Teatime Samurai is a twin-stick arcade-style shooter set in ancient Japan. The game is whimsical and very silly. It released on Steam in the summer of 2024. I did all the art, wrote all the code, and composed the original soundtrack.
Talk Teatime to Me
I made version 1 of Teatime Samurai in 2014 over the course of six months. I was taking a gap year off from school and made one of my missions to finish a game. The result was Teatime Samurai classic, which while extremely unpolished was impressive for my skills at the time. I earned a Kickstarter Staff Pick for my campaign and raised the money I needed to pay app store fees, various licensing fees for sound effects, and music (I had no musical ability at the time).
The game was released to minimal fanfare outside of friends and family, but it was nice to have a finished product under my belt. I did get a 3 star review on Softpedia, which was some real excitement.
Teatime Samurai Remastered
Fast forward to 2024, looking at projects to work on as I prepared to head back into the professional world, I took a look back at Teatime Samurai. The game was foundationally solid, but severely needed polish. There were a lot of bugs and a lot of low hanging fruit for improvements to art, music, and gameplay. And so I set to work.
Your Bass is Grass
The first thing I added, almost as a proof of concept for whether I could make the game look modern, was dynamic grass, meaning grass that swayed in the breeze and reacted as the player and monsters walked through it. I can’t overstate what a difference this immediately made in making the game feel more like a game and less like a tech demo.
After adding grass!
Before adding grass
Reanimating the Dead
Teatime Samurai was my second attempt at drawing pixel art ever. That’s really evident in the quality of the sprites and animations. Revisiting Teatime Samurai meant redoing an absurd amount of sprites and adding an absurd amount of new animation.
There are new animations for
- Idle poses
- Walk cycles
- Attacks
- Taking damage
- Projectiles
There is new art for
- Old enemies
- New enemies
- Old bosses
- New bosses
- Projectiles
- Environment (trees, walls, well, buildings, everything got a fresh coat of paint)
- UI (new health/light/XP bars)
Underground koi
New jump kick animation
Old foot
New foot
New Music
When I released Teatime Samurai classic, I had zero ability to make music. I’ve since gotten relatively competent at making music. I’ve replaced a lot of the original music, which was licensed, with original music, and I’ve added music to places where there was none, the most noticeable of which being the main game loop. Yes, it was eerily quiet while you played the game in TTS classic, but now you have music to keep you company.
The music is one track separated into many shorter seamlessly looping chunks. You unlock more pieces of the track as you get higher score/more kills. You can listen to some of the original soundtrack on my Soundcloud page, Benergize VGM.
Gameplay Changes
A lot happened around gameplay. For one thing, the pace of everything has been picked up, and the game is a lot snappier, both in terms of performance but also just pacing–when things spawn, how things spawn, where things spawn.
Oil formerly dropped exclusively from the temple at the center of the stage. This meant that gameplay was happening pretty exclusively in the middle of the area. Oil now drops from the center, from the lamps at the sides of the stage, and from certain enemies when they die.
Enemies do more. They have attack animations now which introduces timing to fighting them and they also have new abilities and behaviors. At a certain level, zombies heads will fall off when you kill them and the heads will hop around attacking you. Skeletons will sometimes collapse into a pile of bones which then reanimates a little while later.