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 to start

Around two weeks ago I decided that I should finally do things that may make the game easier to experience for complete newbies and easier to understand for people who are not mad explorers like me. I prefer to dive right into a game and explore, experiment and learn stuff on my own. Yet I completely understand why some people don't want to do that.

And it's not that the game should be done in such a way that it teaches people how to play without telling them explicitly about stuff. Because some people will grasp certain concepts right away and some will completely miss them.

Example? The first junction, in the arcade mode, had four doors. I naively thought that everyone will stop and look at each door to tell where to go (as I would do so) and will try to notice any difference in them. And there was a difference. One door had "door direction" screens with a blinking dot. "They stand out, I should follow them". While it sounded quite obvious to me, I saw many people playing the game and completely missing that, just walking pass the doors. That's when I thought that I need a better solution, a room where there are clearly just two doors, next to each other, one has blinking dots, other doesn't. The other would lead to a dead end (without any secret or easter egg whatsoever to not encourage such a behaviour at this point of time). To somehow force people to notice them, for smaller spaces I decided to add a platform that slowly moves towards the doors. I thought that this is where people should clearly see the doors, the difference and should understand that they have to follow the blinking dots. And it wasn't until I added an explicit message that finally people learned to follow the dots.

To top it, I added messages popping up when you go off the path. Although this discourages the exploration a bit and I need a better solution for that (maybe somethin less invasive).

There are other systems that I thought will work but clearly didn't until text-based tutorials were added. Lots of that was done in safe spots, without enemies, where you had to do a certain thing to progress.

People want to go on an adventure but they don't want to figure out the gameplay. And some just want to experience the game without much depth to it. Because the mood, the expectations, the lack of time, for many many reasons.

That's why I thought about doing two things but I was putting them for later for a while now.

1. New difficulty.
2. Insight EXM.

experience the game

New difficulty is actually "almost no difficulty at all". The idea was to have "an experience" mode where there are almost no gameplay systems (no upgrades, infinite ammo, regenerating health), where you go straight into the action without the introductiory part. Just to experience the impossible spaces. When I was implementing that, I thought that punishing the players with reloading checkpoint (that is actually recreating the world) might be too much and I added a different way to handle "death". The screen fades out, you get a countdown and you jump back into the game. All enemies forget about you and run away so you don't have to worry about getting killed immediately.

But then I thought that why should I stop there. Especially as I knew that there are some people who would like to play the game with some of the rougeliteness but without the more complex gameplay. Ie. if they die, they start all over but no map navigation and with tutorials. And that's when I decided to separate both things. Now you can choose how complex the gameplay is (experience/standard/advanced) and what happens when you fail (go back to action/go back to last checkpoint/start all over). With one expection, for advanced mode (former rogulite) if restart, you get the health from backup and then from main storages. If you have none, you're done. This is to avoid "I will shoot myself to get free energy to buy upgrades" that would eventually be done by some people only to make them do it dozens of times. This would be tedious. It's better to just put infinite health/ammo then.

And that's not all. The "experience" mode also has linear levels. This is to make it as easy to navigate as possible. It was requested by some people explicitly. They just wanted to move forward and shoot things.

And as there is no story, no voiceovers, you get actual arcade feeling. Pure mindless action. The only disadvantage here is that there is no story, certain things are missing (tentacles! it's actually much more to those entities than just tentacles but this should be learned through the game) and I will need to take some detours and most likely end the game differently.

The new mode should also make it much easier to introduce people to Tea For God or to VR at all. As there's really not much to explain. Shoot with triggers, move with your own feet. That's it.

insight upgrade

The second thing that I am still adding is Insight EXM. This is an upgrade that shows some information about whatever you're looking at. Health, armour, how much damage does the enemy do, can they see, hear, do they have any special abilities, critical points, etc. Also information about various devices can be obtained this way. And this is something optional. If you decide you want to equip this, you have the extra knowledge. But you miss one (active) upgrade spot.

By default, the information is provided with just health meter and a bunch of icons (armour, what weapon does it have, is it hostile, etc). If you activate the EXM, you get a text description of each thing and some additional information.

It should help to learn about some "hidden" features (spider grenades, turning robodog into an ally, shield "kissing").

I plan to add a few things there - mark special spots (not just critical ones) + "aim plane" so you see where you're aiming.

Oh, there's one more thing I was working on. Because eventually I will be supporting different languages and right now, the font was done by hand. Each character. I thought that it could take weeks to get some languages to the game and I need something that will make it much easier. I added a system to finally change any font into glyphs used by the game. This is done offline during the build process. And to handle more complex characters I had to use a higher resolution for all the UI. AAAAND because the new font system uses smooth font, I decided to do the same for all the other icons to have it more consistent.

I should be finishing this soon. The next in plans are more gameplay focused EXMs and I have a bunch of these to be added. I will be limiting now to add no more than 10. And the weapon nodes!

After that I should fix some bugs to get the demo update done. After that there should be nothing more but the content for the game. Oh, the localisation! That's what is going to be added but this should be done in parallel.