Patch 0.7.3 is here! Discover Tournaments, CremaCorp, mouse control and more!
over 4 years ago – Wed, Jul 07, 2021 at 03:48:26 AM

Hello there Tamers! The second content update of the Cipanku cycle is here to put a bow on the weeb era, so here’s a more detailed look at some of the new features and content added in this update! Be aware that it will contain spoilers about the patch, so read at your own discretion.

While this update, lovingly called CU2, doesn’t uncover any new Temtem or island, it does add some spicy content to the roster: you’ll get to unlock a new building in Cipanku, experience new Quests and gears, a lot of QoL changes and features such as Tournaments and playable musical instruments.

Let’s dig in!

Welcome to our offices!

You’ll be able to walk into Crema Corp in this update, and meet some of us working there. In fact you will help out in various stages of game development, starting from the simplest of tasks and going all the way up to the CEO. But don’t worry, you’ll be compensated for your work in the shape of gears (everyone knows game devs don’t actually get paid, duh).

We’ve carefully recreated the actual Crema offices, and the same goes for our characters, who’ve been hand-made to resemble each one of us. Please take lots of selfies and show us! As you can imagine, this bit is really emotional for the team and we hope you’ll enjoy this opportunity and get to know us better.

Tournaments: time to prove your competitive worth

You read that right! We’re deploying in-game Tournaments now, and they’re quite important so take a seat.

Tournaments will be a weekly occurrence, initially on Sundays. There will be three tournaments each Sunday, spread across different time zones so our Tamers can choose the one that suits them best (or, you know, enlist in all three, who are we to tell you how to live your life). Each tournament will have infinite brackets of 32 players each. These brackets get created as people join in and can be infinite. Brackets will factor in the TMR of the Tamers inscribed, and will designate leagues based on the average TMR in the bracket. There are currently four leagues, and rewards get better as the league gets higher.

Joining a Tournament is completely free of charge, too! All Tamers who win at least one match will get a Pansun reward, more or less juicy depending on their performance. But this is about winning. We’ve tried to make the winning prizes appealing and worthy, so the winner of each tournament will get an exclusive in-game title that is unique to each month, and a winner medal that can be displayed on the Tamer Info.

We’ll be holding our first in-game tournament tomorrow, Wednesday July 7th at 12 am PST / 7 am UTC. The whole Crema team will be watching, so consider it a grand event! We’ll also hold the 3 usual Tournaments on Sunday, but this one’s special. We encourage everyone to give it a try, and wish you all the best of luck!🏅

Competitive improvements

To match the sparkly new Tournaments, we’ve also made some improvements to competitive playing. To begin with we’ve tweaked some timers, and we’ve changed the way Gears were placed in PvP squads: from now on, you’ll place the Gears in slots instead of on Temtem. This allows you to have different Gears on the same tem depending on what Competitive Squad you’re using. This was a long-time request from the competitive community, and it involved changing a lot of the original system of competitive squads, gears, etc.

Apart from competitive in itself, we’ve added a couple things to Spectating to really breathe some life into it: your spectators will actually be in the very Battlezone with you, and you will see and hear their emotes in real time (you can disable the emoting if it gets too distracting). We believe this will make tournaments more exciting and give it an actual sense of unicity and eventfulness. Also, the Spectate button now changes in real time so you never miss your favorite people’s matches.

We’re very eager to see how these changes impact the competitive and tournament scene, and as usual, we hope you’ll like them and will be watching out for your reactions!

Get ready to rrrrumble!

Are you feeling it, Mr. Krabs? We’ve put a lot of care and attention into vibration and Haptic feedback so our players can feel Temtem on a different level. Haptic feedback was uncharted territory for us, and it gave us a lot of room to play around, and we’ve tried our best to include it seamlessly so PS5 players will feel right at home in Temtem. I promise you will feel Techniques on a new level now. Of course, we’ve added vibration to a whole lot of features, so you should experience it for yourselves. And, because we know rumbling and vibrating can be overwhelming at times, both Haptic and vibrations can be turned off from Settings.

Also, while we’re on the topic of control, we’ve made Temtem entirely playable with a mouse! We understand Temtem sessions can get long, we understand some people work better with a mouse or have conditions preventing them from using a controller or a keyboard for a long time, and we understand some MMOs feel better with a mouse. All in all, we believed that giving our players this choice was well worth the resources and will provide everyone some quality of life and comfort.

Let’s get musical 🎶

We’ve added a functioning musical instrument as a reward for a very musical quest. It even has scales and a very focused piano face. While this might come off as surprising, one of our focuses in Temtem is, and has always been, social elements, and we highly value what they add to the game, even if it’s not traditional gameplay per se. It’s finally time to talk to Damián and finish the Musical Crystals quest! 

We’re jumping into the club of games who have playable musical instruments, and as such, and for the arts, we believe this requires an exception in one of our usual policies. This is why, using macros to play the Toy Piano, and only that, will be allowed. Please don’t attempt to use macros for anything outside of the Toy Piano, as it’s a bannable offense. Of course, we’re super eager to listen to your creations, covers and reinterpretations, so please make sure to post them where we can see them!

Smoother running

Temtem will run smoother and perform better on most machines from this update onwards! For those interested, here’s why:

Up until now, the game would load mostly anything it could use at some point, regardless of whether Tamers were going to see it or not. One of our long-planned, pending tasks (scheduled for version 1.0, in fact), was to redo this so only the essential would initially load, and everything else would only load when needed, dynamically.

We wanted to wait until 1.0 to tackle this because it’s infinitely easier to design and implement when the game is already “finished” and everything is laid out, instead of adding and retouching it with each update. To top this off, Unity has historically had a lot of issues with systems like these, so we wanted to wait as much as we could to ensure our engine version would be well prepared for the change.

But this was the cause for both the long initial loading time and some of the black screens that happened when changing scenes (including the Co-op ones!). Due to how much Temtem has changed and grown from our initial standpoint, this situation has escalated to a point where we simply couldn’t wait until 1.0 to introduce these changes, so we’ve gotten down to it. We started internally implementing this change in recent patches, and we tested it out with Technique animations even as far back as PS5 launch. With this patch today we’ve applied this change to many more areas in the game, so it should be fairly noticeable and we’ll continue adding improvements and bettering performance in future patches.

Tl;dr: Temtem go brrrr.

Of course, this isn’t everything! Read the full patch notes here to check out the full list of bugs we’ve fixed, the (few) balance changes, and all the other stuff in this patch, like the split of Telomere Hacks or the changes to PvP timers.

We hope you enjoy this patch, and see you soon!

The process behind the latest Backer Temtem and route!
almost 5 years ago – Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 12:43:49 PM

Hello Tamers! 

We’re here today, as is our custom, to share some insight about the process behind the latest Breeder (remember: the Backer tier, not Mimit) additions to the world of Temtem!

For those unfamiliar with the term, Breeder Backers are Kickstarter Backers whose unique perk was to design a Temtem line, and a route. Follow the links to read more about previous Breeder tems and routes! The Cipanku update gave us the popular Pupoise and Loatle, while patch 0.7.2 granted us access to the beautiful Gardens of Aztlan.

Let’s start with the tems!

Pupoise & Loatle

These Digital wonders were recently added with the Cipanku update, and always make an appearance when asking the community about  their favorites. They were first brought to the table by our Breeder Tutorxic, who approached the design team with the idea of a two-stage Temtem based on turtles, with a voodoo doll theme.

There was a lot of initial debate about the typing for these two: the final stage had to be a Mental Tem because of the voodoo theme, the floating and the psychokinesis. We weren’t sure, however, about the typing for the initial stage, because it didn’t fit the Mental type, and also because there was a drastic change between both forms. We learned that one of Tutorxic’s favorite types was Digital and we took that route, because Digital tems offer unmatched design freedom and allow us to justify huge changes such as this. 

Thus, the first stage was written down as Digital/Nature, while the final stage was Digital/Mental, with some shared elements like the stick, the glow of the shell and the horns.

The design was a bit on the open end of things, and the original references required a lot of adaptation to fit in the Temtem world. For the first stage, Tutorxic wanted the tem to hold a stick in its mouth, and wanted to see that same stick in the final stage, floating by effect of psychokinesis. 

This is the batch of possible approaches created to see which one scratched the itch better. We followed the stick-in-mouth perspective, but also explored other options with 100% less stick. It was, nevertheless, up to the Backer’s final verdict. 

Following Tutorxic’s feedback, and a couple of iterations later, we went with the head of #5, the body and eyes of #2, and the stick from #3. And that’s how the little dude was born. Here’s a rough sketch from the time, and the final concept turnarounds:

Similarly, these were the initial designs we created for its final stage. The color palette changed to accommodate and better represent the Mental type. 

Tutorxic wanted to try a mix betweent #2 and #4, while keeping the stick placement from #1. He really liked the idea of a doll bursting at the seams, with the stuffing spilling out, so the final design incorporated that bit. 

Here’s the big dude’s final sketch and concept turnarounds:

As for their names, we started from Tutorxic’s initial desire of having them be based off Tortoise or Turtle. The first stage had to cover a cute word or theme, while he wanted the final stage to include “Loa”, the good spirits of Voodoo in some regions. We were trying to avoid having another tem name start with “Tu-“, because the Tuwai line has completely monopolized that syllable. After a lot of brainstorming and back and forth, we reached Pupoise (puppy + tortoise) and Loatle (Loa + turtle).

The choice of Luma colors followed a very simple decision process: Tutorxic gave us free way for it, we tested some palettes and really liked the way purple looked. So we gave them purple lumas. Sometimes game dev really is as simple as that.

The Gardens of Azatlan

This new route, accessible from Tucma, was thought up by Soma, the same Breeder who conceived the Volarend line. To get to the Gardens of Azatlan you’ll need to take the new elevator in the Tucma Airport. This elevator, that didn’t exist before and was added for the specific purpose of this route. will take you down to a lower level, a new zone that stands just above the mist, closely surrounded by it.

This is how the entryway was designed: 

And this is its final look in-game:

For the first part of the route Soma wanted a crystal path surrounded by trees. The one quirk? He wanted the path to be multicolored. Just like what happened with the snow in Kilima peaks, it was a first for us and for Temtem. The natural inspiration behind this part are the coastal and swampland areas of Louisiana, in the US, but with a crystal aesthetic. The trees resemble the great swamp cypresses that grow from the murky water, and flank the boardwalk path with their lovely colors. Whether there’s a special meaning to the shape of the path or not is a mystery. 

As you walk amidst the floating lights and the falling petals, and across the crystal patch, you’ll reach a more open zone. The highlight of this part is the tall tree standing on top of the hill, crystallized like the rest but with a greater amount of detail. A similar tree has been growing in Soma’s backyard ever since he was young. You’ll be able to battle Soma there!

And this is the final in-game look: 

That’s it for this entry on Breeder content! We hope you’ve enjoyed seeing the before and after of the new route and tems.

We also have a bit of glum info to share on this matter: due to unfortunate and unforeseen circumstances regarding the design process, we will not be moving forward with the tem and route from the remaining Breeder Backer. For the past two years we’ve been trying to reach a point where both parties were satisfied, but ultimately we’ve been unable to and now there’s simply not enough time to continue with the process. After talking it out with the Backer, we’ll take over and go with one of our internal designs to fill that Temtem slot and route. This also means that there’s only one Tutorxic's Breeder route left now. Please look forward to it!

As for us, we’re working hard on the latest update of the Cipanku cycle. It will include new quests, new gears, interesting QOL improvements, and if you play with a controller you might wanna hold it tighter after the patch 👀 With every step further in the game we also get one step closer to Switch and Xbox SXS launch, so we'll continue working hard to bring Temtem to all of our Backers as soon as possible.

See you next time and Temtem up!

Flowers in full bloom: discover Cipanku, lairs and more!
almost 5 years ago – Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 11:53:27 AM

The wait is over, and Cipanku is finally here! Behold the wonderfully pink new island, and everything new it brings to Temtem. Want to take a quick look at it? Check its trailer:

Please, be aware the trailer contains spoilers about new Tems, techniques, and story bits. If you want to do a blind run for Cipanku we recommend not watching it.

 Temtem: Cipanku Trailer 

Cipanku comes bearing the usual set of new tems, techniques, gears, traits… but it also holds the key to a couple of very relevant new features, including Lairs and the first Mythical Temtem. This is also only the first step on the Cipanku cycle, so expect a couple more surprises later down the road. Let’s dig in!

The first Mythical Temtem

To meet the first Mythical Temtem ever, you’ll need to go through its Lair first. Lairs are a totally new, highly cooperative feature that will require you to form parties with other players to raid a weekly, randomly-generated dungeon, and face the first ever Mythical Temtem. You’ll need to hone not only your Temtem skills, but also your communication and teamwork, as lairs are best experienced as a 5-people party, and require a minimum number of 3 people.

During a lair, you’ll have to progress through battles and actions, and choosing well is extremely important. You’ll earn and spend the new, and Lair-only resources, Jewels and Synstars, each of which serve a different purpose. Every team member will walk a different path, but resources are shared and the actual key to success, as reaching the end of the lair is only the first part of the activity.

Taking your perfect tems and x99 Super Balms with you is out of the question: you’ll start with an empty team and backpack, and will need to form your squad along the way, with the Tems and resources you can find during the lair. You will not be able to carry said resources and tems outside of the Lair, and you’ll start each Lair anew. What happens in the Lair, stays in the lair.

If you and your teammates do well, and manage to reach the end while also fulfilling the requirements, you’ll get the chance to face the Mythical and battle them 1 on 1 for very juicy rewards and of course, the opportunity to take the Mythical home, in portable form: an egg. There are no limits to how many Lairs you can do during the week, and you’ll get rewards each different time, but you can only obtain one Mythical egg per week.

Mythical tems, given its unique rarity, are not tradable nor breedable, so it’s time to lair up. Apart from this, they will work like every other Temtem.

This is the first activity in Temtem that requires more than a single partner, and also the first Mythical Temtem we show to the world. We hope you find it stimulating and fun, and we’re very eager to hear your thoughts on it!

Cipanku, land of technology and Digital tems

Cipanku is home to the first Digital tems you’ll be able to tame. Discover this new type, the first (and only one so far) to be weak to itself! Of course, it also comes with its own Traits, Techniques and Luma, and we hope you find them a place in your heart and in your team. You’ll be able to tame 4 tems you already know, and discover 24 brand new entries for your Tempedia.

On the topic of highly requested stuff, after finishing a side quest in the city of Neoedo you’ll be able to unlock the Teleport, an example of the extremely advanced Cipanki technology. Pay a fee and travel instantly to a lot of places, including key locations and story hotspots. Trips to any Narwhal airport are free!

The new Teleport feature has also prompted us to take another look at travels in the Archipelago, so now you’ll be able to check the Archipelago Map. You’ll be able to check the Archipelago Map from the map at any given time, and it will also be used to select your Teleport destination if it’s on another island. It’s spoiler-free, too! 

Features to make your life better

You’ll also be able to finally rename Temtem in Cipanku, regardless of whether they have you as the OT or not. You can now also change your character’s pronouns.

We’ve also added one of the most requested QOL updates: you’ll now be able to engage in NPC and wild battles while looking for a Competitive match, and not get pulled out of the queue. Forget being unable to TV train, Freetem, or simply wander around while waiting in queue. If you are in a battle when a Competitive match is found, the battle will be put on hold and you will return to it after leaving the Competitive match.

And, by popular demand, filters in the Temdeck will no longer disappear after you open a Temtem’s details, and the Temdeck will open on the same page it was closed. The Backpack is also getting a neat new tab, called Performance, that will hold your TeloHacks, fruits, etc. You’ll also get notifications when an egg has been laid over at the Breeding center so you can go pick it up presto and start hatching right away. Oh, and listen well while you play, because there’s sound and music improvements too: luma sounds have been reworked, and it’ll be a different sound depending on if it’s a tamed Luma or a wild Luma. In addition to that, the Tamer battle theme has new, fresh music variations per island!

And hear me out on this one: Temtem (and Tamers) now leave footprints when they walk on certain surfaces, and there’s many different kinds of little, superb Temtem footsteps. Day=made.

And more!

We’ve improved the onboarding experience new players get when joining Temtem for the first time, so it really is the best moment to hop on! You will now get more experience from defeating wild Temtem, and we’ve decreased the experience needed to level up, so you will be able to level up faster. We’ve also taken a look at the first island’s balance and introduced a new farming zone before the dojo, so newbies can stand a stronger chance against Sophia and experience the Temtem world in a more welcoming manner.

There’s, of course, a lot more than this: the level cap has increased, balance changes have happened and bugs have been fixed. But that’s a story for the complete patch notes, which you can go read right now or, you know, just jump into Cipanku and discover it yourself!

If you don’t have Temtem yet, you can purchase it on Steam and the PlayStation Store.

Temtem up!

A first look at Cipanku, the current status of development, and more!
about 5 years ago – Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 12:45:36 AM

Hello tamers! We hope that you've had a good start to 2021 and that, whatever you're doing in this weird year, you're having a blast doing it.

We're writing today to share some insights on the current state of the project, our hopes for the future, and some questions you've been sending our way.

First and foremost, let's talk about the elephant in the room: is our current roadmap up to date? Unfortunately, and as most of you know already, it is not.

We made the current roadmap right after our Early Access launch in February of last year—before we knew the sort of year 2020 was going to be—and while we've always stressed the fact that the roadmap was not set in stone, it certainly doesn't match reality anymore. We've had to twist and change our plans quite a few times since the EA launch, sometimes because of good stuff, other times not so much. I'm sure you've all seen this happen a lot this year, and we understand this is disappointing for everyone (including us!). We're really sorry.

You've been asking us for an updated roadmap, and we've been thinking hard about it, but in the end, it just doesn't feel like it would do justice to our vision for Temtem, and to you. Closed dates add a lot of pressure and put another load on our shoulders, and we want to focus on delivering the highest quality content possible, and ship it when it’s ready.

Rest assured, though: we’re still going to deliver everything on the original roadmap PLUS unexpected in-between content to keep things fresh between big updates! You've already experienced some of these unexpected features like the latest content update, which included fishing, dojo rematches, postal service, and wishing wells.  None of these features had been announced beforehand, and many weren't even planned, but looking at user feedback we believe they were necessary even if they meant a change in plans. We cannot blindly keep on developing the game we had in mind at the beginning of all this. New islands are important, but we believe that so is providing new content in-between. We hope these little surprises help make the wait between big updates a little more fun.

We want you to know what’s coming, but we want to make sure that we have the ability to make decisions based on giving players the best game possible versus making hard choices to hit our previously set dates. From now onwards, please take the current roadmap as a way to see all planned features in one convenient place.

Although we will continue working with the previous goals in mind, including the upcoming console launch and game completion, we'd rather keep deadlines internal only. That way we can continue working with a tight aim in mind, while knowing that our playerbase is aware that these deadlines are no longer solid and require a broader range of expectations. We're still working hard as ever, but we also want to avoid further disappointment to our community.

As for the often questioned “Cipanku when”, we’re currently targeting the end of March/beginning of April. There are some unknown features, things that will surprise and delight you, and we hope that. in retrospective. the wait will be worth it. We’ve currently halted all bug fixing to focus entirely on testing out the new content, but this also means some bugs might take a while to get fixed. We apologize for the inconveniences this might cause.

We know this isn't a fun convo, and we're sorry it's been such a long slab of text. Thanks for putting up with it, and for being patient while we found the right words. We wanted to reward your patience and support, and to balance all this boring news, with the very first look at ✨Cipanku✨:

Pretty, huh? This long-awaited island also includes some spicy new tems that will surely change the dynamics of the game up until now and a very long list of balance changes that have taken your feedback into account on top of what was internally planned. Some QOL changes heavily requested by the community (hello teleport!) are also on their way. And it's full of anime references, winks to pop culture and tons of little details that will be the delight of all us weebs.

Thanks, as ever, for your continued support and understanding. We'll do our best to continue progressing and improving with our help, and you can always reach out to us at our Forums, Discord Server, and socials.

In the mood for that Backer trophy? 🏆
over 5 years ago – Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 01:59:30 AM

Hello fellow backers!

This is just a teeny tiny update, just in case you didn't get our memo via mail: we have finished yet another digital reward, and this time it's one for your crib. Get that Backer swag everywhere.

The Kickstarter Backer trophy is ready to ship and has already been delivered to your mail addresses. In case you had forgotten about it, it used to look like this:

But has undergone some major glow-up:

And if you thought it'd stop there, try interacting with it, see what happens 👀

If you backed Temtem Maniac or above you should've received it! So please check your mail (including the spam folder) or https://temtem.backerkit.com/, under digital downloads, to fetch the codes. 

Please remember that if you ordered a console version of the game, you are receiving the codes now too. You can hold onto them and redeem them when the game is launched in your console of choice. These don't expire.

Good luck re-decorating, and see you soon with more news!