Tea-mates - Unreal
Gameplay Designer, Programmer, Producer
Get the game on Itch.io
Tea-mates is a side-scroller time management game where you play as a teapot and a teacup to deliver cups of tea to your customers. Twitch is integrated into the gameplay as Twitch viewers can put in orders via chat. I worked as a gameplay designer, programmer, and producer on this game.
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Designed and worked under constraints of integrating Twitch audience interaction with core gameplay
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Balanced the game mechanics to ensure ideal difficulty
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Programmed some of the core mechanics
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Worked as a co-producer in a team of 10
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Transformed brainstormed ideas into an actionable plan
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The player controls the teapot and the teacup individually.
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The player collects teabags that act as ammo for that type of tea. Collecting teabags also makes the player dunk all the tea they previously had.
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The teapot needs to pour tea into the teacup and the teacup needs to deliver the tea to customers.
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The player loses all tea they have if they touch obstacles like falling knives or flames.
Gameplay
Teamates Gameplay
For games with Twitch integration, it is important to make the viewers feel like they have agency in how the gameplay unfolds and that their actions are significant. Also, we wanted to give them multiple options for affecting the gameplay depending on whether they wanted to make the game easier or more difficult for the player. I came up with 3 ways to do that.
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The viewers can put in orders for different tea types. As the information about what tea the player currently has and the current orders is always visible to the viewers, they can:
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​Help the player by making an order that can be easily fulfilled
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Challenge the player by making an order that is difficult to fulfill as the tea bubbles for that order are not available
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​The viewers can spawn all types of tea bags. Hence, they can
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​Help the player by spawning the tea types the player desperately needs
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Make the player's life difficult by spawning tea types that are unnecessary and act as extra obstacles for the player
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The viewers can spawn knives that make the player lose all the collected tea. Some viewers told us that the most satisfying part of the game was to see the player suffer because of a knife with a name of the viewer assigned to it.
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One of the challenges in designing this game was to manage the extent to which the Twitch viewers could control the gameplay. Also, the gameplay should feel solid even if there are 0 orders from Twitch or 1000 orders. So, we added a base randomized spawn rate of objects and orders that would work when there is no viewer interaction and a max spawn rate to ensure that the game doesn't become too chaotic.
Designing the Twitch Integration
Twitch Stream in Gamedev Event
The game was streamed and played by the viewers during EAE Play, an annual gamedev event by the University Of Utah.