://data.burlingtonvt.gov/) and they wanted help and feedback on how to improve the experience to drive more engagement with City data.

We all met up at the Bluehouse Group office, and it was our biggest turnout this year, with around 30 of us there. After some introductions, we reviewed Nancy and Warren's problem statements and goals. Nancy and Warren told us about two main types of users: researchers and casual citizens. I struggled a bit defining when a casual user becomes a researcher and this was something I felt was important to consider with my group.

We split into groups to decide which user group we wanted to focus on. We chose the casual user because we felt it would be more challenging to solve for. We personified our user as someone like a homebuyer checking out Burlington, Vermont’s data. We determined that the site's core challenge lies in users not knowing what to search for because they're not aware of what data the website offers or doesn't offer.

We also felt that researchers will most of the time head straight for the search bar because they already know what data they are looking for. While casual users tend to explore the website in a more indirect way. To better cater to casual users, we suggested adding a grid of categories on the landing page just below this search bar. For example, they could have a category card labeled "Parks." When users click on this card, they'd find all of the data reports related to parks. This grid of categories would help users discover different data types without relying solely on the search bar. Sections like this already existed on the site, but they were very large modules and they were really far down the page below the fold.

Time flew by fast, and all the teams came back together to present our ideas and findings. It was amazing to see how similar each teams concerns were, and also each teams different approaches to solving those issues. Nancy and Warren seemed very impressed and grateful for everyone’s help.

If you live close to Burlington, Vermont, and you are interested in joining our next UX/UI check out our Meetup page, if you follow the page you can get notified for our next event.