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 (software z-buffers were a bad idea, I was aware of BSP but without Internet access, I had not too many sources to read about it). The idea was simple, for each horizontal line you were gathering surfaces to display, intersected them and you knew which surface to display and when. I figured out that you can do holes in walls this way. And to avoid having thin walls, I thought that you could place a very short corridor where the hole was. This lead to having longer corridors that were sticking out of the walls. Overlapping spaces. I had no idea what could be done with it. It was just a gimmick that was fun to imagine and see.

In 2005 I had an idea to use portals to create a space that would allow going beyond the normal 3D world. I remember one discussion I had about this idea. I was told that there were some researches done that agreed that people get lost in spaces that do not resemble a normal world. That they feel discomfort etc. I didn't pursue the idea much and focus on creating a procedural animation system. The simplest thing to do was a spider. After I had a spider walking on a flat surface, I added hills. After that, I thought that it could be fun to see how it moved through a world that years later started to be called "non-euclidean". I created a few hand-crafted rooms joined together. The proof of concept was called Vertigo.

Then I thought that with such use of portals I could just create rooms randomly and created a system to create an endless world composed of just rooms and twisted corridors. I remember that I could not settle on a story much but some other things were well defined. You were a spider-like being that could gather DNA from killed enemies to modify itself. Every time you were killed you got a few possible eggs that you could hatch. You were then a small spider that was mean to grow (you also were supposed to grow weapons). There was no such thing as "game over". You could just continue exploring the world. There was meant to be no written word, just icons. I wanted to have something similar to Captain Blood's talk system. Trading. Some procedural missions.

I dropped the idea because everyone I spoke to, was saying that it was too weird. I started to do different stuff. After a few prototypes, I came up with an idea for a game called Solveation. Today, it could be described as Antichamber meets Mirror's Edge. Again with procedural levels (although with a selection every week for weekly challenges). I had a pretty clear vision of art direction, the lore, sort of story. And again it was too weird to people. And when I got into gamedev, I stopped working on my games.

After a few years, in 2013 I wanted to get back to creating my stuff. I thought about doing something smaller, a remake of one of my favourite games. Dragontorc. I was experimenting with procedural generation. For starters, I had a hand-crafted world layout but the rooms themselves were procedurally generated.

And once again I dropped it. There seemed to be no market for such a game and I haven't even thought about licensing.

And then came VR. I went back to 3D and impossible spaces (still didn't know the name, although it was started to being used in 2012 as far as I remember). I wanted to create a simple story-driven walking simulator. Seating experience. It was a mix of zen philosophy and Inception. Koan was the name. After a short while, I realised that although I like the idea, the lack of gameplay makes it too unattractive to me. And to make it really good, I'd had to invest a lot into proper assets etc. Again I dropped it.

One thing to mention here is that from each project I was taking lots of experience and actual code (even if at some point I switched from C++ to vala and then back). My engine is in a straight line from this project. But the bits come from both Vertigo and Dragontorc. There is a huge procedural generation system I call "piece combiner" that was just taken from Dragontorc. Then it was used only for room generation. Rooms were created with 2D graphics to look a little bit 3D. Although I generate rooms differently now, the same system is used for world/level generation, how rooms connect etc.

Koan was not much fun. Each scene would require lots of work and would be short. And after seeing it once, you would not have reasons to get back to it. I started to think about something fast-paced gameplay based. And didn't want to have any violence. The initial idea was to have a bunch of kids that break into a facility that disassemblies used worlds and they steal whatever they can to sell it later and stay alive. I used to watch some bad tv back then. And the game idea soon got mixed with Storage Wars and the result was Subspace Scavengers.

The idea was to have lots of procedurally generated levels with some levels partially hand-crafted and scripted (above is an example, the overall layout is the same but every section looks different every time you play). At a time I was carried too much by stuff that was not fun and now I think that was not needed at all. I wanted to create a whole living world instead of creating a system that would pretend that there is a whole living world. This means - instead of pretending that there are people working, finding subspaces, selling them, buying, scavenging, I was working on a system that had actual people, sleeping, waking up, eating breakfast, going to work, working, doing some after-work stuff and so on. And it took way too much time. The game was not VR only. But in VR you were seating in a cockpit of a crawler. At that time I was thinking about problems with locomotion in VR. And that's when I came up with what you can experience in Tea For God. But I did not pursue it. Someone else did that (expect of researchers that did that much earlier). The year was 2016 and Triangular Pixels created Unseen Diplomacy. Funny thing is that I learned that only because I know Katie Goode. And because she and John did that already, for a few months I thought that it's not worth doing (it was still better then when I was down for days when Spore was announced and I was working on a game about evolution, in the end, Spore was more about creationism than evolution and I moved on to other projects). When I bought Vive I changed my mind. I remember that moment. I unpacked Vive, tried it on and then I went to walk my dogs. During that walk, late at night, I thought that I may change Subspace Scavengers a bit. Instead of sitting in a crawler, you could be walking through subspaces on your own feet.

And then I remembered the most common thing that people were asking about when I showcased Subspace Scavengers "will you be able to shoot?". I thought "oh well, the most obvious gameplay mechanic, shooting, zero-one, either you kill something or not, well... let's do this".

I went through my list of ideas I had (I stopped writing them down as I already have too many and I don't want to get too distracted from Tea For God). One of them was about an emperor who has been imprisoned by his enemies in an impossible space complex. It was later changed to "his own people did that because he kept on singing and could sing well" and back to enemies. The idea was first to get to the centre of the complex and bring the emperor out. And to keep the game more open was changed into "bring something to the emperor" and then bring something else. You were a soldier who loved the emperor and was ready to sacrifice his life to bring something not that very important. For example, tea. Then milk. Cookies. And so on.

At some point, the idea drifted to Shadowfire (and Enigma Force) prequel. In which you break into general Zoff's mind (that is kept in a separate, highly guarded place, but close to the general himself) to investigate something and in the end to learn about his treason (which leads to events in Shadowfire).

Back then I was just working on various systems and generators. After a few days, I had first flying enemies and rooms that were anchored in the play area. After a month I had the elevator bridge prototype. Then came corridors. Then AI (Subspace Scavengers was not meant to have a proper NPCs, just some fake ones) and so on.

I was developing the lore and the story. Well, mostly the lore to know what kind of stuff I want to have, which topics do I want to raise, etc.
Some of the stuff has changed. I am no longer making a game with strict levels, I want it to be more open world. I wanted to have well defined puzzles for each level. I switched to more gameplay mechanics based. And so on.

And... you won't learn why the game is called "Tea For God" although the emperor thing and prison remained. They were modified a bit, but they are still there. And lots of other stuff.

What's important is the fact that I want everything to have its reason. Maybe not everything will be explained directly as not everything has to, but just internally I want everything to make sense. This means that impossible spaces are not just a concept to allow walking endlessly. It is related to the lore and the story. The reason you see robotic hands. Why you will be dying a lot (or not, if you choose different difficulty). And other stuff.

By the way, currently, there are just two play modes. Experience and challenge. In "experience" the game is just walking simulator in which you can shoot. In "challenge" you have bits of gameplay core loop available (reactor!), although they do not make much sense in a greater picture. As there is no greater picture in the game right now.

I want to make it clear: Tea For God is going to have much more gameplay stuff in it. I want it to be a roguelite. Dying a lot, well dying being part of the experience, experimenting with builds, trying stuff, learning, making decisions (I really want to have lots of decisions that affect the current run, so you have to keep thinking and choosing, and some that are more longterm). But at the same time I really want to make it possible to play the game the way you want. You don't want to die? Sure. No reactor. Alright. Infinite ammo. Ok. And so on. You could trim everything to have just a walking simulator. A hallway simulator. Because why not? And at the same time, if you do not feel challenged too much, there will be modifiers that alter the gameplay. I am not talking just about making enemies more numerous or tougher. Some of the modes will be just to challenge a bit more. For example, start with almost no health and no weapon. Or have all energy balls explode after a few seconds. Etc. And I do want to have speed runs. This of course means that there are going to be a certain, let's call them "routes". The seed will be set. It won't be open world. The play area will be strict. All options too. It will be possible to create/choose route and to have also some extra rules (allow going through walls or not, etc).

But that will come feature after feature. Just remember that the game will be developed for a while and things will be coming in. And if you miss something, tell ma about it. Maybe it is in plans or maybe it was dropped for a reason or maybe I haven't though about that. I already dropped some stuff because it was no fun. Two years ago the game did not have any physical interaction, but it had mini games that were kind of fun when you learned them. It was changed because people didn't find these mini games fun, especially when they were mandatory (now I consider readding them but more as locks that will be on chests/doors containing some goods inside). And they were missing ability to touch things. Picking up robots came naturally. Buttons on them too (because buttons just felt good to be pushed and I wanted to have more of them).

Ok, that's it for now. Thank you all for being here. I get back fixing bugs (to keep them low) and after that I will start to add more features.