Build 0.5 Has Arrived | State of Matterless #24
It’s been a big week for us! Check out what’s been going on in the latest update.
Build 0.5 Has Arrived
After much hard work, we’re ecstatic to have released Build 0.5 to our Patreon supporters! This major milestone in our quest to make digital things real includes improved graphics, animation, and sound to the AR Shiba, gaze detection that lets it look at you as you approach, automatic spawning and warping to far locations, and numerous quality of life improvements. It’s a joy to watch our supporters explore the new additions and we’ll be sure to share some of their matterless adventures in the coming weeks. Support our Patreon and you’ll get access to this closed beta build and all the improvements we’ll be releasing down the road!
Improving Our Om Nomming
Without breaking stride, we’re already going hard at the next stage of our Incos (the official name of our matterless animals) app, driven by the goal of digital intersubjectivity and learnings from previous builds. The first of these efforts is feeding, because after all, what else bonds humans and animals together than the mutual love of om-nomming? In subsequent updates, the slide-to-feed UI will be removed, and instead, you’ll be able to drop food directly into the AR space for your pet to munch on. Plus, we’ll be experimenting with hand-feeding so stay tuned for updates on how that goes!
The next big change we’ll be making to food is to replace the planting mechanism with something that’ll get you and your Inco more involved: digging for food! In this new system, you’ll use your hand to instruct your digital digging doggo to excavate a spot in search of food. There are a lot of ways we can expand on this feature, such as having different types of food in different areas and having your Inco hone its food searching instincts. These upcoming food systems are undoubtedly a more immersive approach that will better build kinship with your loyal friend!
Mood Intuition
Sometimes the most impactful changes we can make are to remove things, rather than add or replace them. In this case, the team is looking into visually removing mood meters so that you’ll have to pay closer attention to your Inco’s behavior. We want to bring your interactions with your Inco closer to that of a physical pet, rather than something more akin to The Sims, where every need is spelled out in the UI. Doing this should give the Inco more agency and let you spend more time with it in the AR space rather than looking at menus and meters. We’ll experiment around with this for a bit before coming to a final decision!
Onboarding
Ever played a game that started you off with a long, uninterruptible tutorial sequence? We want our users to get into the Matterless world right away once they load up the app, so the current tutorial phase in the beta will be replaced with smaller and more modular tutorial pieces that crop up here and there as you go along with the experience!
You can expect some of these improvements in the next 0.6 build, which, based on our current development schedule, will be out sometime in August. In the meantime, we’ll be releasing Build 0.51 very soon, which will include the much-anticipated hand reconstruction feature that will let you pet your Inco! Follow our Twitter and Discord for the latest updates on that.
That’s our update for this week, see y’all next time!
Kerwin, social media manager
