Hello hello hello! Exciting blog post today! But first... you know exactly what I'll mention. ''(  > w 0)

I work on this game full-time. That's pretty cool. But what's even cooler is that I listen to my players and want to keep working on this in my life. I also want to keep it from the depressing clasps of capitalism - that is, I don't want to maximize revenue and become a soulless corporate. So, if you like this game, I'd encourage you to become a funder or just buy the game on itch. It means everything to me.

And of course, there's the KemZrave 2 : a Taste of ACID. In about 24 hours, the event KemZrave 2 will begin. Four hours of electronic music played to the game, for the game, and for you, the players. I think that's unbelievably cool, and I'm planning many more events too. If you can't play the game then, that's completely fine, you can even subscribe to the youtube live stream and still hang out with us.

Anyways, Alpha 14, yes, let's get to it. It's more of a bugfix release, but I've managed to cram in some new stuff - the biggest thing probably being the little room objects to keep bug pets/plants.

Now you can get yourself an aquarium in two sizes, or a cage to hold a bug of your choice. If you have one of them on you, that is, from your gathering adventures. In addition, I also made the plant pots work and cleared up a distinction between the plants: there exists edible plants that you gain a harvest from (and can make soup from) as well as decorative plants that doesn't yield anything. In the room pots, you can plant decorative plants, that's it. But on dirt plots dug outside or in your private gardens, you can plant edible ones. So if it's in a pot, it only takes decorative plants.

Next up is a new item, the board - where you're able to draw/sketch whatever you want on a portable sketchboard and show it off to everyone. The catch is that it looks pixellated! Anyways, I'm not planning anything big with this at the moment, this is just a fun vanity item. That's basically all the new equipments I've added - just for fun and games.

Now, aside from these two public things, I've written cutscenes, added character, added dancing animations, added items and way more things that I'm saving to the rave. It basically took all my attention and focus to prepare for the big event - I want things to work, and so I did a lot of fixes and changes for that. For example, player models are hidden when the camera merged with them. I improved the room editor menu to be less annoying. I fixed the shovel not digging if you clicked too fast. I tweaked and improved the gamepad functionality. I added code to handle touch screen controls.

Wait, what, touch screen?

Android build: Over the past week I've been figuring out how to make the game run on android phones. I didn't quite had these plans when I begun development on this game (in fact, I wanted it to run on really old hardware - think ps2 - but obviously, that's a distant dream). Luckily, because the game uses Godot engine, exporting to android was extremely simple and straightforward, I don't think I spent more than a day or two making it run.

Now, to run well, that might be the difficult part - but thanks to my foresight of targeting low end hardware from the very beginning, using as little video memory and model complexity as possible, running it on android goes exceptionally well considering I didn't even optimize anything for the phone. That's even with my personal phone - Mi Mix 2, a model from 2018 - so in theory it should run just as well or even better with any phone made in the recent three years. For me at least, the campus area is the heaviest - but indoor areas take up way less resources and can consistently hit 60 FPS.

I'll be releasing a preview of the Android version of 0.14.2 mainly for gathering player feedback - I can not guarantee it will be as playable as the windows version - but the intention is to eventually release a phone version on the app store or something like that. I've never been much of a phone gamer myself, most of the games on there are trash. But since I view this game as more of a "3d chatroom", I found it a very interesting prospect to run it on the phone, since not everyone has time to sit down at the desktop.

Anyways, that's about it. After the rave I'll probably take a big look at more optimizations; not just for the phone but for a general weight loss. I also have plans to re-work the seed system so you can plant more stuff by yourself. And, of course, continue the NPC events that we've been holding and let it evolve naturally.

So feel free to check out the Kemoverse! Download the game, create your character, and see if you like the world.