Master of Tea - martial arts themed mobile game

Hi everyone! For over a year, I have been working full-time on my own game after getting laid-off from AMD as a tools developer. I had lots of professional experience as a coder but none as an artist. I love doing art but have only done it at a hobbyist level. The last year has been a great learning experience. I chose to do a mobile game to keep the scope simpler expecting to finish the game in about 6 months. As usual, I greatly underestimated the amount of time and effort required. I would consider the game to be in beta phase right now. There is still quite a lot to do but at least the core gameplay is complete and should not require major changes.

Master of Tea

Master of Tea is a 2D style fighting game with a more cartoony and zany style. You control a martial arts master who uses the power of tea to fight. You fight while holding a tea cup and taking sips of tea buffs various stats depending on the tea spices you use to brew your tea. Additionally, drinking tea builds up your Tea Meter which allows you to execute various Power Moves during battle. These are strong attacks that cannot be blocked by enemies. The amount of tea your cup can hold is finite so you can only take so many sips of tea each round. Each time you get hit, a certain amount of tea also spills out of your cup.

Here is some gameplay footage of the current beta

[video=youtube_share;QDHoysvAUro]http://youtu.be/QDHoysvAUro

If you're getting desperate and still have some tea left in your cup, you can throw your tea in your opponents face and bash him with your cup!

[video=youtube_share;SZBfkW39Ga8]http://youtu.be/SZBfkW39Ga8

I'm currently in the progress of polishing animations. After that I will start fixing all the bugs that have accumulated while I focussed my attention on art.

Anyways, I just wanted to share what I've been working on with the development community. Going with Unity instead of my own home-built game engine was a huge win. It's just nice to not have to code at a framework level. The component system has been great for fast gameplay iteration.

For anyone interested, I have a devblog that I'm trying to update regularly here:

http://phyrestudios.com/blog/

Ok, back to work!

 

very cool I am also working on a martial arts game !

 

Cool!!
I really love it,
Continue your work, hope to see your game in the market!!

 

Looks good. Keep it up!

 

haha this looks really cool and funny. I love how he took a sip of his tea while in the fight.

 

Thanks jaelove. I checked out Kings of Kung Fu and it's looking great so far, reminds me of the days I used to watch all those HK fighting movies from Golden Harvest. Keep it up! Fighting games present some interesting challenges that I'm trying to overcome. The challenges should be much higher for your project since it has a larger scope. I'm always trying to find ways to add impact and dramatic moments during combat. I've added counter attacks and then counter-counters and counter-counter-counters so that there are short moments where you really feel like there's a hectic exchange of shots. Adding facial expressions, camera effects, and momentary timescales helped too. But with now you can really notice the imperfections in some of the animations when playback is slowed down. Anyways, I guess this is just part of game development and iteration. Fun times!

 

Thanks the footage of the game is from a very early build only 5 months of work. The counter-counter-counter system sounds amazing I have a counter system in the game as well. I didn't get a chance to add facial animation and all of the other effects. I had a question what method did you use for the facial animation- facial bones or morph targets? I would love to collaborate with you as well

 

I ended up modelling each head as a separate rigged mesh that attaches to the neck bone of the body skeleton. The reason for this was because I was expecting to have a variety of stylized heads that would require their own custom rigs. This method worked out quite well but I'm not sure if I would use this approach again the next time around. The heads have various looping idle animations depending on the state of each agent. Hit reaction animations are triggered when the enemies receive damage or through animation events. I looked into morph animations but they weren't supported in Unity 3.5. But I found for my purposes, a head rig worked quite well. I do use some morph animations for various special effects but it's limited to 2D object space since I just use the 2nd UV coordinates to store a morph target.