Developer Update: Customizable Skies and Overhaul of the Item Shop

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.

Why is this update important?
As a platform for game creation, lots of customization options, player expression and the feel of the game environment are critical factors. We are excited about the ‘Themes’ update because it improves just that, adding considerably more freedom and customization options to game creators. Want to give your adventure game a mythical and cheerful atmosphere? Want to give your horror forest an even more scary feel? Game creators can now do just that.

This does not only add value to being a game creator - the gameplay experience of games also improves. In many games the sky takes up over half or almost all of the screen view. When something takes up most of the screen view, it should definitely look pleasing. Now, instead of looking at a generic sky, players can now experience all sorts of skies defined by the game creators.

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.​

#GotYourBack winners

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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