Gee, Tea, Eh, Seven?

UNDER CONSTRUCTION - MESSAGE FROM THE DEVELOPER: Wow, you're early. This page will evolve over time.

If you're here - that's INCREDIBLE, really. you're one of the earliest souls interested in the development of this title, driven by a single indie rookie developer who will put in his 100% and more to make this a fun, meaningful and extremely value-for-money and value-for-TIME experience. Thank you. 
Gee, Tea, Eh, Seven is an upcoming open-world bubble tea chain management simulator... on one level. Leave behind the trappings of your stores any time to advance your upstart brand's growing presence -- through all means available to you, including sabotaging rival outlets, disrupting deliveries, and, uh, incapacitating staff.

Whether you choose to grow your dominance through hard work and mastery, or ruthlessness and violence, don't feel bad for the competition. After all, it is they who struck the first blow, and laid low your father's sprawling boba team empire and over ten of your family members in one single, fateful stroke.

REVENGE IS A CUP OF BUBBLE TEA, BEST SERVED COLD

As Seven, the protagonist and sole survivor of your family, your goals are clear: first amass enough influence, wealth, and muscle -- then attempt to uncover the identity of your family's aggressors, and exact your sweet revenge. Or deliver them to justice and a fair trial. Your call. I'm not your father.

PICK THE JUST DESSERTS

The game's mechanics will include:

• A fully-functioning customer/NPC system with persistent, roaming customers, loyalty levels, and preference matching
• Semi-accurate bubble tea brewing mechanics
• Automation and employee systems to build up towards
• Vehicles that you can hijack off the road - or legally purchase, of course, with your hard-earned money. Do note this will turn the drivers aggressive.
• Weapons, ranging from disruptive melee (umbrellas, kicking, punching) to theme-appropriate (bubble tea "grenades with various effects - from recipes that you discover!), to automatic rifles, explosives (gas canisters) and car-mounted cannons
• Day/night cycles
• Seasonal cycles may be included in a later update.

BECOME PART OF OUR STORY

Join our community (Discord, ideally!) or reach out on any platform to start a conversation if you wish to chat! You would probably end up shaping how the game - and even franchise, for this is what I intend to do for the rest of my life (however much I have left of it!). 

We will eventually also do fun stuff like record fictional radio shows to play on vehicles, put your funny audio recordings in (bonus points if you suit an existing NPC), etc, and maybe even get the chance to work alongside qualified (and paid professionals). You'll be credited, of course.

Additional scope for the full gameWe've got a tight timeline to hit and want a presentable standard of gameplay and polish. That said, the goal is:

• A sprawling city with (eventually) five distinct zones
• Fully working traffic and pedestrian systems, including the ability to enter (and maybe race...) a variety of vehicles
• Narrative arc that spans at least 12 core missions 
• An initial 15 sidequests with meaningful rewards to advance or modify gameplay
• Satisfying progression both in combat ability and expansion (or should we say restoration...) of your empire
• Full Steam Achievement integration encouraging multiple playstyles for replayability 
• Comedic, sometimes nostalgic callout moments, but let's not forget...
• Hopefully some touching / thought-provoking moments
• The ability to prioritize (and conversely deprioritize) gameplay elements that you may not like (combat-focused vs simulation-focused)
• Hopefully some 20 hours of gameplay EXCLUDING the endgame and open-world scenarios

Key polish areas

The screenshots and artwork you see right now are not indicative of the final product. We intend to dedicate the entirety of later months to polishing, meaning we're pushing really hard to improve and perfect the gameplay aspects early.

• Optimization to perform on a wider variety of rigs. Playtest stage will help a LOT with this!
• Lighting and color-grading - we know the colours look a little one-note right now. Honestly, we are learning every day about this topic and may eventually consult an experienced art director on how to NAIL lighting in our project. The day/night cycles make this doubly (or quadruply) tricky - but we'll get there.
• Game feel - feedback should be visceral or satisfying depending on which pillar of gameplay you're pursuing at the moment.
• Community feedback - Avid fans of both genres - open-world and simulator (and even cozy) will have invaluable feedback we NEED. Be sure to wishlist and hop into our Discord and/or Reddit channels to have your say, and to check in on the project status!

  POLICY ON USAGE OF GENAI ASSETS

  As tempting as it has been, we're standing our ground on this. Every single voice, artwork and asset in the game will be human-driven. Even if it does open it up to looking a bit more dated, a bit rougher, a bit less polished than what is genuinely very scary, good-looking GenAI products flooding asset marketplaces. I grew up a beneficiary of humans pouring their creative souls into what they loved. I really trust in us gamers to be able to appreciate the effort channeled into something. And so, while the edges of this game are indubitably going to be rough (I'm just one guy...!), please afford us a little wiggle room on account of this!
  
  (E.g. our current Steam page capsule was me painstakingly capturing in-engine moments and then slapping some cheesy filters via my phone's inbuilt camera app and cobbling it together in amateur free editing software. That blender part in the top left? Literally a part you can buy on Amazon, lol. Hardly professional - we'll do another pass closer to launch.) 
  
  I'm building up a capable roster of international talent for voices, etc, and am doing my own homebrew mocap + voices. We'll take the long way around; that's a guarantee. Even our SIGNATURE FONT was purchased after a custom contract negotiated with an Indonesian guy who's been churning them out for near a decade. That said, the line in the marketplace is becoming increasingly blurred, so if you spot something you know for sure is GenAI (creator account, etc), contact us and we'll track it down and put in the work to weed it out. Most of the assets so far are from 2021-2023, predating all this stuff, so I hope that's good news, and/or come from legit 3D artists with a history of quality work!
  
  (P.S. At some point we may even open community inclusions (voicelines, guests on radio shows, MUSIC) and some of these may be paid opportunities. Maybe later in the year once the core game is solid :))