Build it.
Play it.
Learn it.
BasedCode is Seb Fehr’s creator and technology brand: building games and software in public, testing emerging tools honestly, and sharing the decisions behind the work.
01 / Essence
What we meanDefinition and positioning
BasedCode is Seb Fehr’s creator and technology brand. It turns real game and software production into useful, entertaining content through live development, technical explanation, honest experiments, and visible outcomes.
Unlike generic technology commentary or performative “build in public” content, BasedCode is grounded in active projects, working code, production experience, and conclusions supported by evidence.
The brand is not a course, consultancy, professional-services offer, or performance of expertise. It is a living record of making.
Audience
Practising and aspiring developers, indie teams and technical founders, and technology-curious viewers who want genuine access to active work and a place to compare notes, ask questions, and make progress with others.
Content pillars
BUILD software, games, tools, and systems.
PLAY test ideas, games, experiments, and weird edges.
LEARN share lessons, failures, discoveries, and context.
TOGETHER invite feedback, playtests, questions, and shared momentum.
Brand shorthand
Experienced builder.
Curious experimenter.
Candid host.
Generous collaborator.
Curious, capable, playful, dynamic, practical, transparent, and welcoming.
Strategic foundation
Make ambitious creative technology understandable by showing the real work, trade-offs, failures, and decisions involved in building it.
Build worthwhile games and software in public, give people meaningful access to the process, and create a place where practical knowledge and momentum are shared.
A creator-led technical community where entertainment, education, real production, and peer contribution reinforce each other from concept through release and revision.
You will see real work, real constraints, honest conclusions, and people making progress together.
Core principles
Build real things
Start from genuine production, tests, releases, failures, or decisions wherever possible.
Show the reasoning
Explain constraints, alternatives, trade-offs, consequences, and why a decision was made.
Tools, not religion
Evaluate AI and emerging technology through real use, including clean-up, limitations, integration, and cost.
Respect intelligence
Translate complexity without trivialising it or using inflated hooks that misrepresent the result.
Bound participation
Let the community influence experiments and playtests without surrendering product coherence or scope.
Complete the loop
Show concept, implementation, release, response, evaluation, and improvement—not only the exciting beginning.
Audience segments and expectations
| Audience | What they value |
|---|---|
| Practising developers and technical creators | Implementation detail, architecture decisions, informed comparisons, and transferable production lessons. |
| Aspiring game and software developers | Clear reasoning, visible progress, practical next steps, and expertise that is explained rather than performed. |
| Indie teams and technical founders | Scope control, launches, community, tool selection, production decisions, and commercial reality. |
| Technology-curious viewers | Visual progress, understandable stakes, and explanations that do not require specialist knowledge. |
Everyone should expect credible explanations, candid evaluation, visible iteration, occasional failure, and entertainment created by the work itself.
02 / Brand roles
Keep the edges clearSeb Fehr
The host, maker, technical voice, and public face. Use Sebastiaan Fehr formally and Seb Fehr or Seb conversationally.
BasedCode
Seb’s public creator, media, and community brand. It owns the channel experience, content system, visual identity, and audience relationship.
Actuator Digital
The separate software and game studio company. It is not a division of BasedCode, and BasedCode is not its alternate corporate identity.
Actuator Games
The game-facing studio label. It can appear alongside BasedCode when Seb documents or streams studio work, with ownership and attribution left clear.
Products
Not Monsters, On Point, and other products retain their own identities. BasedCode may feature their development without claiming product authorship or inheriting their complete aesthetic.
Approved relationship phrasing
“Building Not Monsters with Actuator Games, live on BasedCode.”
“A BasedCode stream featuring development of Actuator Games’ Not Monsters.”
“Not Monsters by BasedCode,” unless that credit is deliberately approved.
Do not use BasedCode, Actuator Digital, Actuator Games, or a product name interchangeably.
03 / Voice
Human, useful, aliveCore voice
BasedCode speaks in a direct, intelligent, first-person voice: an experienced developer thinking clearly in public and making room for other people’s insight.
Use
Plain language. Specific examples. Honest constraints and trade-offs. Warmth, patient explanation, natural humour, and occasional profanity. “I don’t know yet” is allowed.
Avoid
Fake certainty, income promises, hustle clichés, empty AI hype, generic enthusiasm, targeted jokes, and claims detached from evidence.
Before / after
| Weak | BasedCode |
|---|---|
| “The ultimate roadmap to becoming a developer.” | “Here’s what I tried, what broke, and what I’d do differently.” |
| “AI is changing everything. Don’t get left behind.” | “I gave the agent a real problem and watched where it helped—and where it confidently made things worse.” |
| “This simple trick will 10x your productivity.” | “This made my workflow faster, but it also added a new class of bugs.” |
Tone by context
| Context | Tone |
|---|---|
| Live stream | Conversational, quick, responsive, technically grounded. |
| Tutorial or breakdown | Structured, precise, patient, outcome-focused. |
| Launch announcement | Energetic, clear, action-oriented, attached to a concrete event. |
| Failure or delay | Accountable, factual, candid, forward-looking. |
| Community post | Warm, concise, participatory, bounded by clear ownership. |
| Conference talk | Authoritative, practical, reflective, evidence-led. |
Vocabulary guidance
Favour
Build, test, ship, revise, practical, working, playable, measurable, constraint, trade-off, scope, implementation, experiment, result, finding, limitation, live, behind the scenes, milestone, release, and post-mortem.
Limit
Revolutionary, game-changing, effortless, magic, disrupt, next-generation, “cutting-edge” without evidence, and “AI made this” when substantial human direction was required.
04 / Identity
Wordmark firstWordmark
Use BasedCode as the primary display form. The capital C provides a useful visual break while keeping the name compact and developer-native.
Use the code mark as a supporting device, never as a substitute for recognisable naming.
Lockup rules
Use the wordmark in high contrast. Give it room. Keep the code mark simple.
Stretch, bevel, outline, over-glitch, or add unrelated tech clichés. Do not copy Actuator’s logo.
Use the full wordmark for profile art, thumbnails, website headers, channel banners, and durable assets.
Naming and editorial rules
| Subject | Rule |
|---|---|
| Brand | Write BasedCode. Avoid accidental variants such as Based Code, Basedcode, BASEDCODE, or based_code unless a formally approved visual treatment requires one. |
| Host | Use Sebastiaan Fehr formally; Seb Fehr or Seb publicly and conversationally. |
| Companies and products | Use the full names Actuator Digital, Actuator Games, Not Monsters, and On Point. Preserve creator, studio, label, and product distinctions. |
| Language | Use Australian English in formal and owned-channel copy. |
| Headings and emphasis | Prefer sentence case. Avoid excessive exclamation marks and decorative all-caps outside established labels. |
| Dates and quantities | Use numerals and unambiguous dates such as 23 August 2026. |
| Claims | Avoid “best,” “ultimate,” “revolutionary,” and similar superlatives unless evidence supports the claim. |
05 / Type
JetBrains Monothing real.
Primary typeface
JetBrains Mono is the primary typeface for headlines, labels, UI, captions, and body copy. It is open source and designed for code readability, with distinct symbols and matching weights/italics.
| Role | Weight | Guidance |
|---|---|---|
| Hero / display | Bold / ExtraBold | Tight tracking, short lines, strong contrast. |
| Section headings | Bold / SemiBold | Use numbered system labels and compact hierarchy. |
| Body | Regular | Readable line length; do not overuse all caps. |
| Technical labels | Medium | Use for commands, metadata, file names, and status markers. |
| Emphasis | Italic | Use sparingly for asides and human commentary. |
06 / Colour
Purple energy, dark ground#121014
#1D0A25
#2D1540
#472458
#83478F
#B568C2
Signature gradient
Motion makes it technical.
Use
Build fields from plum, deep purple, and core purple. Use violet and lumen as illumination, hierarchy, and moving energy. White is the key colour on dark and purple fields. Light applications use a warm near-white canvas, deep-plum text, and the same purple hierarchy.
Avoid
Competing accent colours, green, red, blue-violet neon, rainbow palettes, arbitrary glow, or flat purple slabs. Create emphasis through contrast, scale, weight, opacity, and motion.
Motion language
BasedCode should feel alive wherever the medium supports it. Motion is smooth, subtle, and continuous: usually noticed as polish before it is noticed as animation. Every gradient must move on a motion-capable surface; a static gradient is only a fallback when motion is explicitly paused or the format is inherently static. Gradient movement must become perceptible within two to three seconds. Page-level ambient gradient movement belongs inside the hero; the document body remains a stable dark workspace. BasedCode pages use Text Ripple JS as a signature transition for short, prominent text.
Animate the hero gradient and intentional component gradients with visible but smooth colour-field travel. Ripple hero statements, section titles, compact labels, and occasional live-state text.
Animate the full-page document background. Do not make movement so slow that it reads as static, ripple paragraphs continuously, or use random glitch, jitter, and gamer-RGB effects.
Use text ripple for arrival, reveal, state change, or intentional interaction. Preserve the original text during repeat effects and provide an explicit control to pause all motion.
07 / Imagery
Show the workPreferred image world
Real screens. Half-finished prototypes. Game builds. Desk setups. Stream moments. Event rooms. Code in context. The image should feel close enough to touch, not like stock technology.
The fix is probably worse.
Composition
Prefer strong crops, clear focal points, visible texture, and a deliberate relationship between image and type. Use overlays to add information, not to hide weak imagery.
Visual guardrails
08 / Executions
One system, many surfacesProfile / avatar
Use a legible mark at small sizes. Avoid detailed illustrations in the avatar.
Thumbnail
bad idea work.
Lead with one human sentence. Add context second.
Announcement
A new build is live. It is held together by hope and one suspiciously important boolean.
Specific, warm, and slightly alive.
Recommended messaging — working copy, not immutable taglines
One sentence
BasedCode is Seb Fehr’s creator and technology brand, building games and software in public and bringing people together around the real decisions, experiments, and lessons behind the work.
Social bio
Building games, software, and creative technology in public. Come build along.
Short description
Live development, practical experiments, shared learning, playtests, and the decisions behind shipping real projects.
About
BasedCode is where Seb Fehr builds games and software in public. People can follow the process, contribute where useful, and learn alongside the work. The result should feel like a real project with the doors open and a good group around the table.
Publication decision filter
Is this grounded in real work or a meaningful question?
Are claims supported by evidence or clearly labelled judgement?
Are Seb, BasedCode, Actuator Digital, Actuator Games, and the product correctly attributed?
Does the audience receive useful access, explanation, or participation?
Does it feel specific and authored rather than generic?
Is there one clear call to action with an immediate value or consequence?
09 / Channels
Current official linksChannel roles
| Channel | Primary role |
|---|---|
| Twitch | Long-form participation, live builds, experiments, debugging, and community interaction. |
| YouTube | Durable project stories, technical breakdowns, edited experiments, and post-mortems. |
| Shorts, TikTok, Reels | High-signal moments, visual progress, concise findings, and humour arising from development. |
| Visual milestones, launch assets, behind-the-scenes updates, and selected clips. | |
| X | Fast project updates, technical observations, release news, and stream announcements. |
| Discord | Core community coordination, announcements, playtests, feedback, and retention. |
| Steam | Product-specific wishlists, playtests, releases, and community conversion; it is not a general BasedCode channel. |
Profile rule
Every official profile should use the BasedCode wordmark or approved avatar, describe the creator-led build/play/learn focus, and link to the canonical website once it exists. Personal accounts may link to BasedCode; official BasedCode accounts should not route people through Seb’s personal identity.
10 / AI spec
Structured source of truthThis specification describes how BasedCode should be represented. It is not permission for an agent to publish, impersonate Seb, contact people, or make decisions outside the supplied task.