Hello again,

Today I'm releasing Alpha 13, an exciting new build with lots of features that I worked this past month. I had set out to complete a rough preview of the basic gameplay loop, which as you remember from my previous post, was about 1) gathering resources 2) handing them in and cooking 3) in return, get personal benefits. I'll tell you all about it and some more, but first (as always), let me plug our Kofi. I know, you know the story, but I'll happily tell you again! 

Did you know I started making this game back in 2017? Did you know I'm self taught in all the skills that I have used in making this game, such as art, programming, design, and music? Did you know it's rare for solo developers to have this level of passion and vision to bring an innovative game to YOU without milking money from you for it? Did you know... well, you get the point.

So I'll get to the point too: Having money would be nice. I recently purchased a used standing desk because my back was hurting from slouching the past ten years. Also, Lumi (the game texturer) needs new computer parts. Like, a motherboard and CPU. Send help. Even just $10. If you have played the game it would be fair and I would remember your name fondly.

Okay, let's get to the update. I'll split it in two parts since there's some new cool stuff I wanna talk about at the end.

Rooms: Alpha 13 introduces the long-awaited game feature of personal rooms! Yes, now you can own your very own room, complete with a furniture placer and editor. You have a few objects you can unlock with tokens, which is a temporary (?) coin thing that you get once you finish your personal workweek - if you remember from the previous alpha, this is the weekly rotation counting your personal contribution to the foodraise - and this is now used to gather tokens, which can stack and be used to unlock things. Such as objects for your room. The idea was also that the room ownership was dependent on a weekly personal contribution, but since there aren't that many active players yet, I've allowed people to keep their rooms indefinitely. But, you know, each room is unique. A total of 30 rooms at the moment, with singles rooms at the bottom floor, and twin rooms at the top floor.

Another cool thing is that each room now has a label next to their door, with a custom title given by the room owner - as well as a public display of the personal contributions of all the room owners. So you will be able to see if someone has been slacking off and hogging room space without giving anything back.

Catalog: Anyways, that's all fun and games, but aside from rooms you can now also unlock a bunch of different things! Remember the background arts used for playercards? Remember the variety of hats everyone had? Now you can unlock them too! There is a button now in your student planner to open up the Collection catalog, which lists all things that are unlockable. Well, aside from the playercard stickers, since we decided they would be special ones that unlock through specific actions in the game - try catching a snail, for example.

So, suffice to say, there is definitely a personal incentive now to unlock things for yourself. The cooperative feeling is still there though, and I'm definitely planning for more group rewards in the future - such as, when the foodraise is finished, everyone gets a little decorative thing to place in the world. Something like that. I just really wanted the personal reward out of the way, since it's the clearest, easiest way to catch players and retain them. Giving them a goal. Having more players seems pretty useful for a social game, you know.

Spraying: In other news, I finally updated the interface for drawing sprays. You now have three different tools: A pressure sensitive brush, a fixed size pencil, and a dithering brush. Oh, yeah, and you can pick color using middle mouse button. Seems like a lot of people didn't realize that. You can also now toggle between using transparent background or a white background.

Skateboard: The skateboard is back, and you can find it on the campus grounds. Enjoy this previous alpha feature, now with the added feature of doing kickflips! Try clicking with your mouse.

And, of course, there are plenty of bugs and annoyances fixed. But, you know, being Alpha means that things are unstable, crashy, or savefiles can get corrupted. Remember to back up your savefiles, people! (Found in %appdata%\tko\saves on Windows - just paste this in the Explorer file path and you will get there).

Anyways, this concludes part 1 of the new features introduced in the new update, but there is one more thing that I'd like to talk about. 

Now, what's this? Merka appeared in our student rooms while we were hanging out! What's this all about?

Yeah, you might've noticed that Merka and Sera came to life during the last meetup, and went around judging everyone's rooms. Plenty of them were empty, but it seems like people appreciated being able to talk and interact with her. So.. as you can tell, a big new feature is that NPCs can come to life (or, controlled/puppeteered, if you want to break the fourth wall...). I'll speak more about this in the next blogpost part, since this mechanic changes a lot of things. Even the things that I planned regarding storytelling, as per that blog post - and I'm reconsidering those future plans to make a more unique storytelling experience. Anyways, look forward to Part 2.

Until then, have fun in the Kemoverse!