Teatime Samurai Updates

Here’s a Teatime Samurai update soon to be posted on Kickstarter:

Woah! It’s been a minute, like, an almost ten year minute. I’ve come out of the deep stasis state I’ve been held in for the last decade to bring surprise updates about this random game you Kickstarted in 2015.

Teatime Samurai has done great things! We had thousands of downloads from players across the world, great reviews from the biggest most impressive gaming publications, and we were pirated and much discussed on Chinese APK sharing websites.

It’s been an exciting decade for Teatime Samurai, but the fun doesn’t stop here. Fans have been asking me daily, nay, hourly, nay, minute and secondly, “Ben, when is the Teatime Samurai 9 Year Anniversary Game of the Year Orange Box Remastered Edition coming out?” to which I’ve laughed and intertwined my fingers like a supervillain bluffing about a half baked plan, and I’ve responded, “All in good time, my dear friends, all in good time.”

Well the good time has finally come and Teatime Samurai is getting some long overdue love and attention. Teatime Samurai is getting a re-release! You can expect to see the following improvements:

  • Graphics improvements across the board
  • Improved sound effects and voice dubbing
  • Music during main gameplay
  • Boss rebalancing (and nerfing the hell out of the typing boss)
  • Powerups
  • Bug fixes
  • 2014 Oculus Rift Devkit support

All these changes coming to the existing distribution platforms (tts.benergize.com) as well as Steam! Because if your game is on Steam, it’s automatically Great. Expect all this and more sometime in early to mid June! Tell your friends! Tell you partner! Tell you partner’s friends! Tell you partner’s enemies! Shout from the rooftops: “Listen all ye who would listen! The Teatime Samurai marcheth once again upon the earth!”

Teatime Samurai is getting updated! Yay! Very exciting! I’m planning on posting here as dev goes along to chronicle revisiting this ancient project. It’s been a really interesting experience looking at old cold, old art, old ideas; seeing how I did things then and how I would do them now. The project is extremely well organized and commented, and on its own I’m proud of that. It also makes it a hell of a lot easier to revisit it and do work on it.

Code

The code is great in terms of structure, functionality, and organization. The code is awful in that GML is (or at least was as of the 2018 update of Game Maker Studio 1.4) a horrendous awful mess of a language. I’ve been working in Godot for the last few months and coming back to GML has been like going back to the stone age. Things are really, really rough around the edges, and the way the language worked necessitated some really funky hacks and ugly workarounds. I hope you like arrays, because there’s a lot of arrays doing a lot of things that other data types would do a lot better in a modern language. But so it goes.

I’m greatly enjoying finding comments I left to myself, which range from “hey this is what this does” to note-to-future-self so laden with obscenities that I can’t post them here. I also found the lyrics to a Teatime Samurai rap song that will, at least for now, remain unpublished.

Art

I feel pretty proud of the art in Teatime Samurai. It’s rough around the edges, but it was pushing the limits of what I was capable of doing at the time, and there are sprites in there I remain proud of. There are also sprites in there I am not proud of. And I’m replacing them. There’s a huge art pass that needs to happen before re-launch and it’s daunting. Here’s some work in progress before and afters. Keep in mind these are works in progress and that these are stretched to 1000x.

Oni Swordsman (New):

New oni swordsman attack

Oni Swordsman (Old):

Old oni swordsman attack

Undead Wizard (Old):

Old undead wizard

Undead Wizard (New):

New undead wizard

 

Grass

We’ve added interactive grass! It moves when you touch it and sways in the wind when you aren’t touching it. I’ll do a whole post about how I did this without shaders. It’s cool!

Before:

Old grass

After:

New grass!

Music

TTS has always had music in menus, attract screens, and boss fights, but never during main gameplay between bosses. I was worried at the time that if the music wasn’t good enough players would hate the game. My solution at the time was to not have music. Much credit to Ken Gagne for telling me that I’m dumb and should music in (in nicer words). I’m finally taking the advice and composing music for the main game.

In 2015 I had no idea how to compose music, but I’ve since put a ton of hours into music production, both chiptune and hip-hop. The new TTS soundtrack is definitely going to lean more chiptune than hip-hop, but who knows what’ll sneak in there at really high level gameplay…

Screenshot of FL Studio

And More

There’s a lot we’re not covering in this post which we’re going to talk about later. Powerups! Boss fights! Voice acting! In the meantime, stay tuned! Teatime is coming back!

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