Steeped in Trouble

One small spoon. An unreasonable amount of responsibility.

Meet the silver spoon: defender of a very temperamental teacup, part-time newspaper carrier, occasional biscuit demolition expert, and the only kitchen utensil willing to confront an angry espresso machine.

Keep escaping tea leaves in check with steam, milk, and sugar. Read fortunes in the leaves you've defeated, upgrade your spoon, and discover what happens when the tea starts making its own rules.

Between cups, things get stranger. Run to the tea shop, deliver newspapers from a bicycle, launch a sugar cube at a wall of rebellious biscuits, or hop across a very busy road. Apparently, all of this is in the spoon's job description.

Simple arcade action, unexpected little adventures, and a generous helping of nonsense.

Play in your browser. The spoon will handle the paperwork.

▶ Play it in your browser

The first cup of a fresh pot: steam, milk, and sugar against the rising leaves. Prefer a still image? See a screenshot.

Status

Version 0.15.0 — Crossing the Street is the current release.

Crossing the Street: Why did the spoon cross the road? Nobody knows. But apparently, it's our problem now. Dodge traffic, survive an unreasonable number of motorists, and reach the tea shop in one piece. Like every arcade adventure, it's optional: skipping it costs nothing.

Another Day, Another Brew (0.14.0): Every ten normal cups, decide whether tomorrow starts with a gentler challenge or keeps building the Heat. Your upgrades, unlocked teas, fortunes, score, and arcade adventures carry forward either way. Days control difficulty. Chapters control content. See the Day testing guide for practice and qualification.

Already in the published game:

• Arcade defence around a living teacup whose tea swirls, ripples, and reacts to every shot.
• New in 0.13.0: Biscuit Breakout, an optional arcade game with a silver-spoon paddle, a sugar-cube ball, and a talking biscuit among the wall, and Karma, a rare protective fortune for your next cup.
• The Daily Pour, an optional bicycle paper route, and The Tea Run, a dash to the shop with jumps, slides, and occasional aerial nonsense. Both are free to skip.
• Compact / Full View, the Tea Break, recurring optional Tea Shortages, an optional Tea Run to the shop, Tea Cash, Easy Touch, and Auto Steam for a more relaxed pot. Classic Touch remains available.
• Five tea varieties, each changing how its round plays, from leaves that dart or change lanes to spice currents that sweep the cup. They arrive as you progress, in chapters: a steady first chapter to learn the cup, then a milestone to clear before the next brew is poured.
• Tea-leaf fortunes: the leaves you defeat are read at the end of each round, and the reading changes the next one. Tea and fortune combine.
• Spoon upgrades that last the whole pot, and combinations that sometimes brew something unexpected.
• Occasional bonus rounds and a very angry espresso machine.
• Procedurally drawn vector graphics and an adaptive soundtrack that follows the cup, and the tea.

See the changelog for what changed in each version.

How to play

• Tea leaves drift out from the centre of the cup. Each one that reaches the rim spills, costing one of your three cups. Lose them all and the pot runs dry.
• The spoon circles the rim and fires down the lane that glows. Steam is unlimited. Each round you also get a couple of milk pours, which push leaves back and slow them (strongly in front of the spoon, and briefly across the whole cup), and a couple of sugar bursts, which fire down three lanes at once.
• Clear enough leaves to finish the round. The leaves you defeated are then read, and their fortune changes the next round. Every other round you also choose an upgrade for your spoon, which lasts for the whole pot.
• Each round brews a tea, and each tea changes how the leaves behave. The cup announces it, and the side panel says what it does. New teas join the shelf as you progress.
• The game doesn't simply speed up every round. It moves on in chapters, when you've earned it.
• Now and then something different happens between cups. The side panel explains what to do, and none of it costs a cup.
• Experiment. The cup rewards curiosity, and some things are best found for yourself. The full rules are in docs/GAME_DESIGN.md, spoilers and all.

Controls

Action	Keyboard	Touch
Move the silver spoon	← → or A D	hold ◀ TURN / TURN ▶
Fire steam (hold for continuous fire)	Space	hold STEAM ↑
Milk: wash back and slow a wedge of the cup, and the whole cup briefly	Q, ↑, or M	MILK
Sugar: three-lane burst	E, ↓, or S	SUGAR
Pause / resume	P	main button
Start, next cup, new pot	Enter	main button
Pick a spoon upgrade	1 / 2	tap a card
Restart after game over	R	main button
Tea Shortage: Buy / Run / Skip	1 / 2 / 3	tap a choice
Tea Run: jump / slide	Space or ↑ / ↓	JUMP / SLIDE
The Daily Pour: Deliver / No thanks	1 / 2	tap a choice
The Daily Pour: aim porch / mailbox, throw	↑ / ↓, Space	AIM / THROW
Biscuit Breakout: Break / Leave them alone	1 / 2	tap a choice
Biscuit Breakout: move the spoon, launch the cube	← → or A D, Space	hold ◀ / ▶, LAUNCH
Crossing the Street: Cross / Stay	1 / 2	tap a choice
Crossing the Street: hop (hold to repeat)	↑ ↓ ← → or W A S D	▲ ◀ ▼ ▶ pad

Phones start with Easy Touch: hold the two steering pads, double-tap the cup for milk, and hold the cup for sugar. Auto Steam fires only at targets lined up with your spoon. Select Classic Touch for the buttons in the table; it also works with Auto Steam.

After round 9, once the first milestone is beaten, the tea tin may run out. Buy tea for 20 Tea Cash, fetch it in a roughly 34-second run, or skip for free. Buying and a successful run each add one sugar burst to the next normal cup; a successful run also earns 5 Tea Cash. Neither a failed run nor skipping costs a cup. Your spoon and next fortune wait for you.

Later in Chapter 2, the neighborhood may need a delivery spoon. The Daily Pour is a 30-second paper route: line the marked mailbox or porch up with your landing ring and throw. Each delivery earns 25 points, five or more earn 5 Tea Cash, and a perfect route adds a bonus. Skipping is free.

After round 19, the biscuits may revolt. Biscuit Breakout lasts up to 45 seconds with three sugar cubes: keep the cube bouncing off the spoon (its edges send it off at an angle) and break the wall. Each biscuit earns 10 points, breaking 70% earns 5 Tea Cash, and a clear adds 50 points. Losing cubes never costs a cup, and skipping is free.

After round 27, the spoon may decide to cross the road. Crossing the Street hops it one square at a time across five lanes of traffic, with a safe median halfway, to the tea shop opposite, in 40 seconds. A bump sends it back to the curb and costs one of three attempts, never a cup. Each new lane earns 10 points; reaching the shop earns 50 more and 5 Tea Cash, and 40 more without a bump. Skipping is free.

Now and then the leaves foretell Karma. For that one cup, a leaf that reaches the rim bounces back instead of spilling; if it comes back again it vanishes in a puff of steam. It still counts towards finishing the cup, but earns no points.

Options

• View chooses Compact or Full independently of controls and firing. Touch-capable devices default to Compact, with the HUD above the cup, reachable thumb controls, and a Pause / Menu button. The Tea Break holds pot details, tea and fortune explanations, settings, and controls. Required upgrade and Buy / Run / Skip choices stay beside the game; the leaf reading reveals before details become available. Full keeps the desktop sidebar. The choice is remembered; ?view=compact|full overrides it for one visit. You can select Compact even in Chrome's Desktop Site mode; the game cannot override that browser setting.
• Touch chooses Easy or Classic Touch; Auto Steam can be enabled with Classic Touch or a keyboard, and is always enabled with Easy Touch. Both choices are remembered. URL overrides for one visit are ?touch=easy|classic and ?autosteam=on|off (Easy Touch keeps Auto Steam on).
• Sound is off by default. Turn it on for synthesized sound effects and the adaptive soundtrack.
• Graphics switches between high quality (full-resolution tea with glowing currents) and low quality for older machines. You can also add ?graphics=low or ?graphics=high to the URL.
• Add ?seed=<number> to the URL to replay the same sequence of tea leaves.
• Add ?tea=<variety> to brew only one tea, for practice: green, earlGrey, chai, black, herbal, or house. A practice tea is available from the first cup.

Running locally

Prerequisites: Node.js 24 LTS (22.12 or newer also works) and npm, which ships with Node.js. The project works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

git clone https://github.com/libertaine/Steeped-in-Trouble.git
cd Steeped-in-Trouble
npm ci
npm run dev

Then open the URL Vite prints (normally http://localhost:5173/Steeped-in-Trouble/).

Development commands

Command	Purpose
npm run dev	Development server with hot reload
npm run build	Production build into dist/
npm run preview	Serve the production build locally
npm run lint	ESLint
npm test	Unit tests (Vitest)
npm run test:watch	Unit tests in watch mode
npm run test:browser	Browser smoke tests (Playwright) against a fresh production build
npm run check	Lint, unit tests, and build in one go

Before running browser tests for the first time, install the browsers:

npx playwright install chromium firefox

On Linux you may also need npx playwright install-deps (requires sudo).

To smoke-test the published site instead of a local build:

BASE_URL=https://libertaine.github.io/Steeped-in-Trouble/ npm run test:browser

On Windows PowerShell, run $env:BASE_URL="https://libertaine.github.io/Steeped-in-Trouble/"; npm run test:browser.

Project documentation

• Architecture: how the code fits together, and how to add enemies, weapons, and fortunes
• Game design: creative direction, the full rules (secrets included, so beware of spoilers), and future ideas
• Day testing: 0.14.0 approval, practice shortcuts, deterministic tuning and human testing instructions
• Crossing the Street testing: 0.15.0 approval, practice shortcuts, deterministic replay and testing instructions
• Development: the principles for working on the game
• Contributing: branching, checks, and releases
• Reference prototype: the preserved original and its differences from 0.1.0
• Changelog

Feedback

Bug reports and ideas are welcome in GitHub Issues.

License

MIT. All artwork is drawn procedurally with Canvas paths, and all sound is synthesized at runtime. The game uses no third-party art, fonts, audio, or runtime libraries, and it is not affiliated with or adapted from any commercial arcade game.

Support the Project

Enjoying Steeped in Trouble? If you'd like to help keep the kettle boiling, you can support development via PayPal.

Contributions are entirely optional. Playing the game, sharing it with others, and reporting bugs or suggestions are just as appreciated.