Basic Concept
In “Tea Shop” the player slips into the role of a lone misanthrope, living a life of solitude in a small hut in the outskirts of Autumn Well, a secluded village in Canada. One day they find the entire village turned into a ghost town from one moment to the next.
Eerie happenings surround the player as they journey through the village and its past, in search for the truth. While exploring ominous areas like the town’s old school building or the abandoned hospital, they must also tend to their well-being.
It’s the mundane things – be it procuring food from the supermarket, locking the door, preparing some tea to sip at home or simply watching the star-filled sky – that are able to keep us calm when the darkness outside seems to enshroud all the answers.
Reflection
Tea Shop offered a unique opportunity in representing the everyday as a gameplay element. We aimed to create a sense of pleasant life in solitude in the hut in the woods and a sense of eerie mystery in exploration sections outside of it. Ultimately, it was exceptionally hard to balance creating meaningful ways to push the player to go outside while also motivating them to stay in a routine. The systems became exceptionally heavy-handed and a better implementation would have required a signficant out-scoping of the game. Nonetheless, we were able to create multiple unique setpieces where the player was pulled out of everyday situations like making a cup of tea into one-off horror sections that worked specifically because we had forced established routines.
However, many of the lessons we learned in this project were able to be applied directly in the work on our current game, Fey. Restricting the scope specifically and pulling it into a far less expansive world is an immediate, obvious take-away. However, even smaller things like how to create cute puzzles that bring a smile to ones face by bringing in everyday concepts and playing with them was possible as a result of experiences in Tea Shop.
Genre: Occult Detective / Mundane Survival / Horror / Open World
Team
Giovanni Tagliamonte (Design, Programming)
Jan Maslov (Design, Art, Programming)
The project was built as part of my BA studies at the Cologne Game Lab of the University of Applied Sciences, Cologne.