TekShire Logo

Tempest in a Teapot

The Goal

The main goal is to provide a version of Tempest running on mobile devices. To make it a unique game, we have decided to place the Tempest fields inside teapots, thus creating Tempest in a Teapot. We have further decided to make it available as a virtual reality game.

Tempest in a Teapot is being developed as two separate products. First we will build a stand-alone version of just the teapots. You can find documentation and a playable version the Teapots game on the Teapots webpage. When we begin to add the Tempest gameplay, it will be available here.

Basic Game Play

Basic flight for Tempest in a Teapot starts exactly the same as the Blaster variant. The viewpoint is from just behind the ship, which allows us to see objects coming from behind as well as what is in front of the ship.

Flying down the teapot spout will result in landing on top of one of the Tempest fields. The viewpoint here will remain the same as that for flying among the teapots to keep this as smooth a transition as possible. The camera being fixed behind the ship means the ship will remain centered. Steering right or left by head movement will move us counter-clockwise or clockwise, respectively. That means the apparent motion will be that the field itself will spin around. Note that this was the first UI tried by Dave Theurer when he created the original Tempest arcade game. Unfortunately this could result in the player suffering motion sickness. We are hoping that using the body movement to control the ship movement will mean that the physical sensation will match the visual one and that this will keep us in equilibrium to avoid motion sickness

Once all the creatures assigned to that field have been dealt with, the ship will glide down the tube, avoiding spikes. When the ship reaches the bottom of the tube, the blackness will explode into teapot shards revealing that we are in the same place in the field of remaining teapots right where we had been when we entered the spout. I believe this will provide the smoothest transition from Tempest back to Teapots.

Planned Modifications

Flying around the teapot to get into the spout may be very hard. Perhaps we need an auto-pilot. Flying the ship into a collision with a teapot (or a zone around it) will drop the ship into auto-pilot mode. At that time the ship will slur around the globe of the teapot body to the lid on top. After we have started the movement around the body, we will then do another slur as the ship rotates to point at the spout. Once there, we will move forward toward the spout including rotating the ship to point down so when it gets to the spout, it is ready to zoom down into the spout. Note, we can't allow the ship to move though the spout or the handle, so they will get a movement script of their own to move the ship past them to the teapot body.

The key for going from Teapots to Tempest is to fly down the teapot spout. Fortunately, since the charges the teapots fire are area weapons, an explosion near the teapot will damage it too. For that reason, when you get close to the spout, the teapot will stop firing. This allows you to get into the Tempest tube without fear of being destroyed while you are vulnerable.

Availability

2021! For sure.