After lots of hard work during these past months, the first huge content update for the Alpha is finally here.



A new Archipelago Island open its doors: Omninesia.

Omninesian legends tell of a great volcanic eruption that shook the great Paninsula of old, breaking the mammoth island into smaller chunks and flinging them away. While Tucma and Kisiwa were the bigger ones, a scattering of smaller fragments drifted together. Their settlers called them the Myrisles, and during the foundation years, they connected them with ingeniously built bridges, creating a whole new culture. The Omninesians, as they call themselves nowadays, are a reflection of that original spirit, endlessly resourceful and interested in communication and trade, always ready to make the most of their tiny but lush islands.


We don't want to spoil much of what Omninesia and its areas has to offer. But, besides a whole new area and more progress in the main quest, this patch is also filled with new features and improvements over our Alpha.



For starters, the fully fledged character customization experience is complete. On Alpha 0.1 we launched the character creation and now players will also be able to customize its appearance at any time.

The Boutiques from both Deniz and Omninesia are open now, selling all kind of cosmetics and dyes. Every piece of cosmetic is tintable so the customization options are almost endless.

We will be expanding this feature with more cosmetics and dyes along with the development of the game.



Another big thing in this patch is the addition of Traits & Gears, two new mechanics that will fundamentally change how battles work in Temtem.

Traits are innate abilities determined by the Temtem species. Traits can be triggered at any time during battles and can affect used techniques, received damage, Temtem stats...

Similar to traits, gear are abilities triggered during the battle. Instead of being determined by the Temtem species, Gear are items that can be equipped to any Temtem.



Trading is also now part of the game. We've spent a lot of time thinking and doing this feature so we're very eager to see its reception.

Trading will allow players to trade anything, anywhere, anytime and with anyone near you. There are no limits on what you can trade!



There's also a new feature that was already showcased in our Kickstarter original trailer: dialogs with main characters will now portray them bigger on screen and they will also have custom expressions based on what they're talking about.

This adds a lot of richness to the characters and make them more iconic and unique. We hope you like it!


But that's not all! The patch is PACKED with features and improvements: 22 new Temtem, 34 new techniques, new Lumas, re-learn old techniques anytime, inspect players, minimap...

As always, if you want to read the full patch notes you can find them in our forum: https://www.playtemtem.com/forums/threads/0-2.1206/


If you encounter a bug, please help us and report it in our forum: https://www.playtemtem.com/forums/forums/bug-reports.11/

Make sure to read the sticky post in order to report a bug correctly.

Omninesia is almost ready to host new visitors. In just a week our backers will be walking along Nanga, buying goods and preparing their travel through the Canopath, discovering new Temtem species and, even more importantly, making new friends along the way.

Alpha 0.2 will launch next Thursday, June 13th.



This new content update for our on-going Alpha is huge: a whole new Island, new set of Temtem, new battle mechanics (Gears & Traits), several unannounced new features, lots of quality of life improvements and a million bug fixes.

We've poured our souls making it and we're very eager to see your reactions and opinions about it.

This update is written by Damian Sanchez, our composer.

Today, we’re talking about Temtem’s music!

This is not going to be an update talking about divine inspirations, musical notes, scales or chords. Instead, we will focus on the process of making music as part of a really busy development schedule.

I hope this text will bring some light on what’s the production process behind any of the music tracks.


So far Temtem has around 55 minutes of in-game music. And that is not counting alternate melodies (we’ll come back to that later) and night versions, which could easily add double the length. And remember we are still in Omninesia (which is the second island of the six planned). The final soundtrack, considering only main tracks, will probably end up having over 2 hours of music, so I had to create a fluid workflow and prepare the tools to meet the deadlines without compromising quality.

Even before the first note was written, I ensured to create a solid template project that could produce final results from day one. I spent several weeks picking the proper instrument libraries and doing sound and mix tests to make sure once I’m done writing a track, it could be directly exported to the audio engine and create the soundtrack file version without major adjustments needed.


In general terms, the music in Temtem is divided between:

• Cities. A song per city.
  
• Routes. A ‘main route’ per isle plus some extra music for parts that visually differ a lot from the main path. (like the Sillaro River in Deniz)
  
• Landmarks. A song per place.
  
• Special buildings (Home, Temporium, Dojo). A song per type.
  
• Combats. A song per type of enemy.

The average time to produce a track from scratch to fully working in-game is 2 weeks. Going into details:

• Cities are usually 2 minutes length - an average of 5 workdays.
  
• Route and Landmarks are 2 to 4 minutes length - an average of 10 workdays.
  
• Combats are 3 to 4 minutes length - an average of 15 workdays.

The first day is the most critical one. I start trying to come up with that cool melody which gives the perfect mood for the situation. At that time, I honestly spend more time discarding bad ideas than creating good ones, but when I'm happy, I export the first concept mockup ready for Crema's Wise Lord Evaluation Committee (aka Guillermo, Dani, Alex, Enrique, and Adri).

'Briçal de Mar' - First Concept Mockup - https://soundcloud.com/damiansanchezmusic/brical-de-mar-first-concept-mockup/s-XvJZb

In several cases I've spent up to 3 days to be 100% happy with something before being evaluated by the team, literally deleting every single note I've written. In a few other cases, the guys weren't happy with the proposal and I started the whole process again.

Team rejection is not so common (thankfully), but we take this evaluation very seriously and even if just one of the members is not happy with the proposal, it is tinkered and reviewed again until we are all comfortable with it.

Once the track reaches this point, I keep improving it and building the desired length with several additional evaluations until we come up with a complete structure, and then the fun comes!



That’s a picture of all the instruments I've performed and recorded live at my studio to add details that bring life to each track. In addition to that, I did some external recordings with professional musicians to give an extra punch to the song quality. Then a little bit of final mix and mastering and there it goes!

https://youtu.be/DKsjrvUwQ1s


There are some extra materials I must create for each track before it can be implemented in FMOD (the audio middleware we are using to program the audio behaviors).

The intro: There is a special intro section in each track that serves as a presentation of the area and its music. This will be played only the first time you visit a new zone (yes pay attention because it’s sounding just once) and encourages the player’s sense of discovery, but won't play again each time to avoid annoyance.

Random intro points: Once you have already visited a place, the music entry point will randomly change each further time you visit it. We designed a system of several intro points with their respective 'mini-intros’ that will hopefully help you avoid the repetition feeling happening when you hear a track starting once and again at the same point.

https://youtu.be/1RPH0XbP5rI

Alternate melodies: Probably the part of the integration I'm most proud. Almost every track has, at least, one part in which its main melody has several variations that will play randomly each time you reach that point.

This adds richness and keeps the freshness of the song longer without the need to increase the whole duration.

https://youtu.be/QgXg5gmIO1c

Alternate versions: There are some tracks that need alternate versions for places you visit under different situations in the story (think about a Belsoto invaded building and going back after you defeat them), aaaand… we are doing a night version for all cities and routes!

You’re going to experience a really cool mood change in the music when the night will fall on Temtem.

Deniz - Arissola - Night Version - https://soundcloud.com/damiansanchezmusic/deniz-arissola-night-version/s-AQQrg


Creating a music track for Temtem includes:

• Having a good idea.
  
• Getting approval from the team.
  
• Producing the whole track.
  
• Recording the live performed instruments.
  
• Choosing the start points and creating their respective intros.
  
• Composing the alternate melodies.
  
• Make the alternate and/or night version.
  
• Exporting all the materials for the audio engine.
  
• Program the behaviors in FMOD.
  
• Ask Dani to make his coding magic to call the music in-game correctly at its place.
  
• Playing that game area over and over to ensure everything works as intended.

Crazy uh?!... haha

As you may imagine, there is no time to get bored in Temtem development!

Thankfully, we found some of that time we don’t have to write some updates which I hope will ease your wait until Alpha 2 arrives.

See you at the Discord server!

Damian Sanchez.

“It sure looks like rain,” said Professor Víctor of Briçal as he looked out of the window. The gloomy Arburian skies were steadily turning a darker shade.

“Well, I suppose we have time for a story, then. Let me put the kettle on…”

The old armchair creaked when he dropped on it again. He took off his glasses.

“So, Digital Temtem, it is? I’m not surprised you’d ask about them. They are the newest, shiniest variety after all. And all that tech we have running on the same principles, like commcasters… or TVs, like you youngsters call them. But I suppose you want to hear about the Digitals themselves, right.”

“I was there, you know. When they were first developed. I was a young research assistant, fresh out of Properton College. I jumped on an airship as soon as I got the message, and rushed to Cipanku just in time to join the team. It costed a fortune too! Mind you, that was just before TemCards, so if you wanted to bring your favorite Temtem to Cipanku you had to book berth space for it too… Anyway, so I made it to the lab and met my first boss, Dr. Sasaya. Let me tell you, she was by far the best scientist and most intelligent woman in…”

The whistling of the kettle interrupted him. He served two mugs of fragrant tea and gave the stranger one of them. He cupped his in a hand, inhaling wistfully.

“Very à propos – Cipanki black tea, with a touch of Denizan jasmine. Reminds me of home, but also of my times in… but I digress. So, Dr. Sasaya. She was already a legend when I started working at her lab in Nanto. She had been investigating the information-storage properties of Omninesian volcanic crystal, and that’s how we came up with TemCards. It was pretty unexpected, trust me - Sasaya was never much into Temtem anyway. I was a Temtem fan, so I suggested we tried “storing” Temtem in them, and voilà, we came up with TemCards.”

“It’s difficult to exaggerate how important that breakthrough was. Before TemCards, Temtem had to be physically carried from one place to the other. That was a nightmare, believe me – many Earth Temtem were too heavy for airships, Fire ones were just too dangerous to handle, Water Temtem couldn’t survive for very long on dry land... It was a headache. TemCards provided a safe and easy way of carrying around dozens of Temtem. That’s what made Temtem taming the affordable pastime it is today. Before TemCards, you had to be pretty rich or influential to own more than a couple of Tems. No other invention has been as liberating as TemCards, after the development of airships…”

He sipped some tea, then nodded.

“But you were asking about Digital Temtem. Yes, yes, bear with me. So, of course, this generated incredible enthusiasm in the scientific community. It was a collective effort, you see - these principles had been described by Arburian theorists, but TemCards had been developed in a Cipanki lab, using Omninesian crystals and drawing on Kisiwan taming expertise during the trials. Everyone agreed that major tech breakthroughs required extensive collaboration. Nanto Labs used that prestige to bring in the best experts, people from all around the Archipelago. That was the team which developed Digital Temtem…”

The professor sat back, his eyes distant as he reminisced.

“And what a dream team it was! Professor Konstantinos from Properton did the theoretical groundwork – he was so young back then… Tihani of Nanga oversaw the Temtem breeding trials, a Dojo undergrad but already the best breeder in the Myrisles. Yareni of Quetzal, Nalla of Vumbi, the very crème de la crème was there… But Dr. Sasaya wasn’t interested in the Temtem side of the research, she was always more of a pure technologist. She wanted to concentrate on the applications of the tech itself, so in her stead, she put Dr. Hamijo, her most promising pupil. That turned out to be… a mistake.”

He gulped down some tea and left the mug over a precariously-balanced pile of books.

“Sure, generally speaking, it was a success. Digital Temtem were born! And that was no mean feat. It was well beyond our initial scope too - funny how nobody remembers this, but our initial brief was to create Crystal-Electric hybrids. Digital Temtem were a little happy accident! And it made sense too - we had loads of experience working with crystal from the development of TemCards, and Tihani showed us how to choose the best volcanic varieties. And most of the research assistants were Cipanki, so they really knew their Electric Temtem.”

“So, who knew you could theoretically code information as ones and zeroes? Professor Konstantinos, building on Dr. Sasaya’s research. But, to use electricity to store that information into crystalline formations? That was Dr. Hamijo’s genius. And who knew how to tame those new Temtem and develop ways to communicate with them so that they could be taught? You guessed it, young Tihani. It all came together like magic.”

A shadow fell on the professor’s eyes. His mouth twitched a little.

“But as amazing as this invention was, it was just the tip of the iceberg. Digital technology had many more uses, as we all know now. Communications, transport, pansolar energy. We leaped a century ahead, all in mere years. It was intoxicating. For the first time, the Archipelago was coming together... I guess all this went to his head.”

“Dr. Hamijo thought the team shouldn’t stop with Digital Temtem. He wanted to push forward and create more varieties of Temtem, specifically suited to serve humans. Now, this raised ethical issues within the team – Tihani and Nalla said that was inhuman towards Temtem, but Hamijo just doubled down, proclaimed he wanted to create a new race of Temtem slaves. Konstantinos tried to mediate, but it was too late.”

The professor sighed, lacing his fingers together.

“In the end, Dr. Sasaya had to intervene. She had been busy developing most of the Digital-derived technology we have nowadays, including the HealTem machines you can see in any Temporium. There was a meeting, a vote, and Dr. Hamijo was expelled from the team. He didn’t take it well. He just disappeared, and nobody has heard from him ever since.”

He shrugged sorrowfully, recovering his tea mug for another sip.

“But that was years ago. We all moved on. Nanto Labs carried on developing new Digital Temtem, and the tech spilled over. Now it’s everywhere. Everyone went home. Tihani became Dojo Master. Konstantinos has been traveling around, last I heard he was in Deniz researching meta-mimetic Temtem. I returned to my alma mater and these days I’m teaching Lore at Properton. It’s more laid back… oh, Dr. Sasaya? She still writes. She’s back in Nanto, working on some crazy “instant matter transfer” experiment, whatever that is…”

The stranger got up suddenly, something in his hand. The professor caught the glint of something flashing. His eyes went wide...

We love giving our community the chance to name new Temtem, and you already helped us name a few:

• Nessla, Ampling and Amphatyr
  
• Umishi and Ukama
  
• Kalazu and Kalabyss

And today, we bring you a new contest!



#037 evolves into #038. Both #037 and #038 are common inhabitants of the areas around the Anak Volcano in Omninesia. Also both are pure-fire type.

As usual, we're running the contest in our Discord server. We will be accepting new name suggestions up until Monday, then we will chose our favorites and we'll let the community vote on the final name.

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


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...




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.




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.


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!

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.


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.




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.

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.


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.


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.

• 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%).

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.


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.