Wishing everyone a happy 2023!

Looking back on 2022

2022 was a busy year for Kokoro!

One of the first things we did in 2022 was to introduce homerooms as a weekly gathering for students and friends to gather and chat!

Deco Club and Curry Club worked together to run the Valentines Park event

Development began on building interiors that will eventually be used in our town as student accommodation

We introduced movie nights, and Deco Club ran the Summer Games event!

Kokoro's Castle Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/P0PdTiO

Jetski Race Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/HCBmn5G

Pillow Royale Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/F0XeVtE

Our event winners~

Students gathered to plan Seiiki's future, and some initial layout plans were put together for the the phase 1 section of the town:

Plans were made for a new collaboration based clothing store in our town, which involves an experience based system that allows you to try on clothes in store!

A special new version of the uniform was made so we could enroll a very special student! We also made a flippy skirt~

We all gathered to do our second yearbook photo~

We started work on a new creators course aimed at helping students get into creating - The course involves learning a program popular with Japanese game studios - Metasequoia, and also texturing in Blender! We ran trial lessons on some of these courses to begin to work out the kinks and make sure it runs smoothly when the course starts for real. We also developed screen share laptops students can use to show teachers their work~

 

Towards the end of the year, things quietened down on the event side. Some small immersion improvements were made in the sim, including a new splash screen, smoother skybox teleports that don't play sounds, we also started working on a footstep sound system to increase immersion walking around the sim!

Some quality of life improvements were also made, for example we made it so if you teleport out of the sim briefly and teleport back within two hours, your location is restored - You don't have to walk from the spawn! We also added a couple of help points to the sim as a trial way of helping new comers!

We also started work on a new Tennis game, and although not strictly Kokoro related I released a Cheerleader and Tennis Outfit that will be perfect for just this~

Going into 2023

Help Wanted

Building and development is requiring a lot of time, and as such in recent months events and services that I usually run have suffered as a result, indeed in recent months I've been so focused on getting things finished that I haven't run homeroom or movie nights at all! I'm conscious that this isn't great, so I'm choosing to scale back these activities and make them better instead.

Homeroom I will now be running on a fortnightly basis on a Sunday, and Movies will be once a month for the time being. But I will actually run them! Promise! I could really use some help doing events and whatnot, so if students want to help on this front it would be appreciated!

Development Focused

Kokoro going into the start of 2023 is going to be focused on development efforts, this includes building the facades of all of the buildings in Seiiki, finishing the footstep sound system and tennis game. Although this means there will be less events at the start of this year, I hope you will find that the wait will be worth it!

I look forward to going into 2023 together with everybody!

Happy new year!!