Hello hello!

Here's a quick interim build of Kemoverse Online, a sort of "last build before I move" - next few weeks are going to be busy! - but before I go in depth, let me once again plug our kofi - and it's the usual: subscription or one-off donations are highly appreciated. Let me also plug some other links here if you wanna support us in other ways. We sell a Kemze mousemat here. I also sell my personal albums (physical releases too!) right here. And, of course, if you've played Kemoverse Online for a substantial amount of time and feel like we could deserve some money for all that playtime - you can just buy the game. It's free, but you can tip us. You know, once the game is out of alpha, it's not going to be free anymore.

Anyways, let's recap what's changed.

Outfits/Uniforms: There are now standard uniforms and outfits available for both races. There's a school outfit, a kitchen outfit, an outside outfit and a hunting outfit. Here's the thing: they are forced on you. I've implemented a big part of the mechanic, so let me explain how it works: at every next monday after the campus' foodraise; the campus enters a "workweek" - every student is forced back in to these uniforms and are not allowed to wear their casual clothes. To be able to wear them again and be done with your workweek, you can do either two things:

1) You can contribute enough food to a certain percentage threshold as the server keeps track of your personal contributions. You can check the completion percentage of this on the left slip of papers near the collection boxes. Once you pass it, you may wear clothes as you wish.

2) You can contribute food, together with everyone else, to fulfill all the foodraise sliders (that you can see in your student book). When all the sliders are done, everyone will be able to wear their casual clothes until the next workweek reset.

Note that you can also switch your outfits even outside of the workweek, just check out the bottom menu "look".

So basically, it's a casual mini-system that wants to motivate you to collect food together. It's not that important, and so the thresholds are pretty low at the moment, but I have bigger plans - I'm planning to tie this system in to the personal dorm room system. You might've noticed the "room" tab at the bottom, right? Well, the idea is, with enough work every week, you will own a little student dorm room that's in the student houses. A real, physical room, with your name next to the door and all. I didn't have time to add it yet, but I'm certainly planning to!

Targeting: Another thing I changed was how to target and interact with things, since the design of it so far has been kind of confusing. Even confusing me at times, having to double, triple, quadruple click to do what you want... Well, it's more straightforward now. Hover over things, and if you can interact with them, you'll see the outline. Click once, and the menu pops up. Admittedly, this whole targeting system needs a thorough check with a game controller, and that's definitely the plan. But for now, this makes life a little bit easier for PC players.

Performance improvements & bugfixes: Yup yup. Loading players and entities (plants, sprays, etc) should be way, way, WAY faster now. It's quite technical, but suffice to say, the game was doing a lot of extra work for nothing. I squashed some bugs that caused that, so hopefully it runs a bit better. Other than that, I've fixed some other annoying bugs: characters now actually have working sliders (I've yet to add dog ones, sorry, just give me a bit more time!) and the music visualizer in the bottom left is more accurate. I made the savefile system save to a temporary file first, so any risk for savefile corruption should be completely gone by now.

Wiki: Through some nice collaboration between players since I opened it, the Kemoverse Wiki has gained some nice, chunky updates. There's some cool information there now about various topics, and even scripting - ways to automate your character's behavior in the game. Not more to say.

UI updates: I updated the student planner a bit, adding some fancy graphics and clarified what tasks to actually do in the game. Just some maintenance to make it more intuitive for new players... I also locked various things behind an unlockable wall, to prepare for eventual unlocking mechanics at a later point. Sorry, can't pick new hats! But you'll keep the ones you've chosen for now.

And, well... that's actually it! For these two weeks, I just wanted to clear up some technical problems and smoothen out the new player experience, as well as adding a preview of the workweek system. Seems to be slightly motivating already, which is great to see! But its not even its final form... you'll see an even better, more fleshed out, and more rewarding gameplay later on. Just need time and all.

Speaking of, what's next? Well, as said earlier, the next few weeks are going to be busy and silent since I will be physically moving countries with all of my belongings. This is no easy task, you know. Well, once that's done, I'm back in full force and will try to get a preview of the room owning system down and start preparing for the next big event. It's going to be awesome, you know. And I want more players. Big dreams. 

We'll get there... together, in the Kemoverse.