It has been roughly one year since Kemopop! was published to Steam. Ergo, this is the Anniversary Update!! Keep scrolling for news on the first expansion :3!

Steam Workshop (Beta)

On Steam, this update has added Steam Workshop support. I'd love to see your characters, so please try this out...! To publish a character, open the Biography page of your custom character and click Publish. You can update your character at any time.

(While keys last, Steam keys can still be claimed through itch.io purchases.)

• Custom character handling has been improved, and will no longer hang the game during the load transition.

Workshop Troubleshooting

This feature is quite barebones and investigation is needed. If you have issues with Workshop integration, please make the issue known on the Steam discussion boards.

It is recommended you resize your character icon.png to ~500x500 to alleviate issues with file size limits. Everything else should be okay.

Steam Trading Cards are now available!

Trading Cards and an array of emoticons and wallpapers are now available for the Steam release. If you ever wanted to put a half-naked goat boy on your Steam profile as a flex, now you can. Just collect all ten cards in the Kemopop! trading card set!!

The trading cards have been designed in collaboration with Wofy Yems, a Malaysian artist.

(Later, these items will be available to purchase using Steam Points).

Download the Telegram stickerpack!!!

A Visual Refresh!

Azura is the first character players are introduced to when playing Kemopop!. Azura's stage art has been relined and given an extra hour of polish, to bring it up to standard with some later added characters.

Everywhere else, more attention has been put into the game's visuals and controller UX.

• Baro's stage art has been updated.
• Character selection has been given a new appearance. 
  • Compact Menu is a new display setting that will collapse the menu groups.
  • The new particle effects behind the character overview card now have slight hints about the stage's content...!!!
  • Menu navigation has been altered a bit to allow better browsing of characters. Selecting a stage won't move the focus to the play button, but a new shortcut key has been added to immediately play a selected stage.
  • The biography button was moved somewhere more appropriate (from playtesting, some players didn't even acknowledge it).
• Several new animations and particle effects have been added.
• The game logo has been redesigned slightly to improve legibility against busy backgrounds.
  
• The Photo Mode UI has been improved.
  
• Stages without a clear line (e.g. suika) will now show refill quotes on level ups, revealing some unused content.
  

Get a Hotshot Combo!!

A new scoring subsystem has been introduced into the anniversary update. In a nutshell, this is how it works:

• Dropping a sweet and touching one of the same kind will maintain the combo (you'll hear a quiet 'tick' sound and see a little hit marker).
  • There is a little leeway! It's possible to bounce off another sweet and maintain the combo, but it'll have to be quick...
• If there is a match, the combo increases.
• You may miss one time in between combo increments. If you miss twice, the combo is reset to zero.

The rationale behind this change is twofold: it encourages an alternative, slow and calculated kind of play, and rewards new players who tend to play carefully.  It's tougher to maintain, but the point scores from a high hotshot combo are higher!!!

• Two new achievements have been added.
• The scoring system has been adjusted to encourage use of the hotshot system.

Miscellaneous

• The game engine has been updated (Godot 4.3 -> Godot 4.4).
• An older background seen on Mio's stage has been replaced with a pixel art rendition by Geomecs!!
• New refill quotes have been added across several stages.
• Refill quotes are no longer entirely random and will increase in horniness depending on the stage level.
• Some items on the Gumball Machine now require certain achievements to be completed. Fanart unlocks will often require a stage to be completed, but these requirements are generally hidden.
• The Vault: A new Guestbook page has been added. Unlocking this will bring back an old stage (Requires beating the campaign).
• The localisation files have been updated, mostly for Korean (thank you, Commander_P).
• A new mouse cursor style has been added for gameplay purposes.
• The Credits have been updated.
  • Individual sections can now be skipped by interacting with the primary input.
  • The supporters credits have been updated to reflect recent supporters!
    
• Fix: There is now a minimum window size of 800x450.
• Fix: Adjusted the click boundary for navigating out of the Settings menu.
• Fix: An issue where the screen transition might get stuck on white if moving through scenes too fast has been fixed.

New Merch!!

Head over to lemoncre.me to grab Kappu's bulge (mousepad)!! There's some other stickers of mine there, too...

One More Thing~!!!

We are now ready to share information on the first expansion to the game!

More than just a character pack, Boys in Hawaii! is an expansion building onto Kemopop! with new stages, characters, and features. More information on Boys in Hawaii! will be available soon!

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If you are interested in furthering the development of Kemopop! and other projects, consider joining my SubscribeStar...! You get to join a Discord server of likeminded people!!!