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 decided to fix the bug, finish what I wanted to do and release it. And here we are.

Quest 2? Fixed.

New stuff? Lots of it.

When I playtest my game, I often do it with breaks. So I can get as fresh mind as possible. I did so a few months ago and I saw that the game was no longer fun. It was not apparent at first but after half an hour, I noticed that I focus on gathering knowledge points - all I was doing was with KP on my mind. Disassembling every object I find, rushing through the level to get more data blocks and so on. To get upgrades. Upgrades that were just about improving some numbers a bit.

I wanted first to add an open world but I already knew that it won't fix much. The game needed a knife. So I started to cut things. I enjoyed those features on their own but they didn't work together. Data Blocks? Gone. Upgrade maze? Gone. Reactor/time limit? Gone. I wanted to get rid of that complicated UI, so weapon crafting as it was was gone as well.

Then I started to think about what I do like about my game, what people say they like about it and focused on making those things stand out. And dropped a few more things that I liked, just to see what if there's just the minimal set. Energy orbs? Gone. Any kind of currency? Gone. There were too many things you had to take care of. A while ago I was playing with an idea of single energy storage per hand, so you can replace any weapon and keep the ammo. I tried that and it felt better.

While I didn't want to have persistence as it may turn the game into a job, where you gather resources to get upgrades, etc, I didn't want to drop upgrades themselves. First I was tempted to reward the player with "money" for killing robots. The money would be used to unlock upgrades. But then you had to kill a specific amount of robots so you would end up with either running close to the upgrade machine killing stuff or having so much money that you don't care much about it. Then I thought that if it is already challenging to go from one point to another, why not just reward this journey. It may seem that rewards are then for free, but you still have to take care of your health, ammo, avoid enemies or kill them.

While there's still no objective, nor narrative, the game, at least in my opinion, plays much better. There are still lots of things to do, besides the obvious. A few more devices that I want to add. Encounter Director to spawn enemies in a way to make fights more dramatic instead of 6 robots attacking you in a huge group and then nothing.

I managed to create a new body for the hero. It was dictated by the story that I hope is the final version (at least the core of it).

What's next? New utilities (weapon mixer, EXM installer), EXMs, EXM stacker. The most important is to start adding things so the game will finally leave "it's just a tech demo" and will be something more.