I ❤️ Tea Café : Remixable

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  Youtube Cover

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  Square Version

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  Standard Cover

Inspiration

We wanted to capture the energy of a Hong Kong tea café — fast, chaotic, and full of personality — and bring it into Meta Horizon Worlds. On top of that, we want to spread Hong Kong’s food culture by encouraging players to learn about signature dishes and even design their own virtual tea cafés. That mix of cultural flavor, playful speed, and creative remixing became the heart of the project.

What it does

Players step into a bustling Hong Kong tea café, racing to serve iconic bites before customers disappear. Random patrons spawn with order tickets above their heads, and players must quickly match the right food items to earn points. Each correct match adds +100, while mistakes deduct –50. With customers only sticking around for 8–15 seconds, accuracy and timing are everything. The constant back-and-forth of grabbing items under pressure creates the tension and fun at the heart of the loop. Beyond serving, players can customize and remix their own cafés — from layouts to menus — and share their creations with others.

How we built it

We developed the game in Worlds Desktop Editor, focusing on intuitive grab-and-serve mechanics and a playful art style. About 95% of the assets were created from scratch to be culturally specific and optimized for Meta Horizon Worlds. Only the characters/customers came from Mixamo, since custom character design would have taken significantly longer. Through several rounds of asset updates, we had to resist the urge to make every visual perfect and instead prioritize core gameplay first. After balancing performance with design, we got the game working.

Challenges we ran into

Collision & spacing Getting collision distances right and spacing furniture correctly was critical for the serving mechanic to feel smooth.

Physics performance Setting up food items with physics was trickier than expected. Physics improved realism but consumed too much computing power, making the experience unstable. A recent Meta update (disabling physics once items are grabbed) solved part of this, but fine-tuning still took time.

Item respawning Ensuring items reliably respawned in their original locations proved more complex than anticipated especially with physics and required extensive iteration.

Cross-platform balance Designing gameplay that was simple enough to work on both VR and mobile, yet still challenging and fun, was an ongoing balancing act.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Creating a fast, fun VR game loop that captures the chaos and charm of a real Hong Kong tea café.
• Building a cross-platform framework that makes remixing possible and expandable over time.
• Designing a culturally authentic experience that celebrates Hong Kong food and café culture — a niche rarely seen in gaming.
• Bringing a long-time dream to life using Meta Horizon Worlds, and proving that even small, culturally rooted ideas can thrive as immersive, shareable games.

What we learned

We learned that building a game is truly a 360° experience — from sound and visuals to spatial design, mechanics, and UI writing. As a tiny two-person indie team, we discovered how important it is to balance creativity with technical constraints, especially when designing for VR, mobile, and web. Small cultural details — like egg tarts or floor and wall patterns — became important anchors that made the game both authentic and relatable. We’re amazed at how much we accomplished in just one month, with one teammate contributing food items and AI assisting in development. Most of all, this project showed us the incredible potential of Meta Horizon Worlds as a platform for indie creators to bring even niche cultural dreams to life.

What's next for I ❤️ Tea Café : Remixable

We plan to expand the cultural and gameplay layers. For example, adding NPC gangsters who show up to collect protection rackets — giving players the choice to either pay them off with earnings or fight back with a butcher’s knife. This mechanic mirrors a uniquely Hong Kong cultural reference while adding tension and humor to gameplay. Looking ahead, we aim to grow the menu, add multiplayer teamwork, and launch remix contests so players worldwide can create and share their own versions of Hong Kong tea cafés.

Built With

• 3dsubstance
• cinema4d
• horizon
• photoshop
• typescript