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With a brand new Item Shop overhaul and the release of themes, KoGaMa continues to undergo major improvements in visuals, user-experience and functionality
Our recent mission has been to enhance player customization and give more impactful choice to game creators. We are now taking leaps towards these goals as we can now set a fulfilling checkmark on the overhaul of the Item Store along with the no less profound release of ‘Themes’. Our thoughts behind these updates will be outlined below. In the end of this article, a sneak peak into our future plans of improving in-game economy.
Themes
The new ‘Themes’ update adds considerable visual options for game creators to express themselves and create stunning game worlds. ‘Themes’ are unlockable skyboxes that game creators can add to their game to create all sorts of skies. These sky themes are highly customizable. Players can tweak colors, rotation speed and height of clouds, stars, moon and sun, add fog density, and add real time day/night cycle.
We are still looking at the feedback
While the Themes update has been through our test server and released, we are still gathering and looking at feedback to learn how we can improve this new feature even more. Item Shop
The Item Shop is an in-game shop where players can buy various sorts of cosmetics to make their avatars stand out. All cosmetics are sorted by three categories: hats, back items and particle effects.
What’s new?
The Item Shop has received a lot of love in the form of visual overhaul along with new features. One visual change that probably will come to mind first when visiting the shop is the all new and bright look. The look is now more modern and cheerful. Before the colors and layout were quite dark and old school. A brand new feature in the Item Shop is that all cosmetics are now divided by five tiers of quality. Each tier represent a level of unlock requirements in terms of gold and rarity. The tiers are: Common Uncommon Rare Epic Legendary 
Why is this change important?
The intention behind adding tiers is to emphasize the prestigious quality of cosmetics. Unlocking a high tier cosmetic should be clearly visible when showing your avatar off in forums e.g. when playing with other players in-game. Cosmetics are not only about looking the way you want but also about achieving reputation and the feeling of being able to show off. We want to facilitate this.
User-generated cosmetics and future plans
We have many plans for new cosmetics, and creating and releasing new cosmetics will be an ongoing effort. There are already a lot of cosmetics in the making due to a successful contest that we held a few weeks ago. to participate in the contest, participants had to draw ideas for unique and new back cosmetics. The contest turned out to be attract a very high participation from the community, and we ended up picking 17 winners. These ideas will be turned into beautiful cosmetics by our awesome artists, and the winner drawings can be seen below. Upcoming updates
A major milestone in our roadmap is monetization improvements, and this is what we are working heavily towards right now. The monetization system and in-game economy in KoGaMa is undergoing the most significant overhaul yet to come. Currently, the state of monetization and in-game gold balance is an unfinished puzzle. With each each update that we currently publish, we get one step (or puzzle piece) closer to an improved monetization system and in-game economy.
One step in our roadmap was removing free gold from ads and playing games, another step is the Item Shop overhaul. The next major steps are going to be giving the gold packages a revamp as well as implementing a subscription option. We are VERY excited about these upcoming changes because they are going to be the fundament for the in-game economy and how everything will be priced. That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
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With brand new UI and refreshing visuals, KoGaMa is undergoing great improvement in visuals, user-experience and functionality. Not long ago, we revealed that we got an investment from Nordisk Film Games, and that we aim to accelerate our international growth in 2018. We have a strong team and a plan for 2018, and now we’re all about doing, implementing and improving. As a matter of fact, with recent updates we have released major overhauls of visuals along with a number of additional improvements of features Single Winning Conditions The following image shows a teaser of the new Single Winning Conditions update.  KoGaMa contains a lot of different goals and ways of winning. While this improves KoGaMa in terms of gameplay diversity and replayability, a greater effort to communicate and emphasize clear goals is required. To ensure a fun and rewarding player experience, we felt that it is important to emphasize clear goals. To achieve this, we have made major improvements to the user interface and features when playing games. When players are entering a game, they will now see a briefing screen introducing the goal of the game mode as well as current team scores. Players will now be able to know exactly what type of game they are entering and what they should do. These changes have not only made the gameplay more user friendly - it is now easier to host events and contests. To host a contest with an audience, accessible information such as clear info on team ranking or winners are critical. With clear winning conditions and team progress info, contests are now more meaningful. Improved Chat While being a game maker tool and a place to play games, KoGaMa is also a social platform. It is therefore critical that the chat experience between users is polished and nurtured. With this in mind, we gave the KoGaMa friend list chat a lot of love. The below screenshot shows a snippet of what the newly released chat looks like.  The new chat interface and functionality now offers a much better experience. We ripped the old chat apart and gave it a whole new and clean look. It now has a more modern and smooth feel. It is no longer clunky, and now takes up much less screen space. It’s not only about looks, the inside matters too! And we completely agree. We have therefore not only given the chat a visual overhaul, it also has also gotten new functionality that improves the messaging experience greatly. It is now easier to keep track of notifications, active and recent conversations. Global Speaker KoGaMa builders already had the option to ad ambient sounds to spice up the atmosphere of their games. But these speakers are only local, and to add ambient sound to the whole game, the creator has to place tons of speakers. With the newly global speaker update, players are now able to add sound throughout the whole game with just a single speaker. On top of making the life easier for builders, the new speaker also includes new sounds.  Future Updates: Sneak Peak As of future updates, we are working on a lot of changes and features. We are soon releasing a major update that greatly enriches the builders’ possibilities to customize their game world as well as spice up the atmosphere of for their players.  Another update that we are excited about is the wings cosmetics which is a completely new type of cosmetic. We know that wings and back items in general are really popular among the KoGaMa players. Therefore, we are excited to realize just that. The hats and particles will soon be united with wings as well as a complete makeover of the cosmetic shop look and functionality.  That's all for now! Thanks for reading. With a solid 3,7 million monthly users worldwide, an investment from Nordisk Film, and company expansion of new talents, 2018 is going to be an exciting year where Multiverse ApS aims to accelerate its international growth. Being a unique and innovative concept, KoGaMa is part virtual world, part development platform, and part massively multiplayer online game. The platform took its first baby steps 6 years ago, and it gradually snowballed in popularity, particularly among kids and teenagers. In the games industry, we often see that users find modding, user modifications of a game, more engrossing than the gameplay itself. That spirit of creation is one of the central tenets of KoGaMa, and why it has become so popular with younger people. In KoGaMa, users are not only consumers, they are also the ones creating the games, models and avatars. What we strive for is to make the person playing the game the director, being able to express themselves through creation of experiences. To enable our offering of user-created play, KoGaMa offers a virtual construction and game-development platform where everyone has the power to make anything from avatars and 3D models to virtual worlds. Our users manipulate core building components in our environment to manipulate simulated worlds, then share and play them with the KoGaMa community. Today we have reached 3,7 million monthly users worldwide, and 4 million games have been created and published.  Though KoGaMa has proved to be an extremely strong concept, it has a lot of potential that we have yet to explore. The current success of KoGaMa is just the beginning. It is a recognition of our hard work and what we believe in. We are looking forward to take KoGaMa to new heights. We are very happy that we, in November, partnered with Nordisk Film. The investment marks an exciting new chapter as it allows us to explore the potential of KoGaMa and take it to the next level. We are increasing our development efforts as well as doing a focused marketing effort. Despite our rapid growth, we’re still the same company at heart, focused on the same level of innovation and user experience that got us to this point. It is limitation of ambitions that constraints progress, but our ambitions don't have limitation. For us, this is just the beginning. Already hard at work, we are excited to further explore and utilize the potential of KoGaMa and bring it to the next level. |
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