Hello everyone again!

Hope your festivities and new years has been good! It certainly was a comfy time for us, and certainly a reflective time for me - It's been slightly over a year since I opened up the Kemoverse server for the public. What a ride of various events, development progress, and new players! Now, achievements are all well and nice, but as you can read in my previous devlog, I got a bit burned out, so I spent close to two months chilling out - I'll speak about what's coming this year in the next post, which may also be a narrated video. ^^

Before I go in the details of the new version, let me just remind you: we at Kemze (at the moment me and Lumi) are trying to start this studio up so we can completely focus on this project. I've worked on it basically full-time close to one and a half year. If you play the game, like it, and wish to see it develop in to something wonderful, then please consider becoming a funder (subscriber) over at our ko-fi for $10 a month. It's so little (basically a fast food outing) but so meaningful for us to keep going and for a high quality and meaningful creation to be done.

Anyways, here's Alpha 17, bringing some cool new stuff for you.

Cursors and interaction: I've been doing some work to fix up to improve the targeting/selection/menu systems - this update brings new cursors that will tell you much more clearly what items are interactables, which aren't, and which that you need to get closer to. In addition, the camera no longer moves to "look" at the object, preventing the camera jerking around and making it difficult to focus on moving objects.

Interface updates and Escape menu: The interface was cleaned up a bit and stuff shuffled around. Autotexts now has a global toggle, and the planner no longer has the settings menu - this has moved to Escape, which now shows the escape menu with a small blurb about us, a key guide (that is also shown when you are a new player), and the settings. The occupied mode toggle in the planner now hides all player nametags and disables the chat log, so it's effectively offline play (remember, the game can still be played offline to a degree), except it has all the server items and such.

Chat log updates: The chat log was improved and you can now select/copy text and click links by pressing Space (opening the chat input bar). The entire chat log can now be resized using the little grabber on the left. Also, the chat bubbles above players' head were much improved and the color now reflects the chosen color in the planner. Oh, and the text speaking speed was flipped in the settings, I did a mistake when making it.

Physics and graphics: I improved some physics code which should fix the annoying issues of glitching through the floor when walking in the sanctuary, or when climbing stairs and other special cases. I also improved the performance of loading areas, which should help the android users. Graphical differences between GLES2 and GLES3 were now fixed, and everything should have the same visual look in either version.

Story: A student NPC named Takar was added, but only available for a test quest that only I can trigger. He'll get introduced with a few other students later this year. Merka now also follows a 4-week reward rotation that gives unique combination of items, so work that foodraise to get yours. Finally, you might've noticed that the center tree of the campus now has a bunch of stones and plateau's surrounding it - they're lesson starters, so when Onrakh is asking you to select a lesson to start, you'll stand on the lesson you want to start. Lessons are basically multiplayer tutorials, but they're a work in progress right now, so they're coming later.

Anyways, this was most of the bigger features available in Alpha 17! Hopefully the new player experience and the overall gameplay/interface experience is improved and makes you look forward to the next one. I sure am excited for the plans this year!!

See you in the Kemoverse!