Next Alpha update will be delayed 🌿
about 7 years ago – Sat, Mar 30, 2019 at 02:12:44 AM

Today we bring you some sad news: Alpha 0.2, aka the Omninesia content patch, is going to be delayed.

Our initial plan was to release the new content on late April but unfortunately we're not going to be ready to meet that deadline.

Why did this happen?

Temtem is a very ambitious and huge game. As we talked in a previous update, our vision for the game increased with the Kickstarter success. We want to create the perfect experience for all our backers and in order to do that we knew we needed to increase our team.

Over these past months we almost doubled our size. Some of the hirings have been very challenging and we also had some problems that prevented us to do the hirings earlier.

That situation led us to almost delaying the first Alpha launch back in November. We suffered a lot to launch in time and we ended up cutting some features from it (like the house interiors and the Aguamarina caves that came in a later patch). 

So, we're super sorry to announce it, but we failed to fulfill our previsions and we have to delay the patch. This time we don't want to rush things, cut features or put more pressure on our team so we think it's the appropriate action to take.

What's the new timeline?

Short answer: we don't know and we don't want to throw a date and then delay it again.

We're looking at late May / early June to release it, but it's still a bit early to be sure about the date. We will be keeping you updated in the upcoming weeks and we will be showcasing new Omninesia stuff too.

Also, this is going to add a couple of months to our planned timeline for the Early Access and the final launch. When Alpha 0.2 arrives, we will analyze our planning and work on a new and updated timeline.

Looking on the bright side 

We plan to bring the pre-order store along the next patch, so we will have some more time to get everything ready for it. Our idea is to offer pre-orders, and with each pre-order you will get instant access to the Alpha so it would be kinda like a super late Alpha Hero tier but without the exclusive perks our backers will enjoy.

We're planning to make a new community naming contest very soon. And we're also planning a couple of updates in the upcoming weeks talking in-depth about the Breeding and another one talking about the backstory of the Digital Temtem and how they are revolutionizing the Archipelago.

Also, Omninesia is looking great visually and in terms of new game mechanics too. There's a few unannounced things that will arrive on the next patch and we think the community is going to have a very good time exploring them.

We're not ready to show anything final from Omninesia yet. But, lucky for us, Damian has been hard at work creating the new music needed for its areas, and we want to end this update with one of his fantastic pieces.

Alpha update 0.1.10! Aguamarina Caves + House interiors 🏡
about 7 years ago – Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 02:03:48 AM

Work never stops at Crema, so one more week we're here with a new patch for the Alpha!

Aguamarina Caves

The Aguamarina Caves are a complex of caverns that run deep under the Thalassian Cliffs. The better known entrance is through the Sillaro River, but they're so huge they even cross the whole cliffs and connect the river to the upper area of the Indigo lake.

The Caves have five different floors and they include a new gameplay feature: the crystal areas. We don't want to spoil too much, so you'll need to go ahead and discover it by yourself. The crystal areas affect how the player moves through the terrain and they will be very present along the whole Archipelago.

Right now the Caves are a totally optional area to explore and they don't have too much in terms of interesting new Temtem or items. In the future we plan to re-populate them with some more Temtem so they will become the first area in the game where you will be able to obtain them. They will also hold a special and unique shrine you will be able to reach with the climbing equipment...

House Interiors

One of the more prominent features missing from the current Alpha is the option to go inside the houses currently placed on Deniz. This ends today!

With this patch you will be able to visit the houses and talk with the people inside them. Houses are also usually something optional, but they add so much richness to the lore and the overall feeling of the game we wanted to include them as soon as possible.

You'll notice some of the houses are still closed. These houses are "special" places that will open in future updates since they are related to some unavailable features right now. We added an Alpha sign to them so you will know where you can enter or not.

By the way, almost everything you see in the NPC houses will also be available to player housing. We're doing everything as flexible as we can so everything works for the player's houses too.

And more fixes, improvements and new stuff

As usual, there's a lot of things on this patch. We've made a huge number of improvements and fixes including some important ones like improving the initial cinematic flow or making sure the AI uses the rest option when needed in battles. We also managed to find one of the most endearing bugs in the Alpha which caused the NPC tamers to forget about you and ask for a fight constantly.

We also included some new stuff: 4 new Luma species, 9 new Techniques including a new Status Effect, death voices for every Temtem, new sounds here and there... You can read the full patch notes in our forum.

Omninesia and more

As you already know we're still working on the next huge content patch for the Alpha, which will include a whole new Island, new Temtem and several new features. We don't have a fixed date for that content yet, so we will be keeping you posted in the coming weeks.

Also, we're working on having a pre-order option for users who want to buy the game and get instant access to the Alpha. Although it looks like something easy, having a pre-order store implicates a lot of stuff under the roof and we want to make everything right as usual. Please, bear with us while we work on having everything ready!

Physical rewards status and progress 🎁
about 7 years ago – Sat, Feb 23, 2019 at 01:47:08 AM

As you know, we've been working non-stop on new content for the Alpha which will be arriving soon. But even with all this hard work, we found some time to make progress with another of our Kickstarter promises: the physical rewards.

Today, we will share with you what's the current status of each reward and how are they looking so far.

Printed Sticker Pack

This has been the easiest reward to manufacture so far. We began making a lot of tests using different providers and asking for a small batch (~10 sheets) in order to compare the quality of the printing and the sticker itself.

We also made some tests with different variations in order to nail how many sheets and stickers should we make, how to place them on the sheet, what's the optimal size...

And we ended up with these cuties. A couple of high-quality sticker sheets featuring some of our beloved Temtem (and including a couple of unrevealed ones!).

We have already ordered all the stickers (almost 4000!!!) and have them laying around and ready to be shipped!

Pigepic Plushie

The journey of making the plushies has been looooong. We've spent a lot of months discussing with our manufacturer on every small detail and even helping them with some stitching patterns to make sure the plushie ended up looking the way we wanted to.

And we're happy to say we managed to do it!

After several failed prototypes, our manufacturer achieved to create what we had in mind. But now a new problem raised, where do we store the plushies?

The plushies are HUGE and we had to buy over 3000 of them! We made some calculations and to store them in our offices we would need to move away, remove every piece of furniture and hardware and even then, we wouldn't have enough storage!

So we ended up hiring an storage unit and now they are safely living there, waiting to arrive directly in your houses!

Painted Statue

If there's a troublesome reward, that would be the statue. We started working on it with a manufacturer and everything was looking good, we worked on the model to be printed, on the pantone colors, on making sure the statue would stand by itself and wouldn't knock over easily...

We got some photos of the cast model and it was looking gorgeous, we were so anxious to contemplate the final painted result!

The manufacturer painted the test and sent it over to us and then... the problems started.

Our initial impression was very mixed. On one hand the statue is huge, it's super heavy and the materials are awesome. On the other, some of the pieces broke during the shipping (even with the statue being heavily protected) and the biggest problem for us: the painting.

Each statue needs to be painted manually, one by one. The painting on the prototype wasn't near good, there were a lot of tiny mistakes and some areas incorrectly painted. If this is the quality of the prototype (which is supposed to be perfect to convince us on buying the whole lot), what's going to happen when they needed to paint 300 statues?

We talked with the manufacturer but we weren't happy with the discussions so there was only one option left: search for a new manufacturer. That's what we did, we find a new manufacturer and we're starting the process again with them! This is going to delay our plans a bit, but we hope it will be for the best.

When should I expect the shipping?

Our initial plan was to deliver the rewards on September 2019, right along the launch of the Early Access of Temtem. We're still on track for that date so you should be receiving your stickers, plushies and statues around that date.

We will notify you again before sending anything so you will be able to change your shipping address on BackerKit.

Wait, what about the cloth map and the signed illustration?

We want to have some more time for those so we want to make them when the game is completed and released.

Producing the map right now would make it very inconsistent with the final one, we've already changed A LOT from our initial internal map and we've only made a couple of isles. During the development of the game we will make more changes and we want the map to reflect more accurately the final Archipelago map.

The illustrations are going to take a huge amount of time from our artists, and right now time is not something we have a lot on our hands. Also, waiting till the end would allow the recipients to better chose what they want in their illustrations since they had more than enough time to get familiar with everything the game offers.

And that's all for today's update. What do you think of the rewards? We hope you like them!

New Alpha update! Luma Saipat & Improved battle flow 💢
about 7 years ago – Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 01:35:04 AM

New year, new update!

After launching 8 updates in less than a month after Alpha's release, we've decided to decrease a bit the rhythm and spend some more focused time with the next big patches. Over this past month we've been working simultaneously on three different big patches:

• An update focused on improving the battle flow.
• An update including the content missing right now from Deniz (houses interiors and the Aguamarina Caves).
•  Alpha 0.2: including a full new island (Omninesia) and a set of new Temtem.

Today we're bringing you the first one.

Improved battle flow

As we talked about in our previous update, one of the most frequent requests from the Alpha feedback was to improve how battles feel. We didn't have a lot of time to review battle times before releasing the Alpha so the feedback was totally right, battles felt super sluggish.

But that changes in this new update. We've spent a lot of time reviewing every bit of action in battles and tweaking them to improve times. 

With all these new tweaks, our team managed to make battles twice as fast from before.

And a lot of new thingies

This patch includes a lot of fixes and some more new things too.

You can now try to find Luma Saipat, enjoy the new combat music or just amaze yourself looking at the improvements and fixes list in the full patch notes.

Please, tell us what do you think of the new changes and your impressions with the new battle system. Also, if you find any bug, make sure to report them in our forum.

Alpha’s first-month review & next steps 🐾
over 7 years ago – Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 05:48:26 PM

Although it seems we launched our Alpha yesterday, today marks the first month of it being available.

Whew! We want to take a look back at this month in this update, see what happened during this time, share some fun data and talk about what’s coming next.

So, how was the launch?

The launch was amazing! We managed to deliver the Alpha on time without any delays (although we were very very close) and achieving that has been a huge achievement for our team.

One of the things we were more interested in looking at during the Alpha was how the server performed and how our infrastructure for multiplayer, instances, sharding… was working. So far it’s been great, we haven’t had any major problems with the server and it has been holding up the current player base effortlessly.

Also, we’ve been reading and watching every reaction in order to know if we were on the right path with our changes to the battle system and so far it looks like we have made the right decisions. Most players have liked how the Stamina changes the whole battle and the new mechanics on Techniques like the Holds or Synergies.

We’ve been also analyzing the constructive feedback about the pace and difficulty of the game and we will be iterating over it in the coming months. If you have any additional feedback or suggestion, please post it over at our Forums.

Last but not least, as we talked previously we did increase our vision for Temtem and even for the content available for the Alpha. We ended up having ~10 hours of content (without farming anything, training TVs or catching Lumas) which has surprised almost everyone because most of you were expecting a much smaller amount of content and polishing.

What’s been going on at Crema during this month?

We’ve been hard at work of course! During this month we released 8 patches fixing most of the bugs appeared and we even managed to include some new content (new animations, more Luma species, the capture animation…).

We’re still working on having all the physical rewards ready. As you can see in the photo the Pigepic plushie is looking good!

Also, we’ve started working on the next content update for the Alpha, but more on that later.

GIMME SOME DATA

• There have been 810.000 untamed encounters.
  
• The most captured Temtem is Paharo.
  
• The less one? Saku.
  
• The most evolved Temtem has been Swali. More than 2200 Loali were created by evolution.
• Players managed to capture 94 Luma Temtem so far.
  
• The most common Luma is Paharo / Paharac (34).
  
• The less common Luma is Barnshe (0).
• Over 7500 Tamers have tried the Alpha so far.
  
• 1088 Tamers have been able to defeat Lady Lottie.
  
• And 576 have completed all the Alpha content.
  
• The most popular starter is Houchic (49,94% Tamers have chosen them), followed by Crystle (32,31%) and Smazee (17,74%).

And what’s coming next?

There are still a few more things coming to Alpha 0.1, most notably we will open access to the Aguamarina Caves so you’ll be able to explore a whole new area. Also, we’re working on improving the battle pacing and tweaking all the effects and timings so the battles feel less sluggish.

Parallel to that, we have started working on the next big content update for the Alpha (0.2) which will bring access to the second Island on the game (Omninesia) and a ton of new features (Settings, the Tempedia, held items and abilities and much more).

According to the plan, 0.2 will be released on April. Until then, the current version of the Alpha will still be playable and we will be updating you on new stuff like usual.

Final words

We want to wish you all happy holidays and a happy new year 2019.

We also want to take a moment to thank you all for making this project possible and for joining us on this adventure. Thanks to our Discord mods who help us manage that crazy server, thanks to our Alpha players who help us finding new bugs, thanks to all content creators enjoying the game and sharing it with their viewers, thanks to all artist creating fanarts, thanks to each one of you guys who fill us with joy and eagerness to keep working on Temtem.