Hello Tamers,
It's already been over a month since Temtem's release. During this month we've seen a constantly growing amount of questions around the game, its future, and its planned features. So, we want to take some time to share with you what we have in mind for the game so you can have a peek at what's coming.
Please, keep in mind that every detail discussed here is not 100% confirmed for the game. During the game's development cycle, ideas change constantly and stuff we like today we might not like as much tomorrow. So take everything in here not as confirmed facts, but more like the stuff we would like to include in the game.
The same thing happens with the planned dates. We're not really big fans of having public dates for everything, they add a lot of unnecessary pressure on the team and they make making changes and swapping features around a very difficult task. We know everyone else likes dates though, so we've decided to include open dates for each block of features. Take them with a grain of salt and expect delays and features moved around dates.
Also, one of the motives to write this is to gather feedback around the ideas. So feel free to discuss them in our Discord, our forums or /r/PlayTemtem. Temtem is always built around its community so every idea is appreciated.
We've divided the Roadmap in two and we'll also be talking a little more in-depth about some of the features depicted in the roadmap.
Short-term Roadmap
Ranked Matchmaking
- Balance
While we plan to do balance patches frequently during early access, our plan is to not be obsessed about reaching a perfect balance until the Temtem roster is complete (in the full final release). Due to having only a limited set of Tems and techniques, it is impossible to balance everything perfectly so we will mostly balance extra overpowered stuff that can break the current meta.
Even with a not so perfect balance, we've seen several team compositions and strategies already, so don't be afraid of trying new things and step into Temtem's competitive scene.
- Matchmaking V1
The first iteration of the matchmaking will include a player rating system based on ELO (aka TMR - Tamer Matchmaking Rating). Players will start with some placement matches which will define their initial TMR and after that, they will be matched with each other based on their current TMR.
For this first iteration of the matchmaking, we plan to give pansun rewards for each victory as a reward for the time spent battling (based on the opponent's TMR). Although probably this feature will be disabled when the feature launches until the system is fully tested and stabilized.
- Temtem auto-scaling
This is probably one of the hottest topics in the community. We know it is very important for competitive players to jump into the competitive scene as quickly as possible and reduce the time and friction needed to tweak and test new stuff.
So, our idea to solve that is to introduce auto-scaling into the ranked queue. Auto-scaling will essentially perfect your Tems, upping all their SVs up to 50 for the battle and their level to the current level cap (currently 48). With auto-scaling, players will still need to capture and organize their teams, set their preferred TV spread using fruits or training, obtain the necessary gears completing the main or side quests in the game and breeding for their desired egg techniques. But, players won't need to grind for perfect SVs or spend a fortune breeding to reach that point.
This auto-scaling will only apply to the ranked matchmaking queue, so there will be other game modes where having a perfect Temtem (and breeding for them) will be necessary (in-game tournaments, player organized tournaments and battles, dojo club wars, end-game PvE content, etc...).
Spectator Mode V1
Having a spectator mode has been one of the most requested features so far and while we already had it in our internal roadmap scheduled for later, we've decided to push it to the front due to the number of players requesting it. This first iteration of spectator mode will be a basic one and we will iterate on it in the future adding more options.
Basically, players will be able to spectate other players while they are playing a competitive match. While spectating, only the common info will be displayed (HP and STA percentages, team composition after the pick&ban, stages and status conditions, techniques used, etc.) so players won't be able to use this feature to get leverage over their opponents.
We hope including this feature will also help tournament organizers solve some of the issues they're currently facing.
In-Game Chat
The chat implementation we had during the Alpha / Stress test phases was a temporary one and it was lacking a lot of features, so we decided to disable it entirely for the early access release. Our plan is to remake the chat from scratch, increasing its performance and capabilities.
The chat will feature several predefined chat groups (e.g. Global, Local, Trade, Club...) and it will also support private messaging between users (whispers). We're also going to add chat bubbles which will appear above every talking character. We know some players find chat bubbles a bit intrusive sometimes, so we will give players the choice between two different levels of chat bubbles (displaying the full text or just a notification to know they've talked) or disable them entirely.
Club Management
Clubs are our take on clans for Temtem. Clubs have basically two main features related to them.
The first one is to be able to create a club, assign a banner to it, name it and invite all your friends to join. This will be the first part of the club features that we will tackle.
The second part is the Dojo Wars, which we'll talk more about in the next part of the roadmap.
Housing
Every Temtem player will be able to acquire a house since they won't be limited in quantity. We're designing the Atoll Row (the physical location where all houses will be built) to be infinite so you don't need to worry about buying permits or land. Technology in the Archipelago is amazing!
There's one thing you'll need to worry about though, decorating your house! You will be able to decorate your house using furniture bought and earned in-game, and every furniture store in the Archipelago will open their doors and will showcase different furniture in each island (in a similar way as the boutiques with the clothing options).
You will also be able to invite other players over so you can gather around your dining table or join other player's houses and check how they're decorating them. While houses will keep a predominant decorative functionality, we have some ideas to include useful furniture too in the future (think of things like an incubator, a jukebox, a fruit tree...).
Achievements
We all love achievements. Whether they are something simple like completing the Tempedia or something more obscure like defeating an Ukama with a Head Charge, achievements are now part of most games and Temtem will not be less. Temtem will feature a full array of achievements that will reward players with the most precious currency of them all, bragging rights (although some of them will also potentially give some in-game rewards).
Achievements will be supported directly in-game, and we will also support achievements for every system we release on (as long as they have an achievements/trophies feature of course).
Mid-term Roadmap
This section of the roadmap includes features that are very far away, so details about these features aren't yet fully designed and there's still a lot of room for change.
Dojo Wars
Each island in the Archipelago will hold a Club Dojo (so, six in total) which players will be able to conquer and hold. Clubs will be able to challenge the current Dojo leaders each week, by participating in in-game tournaments and battling with other participant Clubs in predefined time frames during different days based on the Dojo they want to capture.
Once a Club has conquered a Dojo, they will be able to decorate it and obtain rewards for their members during the time they hold it.
Trading House
Some of the islands will feature a "Trading House" (they're already in-game, but they have a WIP sign and are inaccessible). The Trading Houses will be the market-oriented locations in the game, where players will be able to post and receive offers without the need to directly interact with anyone. They will act as a bulletin board where everyone will be able to post their offers and requests and others will be able to sort through all these listings.
We're also considering having some other ways to trade in the trading house. Tentative ideas being timed auctions, live auctions, random trades, etc… But are not guaranteed to be included at launch.
We know there's a lot of hype about the Trading House and some of you may be wondering why we aren’t pushing this feature to come out sooner. The Trading House is a huge feature, it requires a lot of planning, work, and testing so we don’t want to rush it and we want to have enough time to properly develop it the way we want to.
Matchmaking V2
For the second iteration of the matchmaking, we want to have different leagues/medals players could reach (e.g. bronze, silver, gold... although hopefully, we find some more clever names for them), as well as seasons which will grant players with rewards based on their position when the season ends.
The plan is to have a pre-season which will last until the game is released and then start doing periodic seasons. Once seasons are live, our idea is to do balance patches only between seasons, so we will have a stable competitive scenario during the whole season.
Spectator Mode V2
The second iteration of the spectator mode will be totally oriented to the professional scene. It will present the ability to create competitive lobbies where players will be able to invite spectators and casters, which will have more spectate options (changing which player they are spectating, what they are choosing to do during the turn or more advanced statistics) and more options geared to organizing and casting professional tournaments in a more efficient way.
Consoles and 1.0 release
We expect to have the console ports ready for when we plan to launch the 1.0 release.
One of the most recurring topics about the console ports is if we're going to support cross-play and cross-save so we want to take this opportunity to talk a bit more about those.
Cross-play is technically simple to achieve. We already have cross-play between Discord and Steam players and every new platform will behave in the same way. The main problem with cross-play is related to console holders restrictions but they seem very open about it lately so we're hoping we will be able to achieve cross-play on every platform we launch.
Cross-save is more technically challenging. Apart from having the same legal and restrictions hoops, there's also a technical issue that needs to be sorted and solved which is a way of joining all your different accounts into the same one. Temtem doesn't have a custom login system, it just uses the platforms' login system in a transparent way (you don't really have a Temtem account right now, just some data associated with a Steam/Discord account), so we'll need to find a way to join them together so you can access the same data in all your platforms. We're pretty confident about it but we still need to figure out some more things and talk with the different platform holders to get their OK.
End-game Island
There will be a mini island fully dedicated to end-game activities (something similar to the Battle frontier in you know what game). The island will have different (3-4-5) buildings, each one with its own mechanics (but all relative to Temtem battles) where players will be able to enter and win rewards based on their performance. These buildings will be mostly focused on PvE activities and will reward players with pansuns and items for their invested time.
Cosmetics Store and Monetization
Temtem is an online game that requires monthly server costs, maintenance fees, and a growing and sustainable development team. Players are only required to pay once for the game, with no monthly fee required. In order to keep sustaining and growing Temtem, we'll be introducing a purely cosmetic store in-game around 1.0 launch.
It’s still very soon to give more details about what the store will feature, but we’re working on several different customizable options (players’ clothes obviously, housing furniture, emotes…). The store will hold different cosmetic items periodically that will be purchasable with microtransactions.
Like we've said since our Kickstarter, microtransactions will never be tied to any pay2win or pay2skip scenario (no good/better Tems, stat boosters, exp boosters, TV fruits or anything similar that puts a player in an unfair advantage).
Cosmetics Battle Pass
After launch, we’re aiming to introduce a battle pass-esque system which will introduce an additional leveling system for players during the current season. With the seasonal battle pass, players will be able to obtain certain seasonal cosmetics for free just by playing the game during that season and completing objectives, and it will also feature a premium version with even more cosmetics and non-P2W rewards.
Nuzlocke
For those of you unfamiliar with the Nuzlocke game mode, it is basically a hardcore difficulty mode for the game. In Nuzlocke every time one of your Tems gets knocked-out, it will be permanently released. Also, the amount of capturable Tems is limited and you will only be able to capture one or two per area, so you will have to perfectly balance your resources in order to complete the game.
Nuzlocke players will play on a different instance of the server, and they will only play around other Nuzlocke players. Trading will be limited due to the Nuzlocke rules, but PVP will not. So if you're brave enough, you will be able to duel other players and face a permanent loss...
Complete Roadmap
