Hello again! It's time for yet another update blog where we'll talk about alpha 16! But first, a word from our sponsor--   Actually, I don't want to rely on sponsors, investors, or depend on other parties who might have influence over the future of the game, because I have an extremely strong vision and purpose for the game - It is a creative experience that I design, craft and offer to you, the player, and no one else. Do you like my vision and desire? I would greatly appreciate then if you could become a funder at our Ko-Fi so that I can be completely financially independent and keep working on this. And if not, don't worry, I'll be writing a post of more practical, non-money things you can help me with at a later date.

But first, Alpha 16 has had 5 patches, so let's go through what's new. There's a lot of new things!

New mushrooms: As Onrakh taught a few people in the mushroom lore event, there are now some new strange mushrooms to pick from the forest! And not only that, some of them even have a certain personality to them. Try planting a Ramoka, for instance, and you will soon see an elusive mushroom grow close to it! The others are simply mysterious, but who knows if the secrets will be revealed at some point in the future... but anyways, this was mostly to flesh out the forest with a small mechanic, as part of my effort to update the gathering mechanics. Next up, I will be focusing on updating the fishing system.

New NPC & Schedules: Ikt (pictured above) just arrived to the campus and now resides at the school library, which got a massive design overhaul and is now way more open for social activities than before. He spends most of his time in there, studying and sorting books, and maye sometimes go outside to do some field research. And speaking of outside: Onrakh, the teacher you've seen, is now often seen outside at the campus, encouraging you to work! So that's basically two new characters now living on the campus alongside with us, and more than that, they (and the existing ones, like Merka and Retakatekt) also have gained a more unique schedule: their behavior now varies thorughout our human week, so they're not stuck repeating the same thing every single day.

The library bookshelves also now feature a way to write and submit player-written books! For now, you can get books by contributing to the foodraise and talking to Merka. Using the books is really simple! Just click on the book in your inventory, double click a page, and start typing. You can then submit the finished book to the bookshelf, and other players will be able to read it. You should go there right now and check what books exist already! It's a very interesting read.

New player experience & Survey results: Remember all of those previous posts I talked about marketing and how important it is to get the new player experience down? Well, to put myself to work, I made a survey that analyzes the sentiment and experience of our current players. I had about 25 total answers, which is a pretty good result given that this is essentially alpha software! And the results show that, of those who play the game, they really value the effort we have put in the environments and the overall feeling that seeps through the game.

Of course, it is a biased analysis since I made it, but on the flip side it forced me to take a second look at the "new player experience" when a new player opens the game. I concluded the start was way too vague, unclear, and didn't reflect the game as it has grown with content and items since last year, when I constructed the cutscene. I let the cutscene be, but I have now added plenty of help to guide the new player - two official books (as pictured above) that explains most of what's available in the game, and added very obvious tooltips to guide you to the interface as you see it. I feel like it can still be improved, but this is already way better than what was before.

You can read the survey results here.

Pawprints and broom: You might've noticed that if you stomp around a location, it will leave a bunch of pawprints now, and what's more, you can actually clean it up! Head to the library, where Ikt has a broom nearby him, and you can then use it to sweep the pawprints away and keep everywhere clean. A good way to see if anyone has been around recently.

Permanent sprays: As part of fixing some bugs in the system involved in placing/modifying/removing network entities, I upgraded it so that things loaded from the server (graffiti, sticky notes, etc) can now be "Permanent" and unremovable. I applied it to the graffiti behind the school, which had hit a hard cap, but I fixed that, and they should all be visible now and unremovable as a testament to the past players who sprayed them there a long time ago. Kemoverse history (and memes) in the making! 

Decorations and Inventory bags: Smaller feature upgrade, but your equipment inventory should now feature bags so you can sort your equipment items. Hopefully this will help you out who have had trouble navigating tha mess! And also, I deemed decoration equipments to take up too much valuable space there, so I pushed them off to its own icon on the left. As you click on an item, you'll hold a little decoration box, and you can place the decoration anywhere in the world. As usual, other players can move them around in the same area, and can remove them, but can't take them to place elsewhere.

Performance optimizations: This is a big one. It was actually a spontaneous development from my side, because I got very frustrated at the poor performance of players loading in, and as a result I went through the effort of loading players and scenes through a threading model and using caches, reducing the gameplay lag by A LOT - the campus now basically loads instantly, players fade in with little to no hit on your FPS, and overall, the game just feels smoother. I'm extremely pleased with this development and as it turns out, it does help the Android build as well. Speaking about Android, I improved the navigation widget and fixed some other smaller annoyances. It's still pretty crashy, however, as is usual with alpha software. 

That's it for the game itself. I have one more news to share, and it's something beyond:

Kemze HQ: If you've kept an eye on the discord, you might've seen me mention the Kemze HQ map hosted in VRChat - an unfinished area mean to represent the virtual home of our studio that I made when I played regularly over a year ago. A few days back, I asked my 3d modeling friend to help me remake the room in higher quality, since I wanted to advertise the game more, and it seemed logical to do it in another game that is also focused on social gameplay.

While its reconstruction was underway, a member of the discord, Kryztel, suggested to create a Kemze group on VRChat and hold meetings there, and something clicked in my head - it's the perfect avenue for active or even passive advertisement! For example, I'd love to host a booth of the company, project, and with my virtual avatar and go all in the virtual realm! Not only because I played VRChat in the past, but because I have actually had thoughts about advertising the game in person at real life conventions - but I don't like my physical form too much, it feels a bit awkward, and VRChat just seems like the obvious right answer to this question. So, yeah, I believe this would be a worthy path to go along, especially since I basically have all the VR setup ready to go. Thank Nova I didn't sell it off to finance my big country move...

Here's the link if you're interested in signing up for future events and such: https://vrc.group/KEMZE.4666

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Anyways, as you can tell: I've been working my hardest to polish and improve the game, and it seems to be paying off with a slowly increasing devoted playerbase and I think it has a bright future ahead. Let's hope it goes well.

See you in the Kemoverse!