It’s been a busy year for the two of us at Tea-Powered Games! We’ve been reflecting a bit on our work this year, and we thought we would share some of that with you.

Dialogue: A Writer’s Story

The year started with Dialogue on Itch, and on Greenlight going through the voting process (remember the days of Greenlight?)

We spent some time improving Dialogue, especially the User Interface art, creating a new trailer and reaching out to our market. We worked with Lewis Denby from Game If You Are; he was a big help in putting all of it together!

And so, we got Greenlit and subsequently released Dialogue on Steam! We’re happy it’s finally there, and we needed a bit of a change in pace, so we’ve also been working on…

Elemental Flow

This year we announced Elemental Flow, our next game. It’s ambitious and exciting, and we hope to share more about the process of making it as we go along, through our blog posts.

We had the chance to show Elemental Flow at Comic-cons in Aylesbury and Reading, as well as AdventureX in London. We had a lot of great feedback, and a really positive response. We can’t stress enough how great it is to see people sitting down to play your game, and really ‘get it’ and enjoy it. Thanks to everyone who tried it and talked to us about it, there’s still much more to come!

Side Projects and Other Things

We got accepted into BAFTA Crew this year – it’s been a great way to make connections and everyone has been lovely!

This year we took part in our first ever game jam, the Ludum Dare 38, with Víctor Ojuel. Our game Nightwards, Heartwards was a short and interestingly moody piece about self-change, connecting with people and connecting people to each other. It could use a bit more on the tutorial front, but hey, we made a game in a weekend!

Flo (with some coding help from Dust) entered her first Interactive Fiction Competition. Her entry, The Dream Self, is part everyday story, part dreamscape, part personality test, and you can play it for free here, or read the post-mortem here.

She also released an interactive exploration of the feline evolutionary tree called the Felidae Phylogenetic tree which you can play for free here, or read her post-mortem here. It’s a pleasant way to spend half an hour, especially if you’re a cat lover.

And, because she loves variety, Flo has also started Bite-Sized Thoughts, a fortnightly column that looks at interesting features from small, indie games that people may not have played. Hopefully the length and format make the Thoughts easy to digest!

We also announced our narrative design consultancy this year. If you think your game could use that extra bit of seasoning at the intersection between story and play, you should get in touch! Perhaps you need a tasty side dish or an entirely new course… okay, this metaphor is getting away from us (and making us hungry).

Near Future and Beyond

It feels like a year of firsts, despite having launched Dialogue last year, and as a company we’ve been busy. We’re looking forward to having more conversations with you all, both here and in our games, in the coming year. Right now, we’re working on an online demo for Elemental Flow, so everyone can try it out soon!

In case this is the last you hear from us this month, have a very happy holiday season, and try to make some time for yourself with a nice cup of tea and a good story!

– Dust and Flo