The first commercial release of a Downpour game

Hey, it's a vaguely work themed post! Today is the release of Terry's Other Games, a nice collection of, well, the games that Terry Cavanagh has made over the years that aren't his big commercial releases. Commercial releases like VVVVVV, Dicey Dungeons and Super Hexagon - all good games!

Why am I posting about it, other than I'm friends with Terry and just generally excited about the release? Because one of those games is A Proper Cup Of Tea, a Downpour game which is probably the most popular thing made on the platform (look, he's good at making games, okay?). And this means that this is also the first commercial release of a Downpour game!

Structurally it feels like this is the place I should describe A Proper Cup Of Tea. But actually I think you should just play it. Here you go, it's embedded just below, it's a short little thing to click through, it'll take you a minute or two:

How was that? Good, right? If you only made one cup of tea you should go back and play it again, you won't properly get the joke otherwise. It's a good joke, imo!

Anyway, yes, it's been great to see responses in the runup - the Reddit AMA Terry did had a bunch of people asking or referencing the game, it's nice to see how it's sunk into the pop culture. To see streamers streaming the game too, playing it really fast and singing a little tea-themed song while they play. It's a weird thing, making tools - you have these feelings of pride and accomplishment, but over things that other people made, that are fundamentally not something you would have made. It's a very good feeling. I wonder if I'll see even more people posting about it after the launch?

I should also say: I'm proud of A Proper Cup Of Tea being included in the collection because the collection is the result of recoding the games so they all work from within the same codebase, they're all maintainable together and not a disparate collection of .exes that work or don't work under different circumstances. So it wasn't a case of plopping a web browser in there to make the game playable, but reimplementing it in a new language. Which is something I worked hard to make possible! A design goal when I was making Downpour was to allow people to take the games and do things with them outside of the contexts and tools that I provided. So you can export games from the app, and they are a html file, a folder of images, and a data.js file. That data.js file contains a big JSON blob containing all of the game data, in vaguely human readable format. So what Terry did was he wrote his own parser for that format, he positioned images and text in the correct places as that file specifies. He told me it was "not too painful"*. A proud moment to hear that! And also a reminder that maybe I should document the format properly so some of the corners that are a little more cryptic make sense (for the record, b_c is border colour and bg_c is background colour).

And then of course, Terry has done the work to make this a proper release - and that means that he's added controller and Steam Deck support, and he's added localisations into a ton of languages. So now I can see what a Downpour game feels like when you're using a controller. This is also the joy of making tools - doing hard work, in the hopes it will pay off in an unknown way in the future. Making something rich, and leaving all these loose threads that someone can hook into later on and build it out in ways you wouldn't anticipate.

Anyway - the collection just came out, go buy it. If only for Tiny Heist, which is pretty addictive. Here's a big thing to click:

* I checked this quote with Terry on Discord:

So, yeah, on the record: it was delightful.