Tea For God

Devlog

• performance of a custom engine on a standalone vr headset
  March 27, 2023 by void room

  7

  #performance

  When I started to work on Tea For God I had no idea that in a few years, there will be a standalone VR headset and what will be inside it. I decided to go with a custom engine as both Unity and Unreal... Continue reading

  
• "Beneath", health system and AI changes
  February 16, 2023 by void room

  6

  A quick update. I am working on the "Beneath" chapter and approaching the end of it. Besides the intro, it takes the place underground which had its own set of issues but also allowed certain places t... Continue reading
• vr anchors and elevators
  January 16, 2023 by void room

  5

  One of the cornerstones of Tea For God's implementation of impossible spaces is something that I call VR Anchors. First, let's talk about spaces. For Tea For God I use different reference spaces. I ha... Continue reading
• v 0.8.0 new difficulty setup, experience mode, new font, performance update
  December 15, 2022 by void room

  1

  #build

  Whenever I am to update a demo I get nervous. With preview builds I just playtest the game for a bit and upload the build. The audience for preview builds is limited and they do expect bugs and glitch... Continue reading
• performance
  December 02, 2022 by void room

  3

  Since I implemented support for OpenXR, the performance of the game went down. Enough to be noticable. I decided not to investigate it immediately as I knew that with lots of new things coming the per... Continue reading

  
• getting ready for demo udpate, scourer improvements
  November 15, 2022 by void room

  2

  insight EXM I mostly kept working on insight EXM for the first week as there were a lot of things to be added and tweaked. The slight problem with this EXM is that it takes some of the mystery away. B... Continue reading
• new difficulty + insight upgrade
  October 31, 2022 by void room

  2

  It's not entirely true that I underestimate some tasks. Some of them I just push away as I'd prefer to focus on other things. But when I start working on such tasks, I am all into them. making it easy... Continue reading
• release delay
  October 20, 2022 by void room

  3

  I wanted the game to be released by the end of 2022. A lot of things happened that required extra time and I could either go with Early Access soon or move the release date into future. Planned date i... Continue reading
• loading times and early optimisation
  October 17, 2022 by void room

  2

  Recently I decided to investigate long loading times and hiccups that happen during the loading. I had two reasons to do so. The first is that it takes way too long to load the game. It was 5+37s on Q... Continue reading
• what's going on? chapters, bugs, performance, extended play mode
  October 03, 2022 by void room

  3

  This is just an update on the development. I want to write something every other Sunday/Monday. Almost missed that. As this post was initially meant to be about a few cutscenes, smoke and mirrors of g... Continue reading
• boss fight and plans
  September 19, 2022 by void room

  3

  I like boss fights. The ones that are just clever and fun. And these that are frustrating and you have such a huge relief afterwards. There's this huge relief afterwards, the sense of achievement and... Continue reading
• welder and shield
  September 05, 2022 by void room

  2

  The latest level is a dangerous place on its own. While you meet some resistance, the bulk of the danger is the place itself. Not only there are different places full of electrical discharges, all the... Continue reading

  
• smooth locomotion
  July 21, 2022 by void room

  5

  Initially, I had no support for that. It would be against the impossible spaces. But a friend of mine suggested that I should add it. And while I was against making it a game feature, I added a code t... Continue reading
• v 0.7.0 smooth locomotion, OpenXR support, tutorials+tips
  July 21, 2022 by void room

  1

  I keep working on the game's content but recently I also did a few important changes to the game itself. Some technical (OpenXR support), some general design (smooth locomotion) and some gameplay rela... Continue reading
• things I learned about foveated rendering while failing to implement OpenXR
  June 03, 2022 by void room

  11

  Recently I decided to implement OpenXR support. It all went quite well until I realised that foveated rendering does not work. I couldn't make it work at all. Even the sample was not working. I decide... Continue reading

  
• v 0.6.3 new content, streamlining gameplay, optimisations
  March 08, 2022 by void room

  3

  #build

  While working on this update I was adding new content but the vast amount of the time was spent fixing outstanding things and improving performance. First, the new stuff. There's an interlude section... Continue reading

  
• a bug story
  March 07, 2022 by void room

  3

  This dev log entry is not really about a particular bug. Although this very bug is a good example of what fixing bugs may look like. I changed the death effect for a few reasons. One was the performan... Continue reading

  
• solving transparency with dithering
  February 08, 2022 by void room

  5

  Using alpha transparency for Quest is discouraged. It can hit performance quite badly. What are your options then? If that's in a very controlled scene you may still go with it. If you have full contr... Continue reading
• breaking down the train turret fight scene
  December 18, 2021 by void room

  3

  First, a quick note. I underestimated this one. I thought that it will take me maybe six days. It's a bit more than two weeks right now and still a few minor things to do. This might be because I adde... Continue reading

  
• what's going on? new level, changes
  November 12, 2021 by void room

  5

  I finished the "Interlude I" level, internally called "Train station". It will be a part of an extended demo that should come soon. To have it working I had to add a few things. Some were strictly gam... Continue reading

  
• v 0.6.2 discharge weapon, menu+HUD improvements
  October 20, 2021 by void room

  2

  As I will be working on new levels, I also want to add new items and weapons. I plan to interweave three things: add items, weapons and any features I need work on a level (zones + enemies) bug-hunt a... Continue reading

  
• Tutorials, Arcade & Roguelite
  October 14, 2021 by void room

  1

  I love to explore, to learn things on my own. I also think that certain things have to be explained or told straight away. Like the controls or some very basic concepts. At the same time, I am not a b... Continue reading

  
• v 0.6.1 arcade/roguelite, music, voice over and more
  October 05, 2021 by void room

  4

  Haven't been uploading new builds or actually writing anything for a while now. But here it is. A new build. The most important change is that it is another iteration of the gameplay loop but this one... Continue reading

  
• Open world with impossible spaces
  March 26, 2021 by void room

  8

  Let's talk about making an open-world with impossible spaces. The concept and some details. But first, why would anyone want that? Impossible spaces encourage exploration. Linear levels are quite limi... Continue reading

  
• v 0.5.5 (unlocks, airships, new tower, fixes)
  March 08, 2021 by void room

  3

  This post is going to be a short one. Just about the new update. The most important gameplay feature is the persistent unlock system. During runs, you gather experience. With this experience, you may... Continue reading
• v 0.5.4 (scripting, haptics, savegames, map symbols)
  February 13, 2021 by void room#build

  The very first thing that I've done for this update was the music system. But there's no music in the game, right? Yes. But it will be easier for the composer to work with the game when it is possible... Continue reading

  
• v 0.5.3 (dynamic lights, coloured guns, new EXMs)
  January 02, 2021 by void room

  3

  #build

  This update was meant to be a quick one. In the end, it was kind of quick, is during the Christmas period, I work less than usual. What comes with this update? Colours! Weapons have different colours... Continue reading

  
• v 0.5.2 (weapon mixer, new weapon parts)
  December 19, 2020 by void room

  2

  With this update, I have finished with adding all core gameplay systems. The last one is the weapon mixer device which allows, as its name suggests, to mix two weapons. Although you can just use weapo... Continue reading

  
• v 0.5.1 (workshop, permanent upgrades, modifiers, new zone, new enemy)
  December 05, 2020 by void room

  4

  This update could've been divided into a few updates. There's a lot of changes which I will quickly cover. Old difficulty setup system is gone. It has been replaced by modifiers. You now simply switch... Continue reading

  
• v 0.5.0 (new core gameplay loop, open world)
  October 28, 2020 by void room

  5

  #build

  When Quest 2 got released, I hoped Tea For God will be just working on it. It wasn't. I haven't updated (officially) the game since July. The problems on Quest 2 were just screaming for an update. I d... Continue reading
• Optimisations
  September 25, 2020 by void room

  3

  Quest 2 is coming. More powerful! When I read specs for Quest (1), I thought that it's not going to be that much different than PC. It has 8 cores, right? Oh, 4 are weaker? That's still 8, let's say,... Continue reading

  
• Dynamic spawning
  July 23, 2020 by void room

  What would be a shooter without enemies? In games that have hand-made levels, most of the times, enemies are also placed by hand. This approach allows for creating more directed encounters. Gives some... Continue reading

  
• v 0.4.13 (dynamic spawning + general optimisations)
  July 21, 2020 by void room

  2

  The plan was to add a dynamic spawning system and release it. After a few days I got it working but realised that if I want to spawn characters during the game, maybe a few per minute, I need to impro... Continue reading
• Gameplay changes
  July 11, 2020 by void room

  2

  #game design

  I kind of hit the wall with the game. When I played it recently, I realised that it was becoming what I wanted to avoid. I didn't want to turn it into a long grind. My approach was about giving option... Continue reading
• v 0.4.12 (LOD system and suspending advancement)
  July 07, 2020 by void room

  1

  #build

  Because I run into some game design issues, I decided to focus now on some technical stuff to get my head clear. I was away for a week and the last week was also full of non-project related events, so... Continue reading

  
• v 0.4.11 (new weapon type, minor features, performance update)
  June 19, 2020 by void room

  1

  #build

  Initially, I was planning to introduce a new enemy type with this update but after talking to a few people I focused on something else. First things first. This update introduces a new weapon type. Co... Continue reading
• v 0.4.10 (1 new enemy, navmesh, new health indicator)
  June 03, 2020 by void room#build

  Initially, I wanted to have this build include some extra stuff that is not visible to players and spent the rest of the time working on a new enemy. While I was able to do some things for it quite qu... Continue reading

  
• v 0.4.9 (weapon crafting)
  May 17, 2020 by void room

  3

  #build

  Finally, I've uploaded it. The biggest, the most important feature of this build is weapon crafting. Not only you can disassemble the weapons you find to get new parts. You can also do that with robot... Continue reading
• v 0.4.8 (modular weapons)
  April 11, 2020 by void room

  1

  Latest build introduces modular weapons. There are still a few things required to be done (like assembling your own weapons). In Tea For God you will be able to build a weapon using four types of modu... Continue reading

  
• v 0.4.7 (tutorials)
  March 11, 2020 by void room

  4

  Tutorials are now available in Tea For God. It's been a while, though. Initially, I wanted to break it into two updates with a set of tutorials for moving, shooting, etc. And another for loadouts and... Continue reading
• v 0.4.6 (persistance changes, performance)
  February 03, 2020 by void room

  2

  I'll keep it short. New build (0.4.6) is available. There are four interesting changes (among fixes and some smaller things): Hand-tracking. You can now choose a different gesture to shoot - fold your... Continue reading
• v 0.4.5 (hand-tracking)
  January 29, 2020 by void room

  2

  The most important feature of this build (0.4.5) is hand-tracking support for Oculus Quest. The support is quite basic. Hands are tracked, there is nothing extra done with tracked information. No smoo... Continue reading
• v 0.4.4 (persistence)
  January 14, 2020 by void room

  3

  #build

  It took over a month, but there were Christmas and a period (well, two) of general sickness at my home. And there was a bug that was leading to crashes, I got dozens of reports and couldn't figure out... Continue reading

  
• v 0.4.3 (hand to hand combat)
  December 10, 2019 by void room

  3

  Persistence layer might be not as exciting as other things. Nor open world. And among outstanding issues, there was one that was kinda breaking the experience. I noticed that many people struggle to p... Continue reading

  
• v 0.4.2 (profiles, game slots, new menu)
  December 03, 2019 by void room

  2

  This build was meant to take a week and a half, max two weeks. It took three weeks. Although the actual amount of work was as anticipated, it was spread over three weeks. I was considering to change t... Continue reading

  
• v 0.4.1 (vr scaling, headshots)
  November 13, 2019 by void room

  4

  A new build was ready 10 days ago but I thought that I will add a new enemy. And then I found that there are a few things to improve with AI (most of them related to path following). And then I decide... Continue reading

  
• v 0.4.0 (exms)
  October 28, 2019 by void room

  4

  #build

  It is the first update that includes core gameplay mechanics I want to have in Tea For God. Hence the change in version number to 0.4.0.This one introduces extension modules. These are devices that yo... Continue reading

  
• what's going on? - EXMs
  October 15, 2019 by void room

  2

  Recently I had lots of stuff that was carrying me away from working on Tea For God. Some of them are still there (half of our house is sick a bit, including me), but I still managed to do the most of... Continue reading
• what's going on? - controllers
  September 19, 2019 by void room

  2

  There was an issue with Index controllers not working properly. As I don't have Index, but I had Knuckles for a while, I thought that Tea For God supports Index controllers. I was wrong. The support w... Continue reading
• v.0.3.13 (performance updates, non-aggressive NPCs)
  September 05, 2019 by void room

  2

  #build

  I managed to fix the performance issues that appeared recently. They started to appear with 0.3.12 but in it was the latest Quest update that made them visible while they were all the time in the code... Continue reading

  
• v.0.3.12 (non-linear levels and more difficulty classes)
  August 20, 2019 by void room

  2

  A new build with a few new things. The most important to the game are more open levels. Before that levels were linear. In the experience mode, there was just one path. No crossroads. If you just foll... Continue reading
• v.0.3.11 (dealigning rooms and corridors, bug reporting)
  August 09, 2019 by void room

  3

  #build

  I know that there won't be a year I won't get sick. Some medications have... funny side effects. One thing that I took resulted in dizziness which made me sleepy. I decided to check in the changes I d... Continue reading
• Why "Tea For God"?
  July 26, 2019 by void room

  3

  I've been playing around with a concept of impossible spaces since 1998. I was trying to create a rendering system based on scan lines. Mostly to solve the issue of sorting surfaces to display (softwa... Continue reading
• v 0.3.10 (performance improvements)
  July 26, 2019 by void room

  1

  New build fixes "one hand" issue and contains lots of improvements. Some sacrifice the details. But in places where the framerate was dropping to 50 it is now still at 72. And that's at 100% scale (no... Continue reading
• v 0.3.9 (Quest port!)
  July 12, 2019 by void room

  2

  Last month was pretty mad. I was going mad at times. After the initial two weeks of porting, I realised that it may take more time than I anticipated. I expected it to take me maybe three weeks top. I... Continue reading
• v 0.3.8 (a train!)
  June 14, 2019 by void room#new build

  While most of the time I spent on porting, I had a few days that I was discovering problems with my code. And it happened because I switched to a newer Visual Studio (and Clang for Oculus Quest port)... Continue reading
• what's going on? - porting
  June 05, 2019 by void room

  3

  I thought that even if I don't have anything particular to share, I will be still doing a short "what's going on?" posts. Here's the first one. A week ago I started to port Tea For God to Oculus Quest... Continue reading

  
• time limit in a roguelite's run (reactor feature)
  May 28, 2019 by void room

  1

  I do really like roguelikes and roguelites. It actually doesn’t matter if it is a classic turn-based rougelike, a 2D platformer, a top-down dungeon crawler, a space shooter, a real-time tactic/strat... Continue reading
• v 0.3.7 (reactor = time limit)
  May 26, 2019 by void room#new build

  New build is here. This one introduces one very important change. A feature called "reactor". You will no longer be able to play endlessly. Although for a while it is possible to extend the playtime... Continue reading
• multithreading
  May 15, 2019 by void room

  1

  #multithreading

  Tea For God is a VR game. This means that it has to render two images for each eye. And it has to do so in 90 frames per second. There are several approaches to rendering and there are more and more b... Continue reading
• v 0.3.6 (crouching maze and adjustable height)
  May 10, 2019 by void room#new build

  Been a while (being sick, again!), but a new build is here. I modified the main menu and added a section to explain some of the gameplay mechanics. I want to make sure that one thing is clear and I wi... Continue reading
• v 0.3.5
  April 25, 2019 by void room#new build

  A new build, although with not too many visible new features (Hello Easter, hello being sick :( ). The only really important is loadout setup section. Currently limited to FAD only. These are ForeArm... Continue reading
• v 0.3.4
  April 13, 2019 by void room

  3

  #new build

  A new build is here! I started to work on full time basis just few weeks ago, significant chunk of that time went into adding a menu and options. Here's a list of the most important changes: one new... Continue reading
• procedural level generation using impossible spaces
  April 13, 2019 by void room

  6

  #procedural generation, #level generation, #impossible spaces, #non euclidean, #procedural

  During the last few days, I decided to focus a bit on level generation. I wanted to try adding new variations for existing generators and clean up generation code/definitions a bit. Most of the people... Continue reading
• ui and options
  April 04, 2019 by void room

  2

  Among things that people were mentioning was lack of any settings. I'd prefer addressing feedback as soon as possible to be on track with anything that people want to get in the game. Not everything i... Continue reading
• forearm displays and navigation
  March 27, 2019 by void room

  4

  A while ago I published a demo build and got amazing feedback from lots of people. Most of the issues are now implemented. New ideas not and sound is as it was. But that will change. One of the reques... Continue reading