The development of Juno has come far. Initially, what was a zoomed out amalgam of madness in which you must squint your eyes in order to see what was on the screen and keep track of an extremely busy UI has now been simplified into a very streamlined experience.
The map UI itself has been upgraded. There is now a hot key system where you can quickly slot in consumables and blow through them with never before seen godly goodness speed!
There is now a time gauge which easily lets you keep track of time in the game which in turn allows you to know when to move to designated areas for special events! Keep in mind NPCs have different move paths based on whether it is a weekend or holiday.
The battle system has been rehauled with regards as to flow. There is no battle command anymore. Instead, depending on which button you press, there is a circular gauge which pops up allowing you to cycle through each skill and swap them out as per necessary. This is accessible only when the battle gauge is full or at the start of battle. The weird overlay with actors when in abnormal or crisis state has been disabled by disabling those motions
Currently finished is the spirit realm generator. This ties in with certain story elements and as such cannot be elaborated on upon further. The layout of these realms are different every time and as such, trying to memorize a path through them is pointless. Some may also loop infinitely.
They come with the general fare of pitfall traps, monster spawners, teleport into lava, the nice stuff.
With so many changes (Mostly under the hood) the demo has been disabled. progress of development may be followed on the twitter account.
Current focus of development right now is story/debugging.
Juno Devlog #2: UI and Scene Reworks, Story Write up started
It's that time again! Devlog!!!
To start things off, this devlog deals with the modifications to the game UI mainly and some functionality updates as well.
UI MODIFICATIONS
Main Menu
To start it off, let's talk about the main menu updates:
First is the modified inventory. In game, players can hold a maximum of 30 items at any given time. It is currently still under debate as to whether to allow similar items to stack but the final decision will be made based on the story and crafting elements once those are finalized.
The first thing you'll notice on the inventory tab is that you can see the remaining avatar transformations, your HP (Health Points), EP (Energy Points) and stats. below everything is a rank progress bar which shows the % till the next level.
The next tab shows the status of Juno in that you are able to view states affecting Juno as well as, when unlocked in game, runes and their status effects as shown below:
Runes occupy a space on the soul board which will be explained in game but in short, it's an equipment system which does not follow traditional RPG rules in that you must equip a weapon on a weapon slot and an armor on an armor slot. You are free to place as many runes, however you want barring the in-game explained limitations.
Skills in Juno are plentiful and as such, it was a task to navigate through all those menus looking for a particular skill or even to equip/unequip them when closing and reopening the menus as such, a sort and filter mode have been added to the skill modification:
This makes it super easy to navigate throughout all the nearly 200 skills in game. There is a limit to only being able to carry 10 skills into battle at a time however.
The social tab has also been reworked to bring it more inline with the rest of the menu interface as well as show you the appearance Juno takes when performing an avatar transformation with that character.
You can view a compact version of skill information by tapping the [Confirm] button which you can set in game, speaking of which...
You can modify the input settings of the game. Yeah. Not much can be said on this point to be honest. It's something that's expected in all games in this day and age and I'm saying that it's here.
Battle Scene
There have been complaints that the battle scene does not occupy the entire screen and looking at some of the old screenshots like these:
I can understand why. The UI was also a confusing mess but that's a thing of the past, the new UI and scene:
Has a more compact player status removing a lot of unnecessary elements like weapon data and boxy graphics which serve to be more eye-sore than functionality. the battle area also occupies a significant portion of the screen but has been changed so that the arena now shrinks instead of expands.
The grids are now compacted together and minimize on the wasted space your eyes would have to move to observe the entire field.
The battle command now appears above Juno's head but this is a UI element that may be subject to change based on player feedback.
Skills in battle do not show a lot of detail as compared to before given that you can observe this detail from the main menu.
Likewise changed are the avatars you can assume in battle:
More information is given towards the status boosts and skills.
FUNCTIONAL MODIFICATIONS
Most functional changes would be related to the battle scene which can be summarized into bullet points:
Player Speed limit cap adjusted, motion speed bonus to AGI increased! (You get more speed from AGI)
Summon type skills added, players and enemies can summon a battler to do battle. The summoned battler doesn't have much of an AI so it's not good to rely on it too much.
Damage Obstacles added: Obstacles which cause damage on impact and can affect movement and projectiles.
Blind State (Player): Now noise effect the entire screen to make it harder to see.
Skill use now recharges after every battle, balancing factors implemented to prevent abuse.
Skills can now be directly used instead of having to shift to them in battle thanks to input upgrade.
Avatar uses recharge if not used in battle.
Development Log #1: UI Reworks and Maps
Good day everyone, this is the first development log for Juno RPG. Since releasing the demo, multiple changes have occurred with regards to the game UI, maps and skills.
First to discuss would be the UI reworks.
The inventory scene as seen in the demo version of the game is rather annoying in that the item data window covers up the player status window making it hard to see what items you need to and don't need to use. Whilst still in progress, the scene rework also comes with an inventory limitation which means that you can't exactly run around with every single item in the game on your person at the same time.
This still needs more work to be done on it as development move towards centering the game more on a progression focus of crafting and relationship building.
Next would be the menu. In the demo, when the menu is called, everything still progresses as normal which leads to certain bugs. The new menu scene changes this by allowing players to quickly be able to take a breather whenever and wherever they can.
From the menu, already discussed was the inventory above, so for status, it remains more or less the same as it is in the demo version with a modification towards the rune system parameters and zero stat penalties.
With no penalties to having zero (0) stats, a player would have been able to make hilariously lopsided builds which maximized attack and speed whilst having no guard whatsoever. This has been fixed and now, if a player has too many zero stats, they may find that all other stats begin falling towards zero no matter how many [+] runes they add to their board.
It is still possible to make max power characters but in the full version, this requires creativity.
The battle scene is a topic of discussion. Development has progressed towards ironing out bugs for the arena adjustment and arena area stealing which means you can use skills to modify the battle arena to your advantage and seriously lay on the hurt on enemies.
Do be aware that not all bugs have been smashed yet and this is still a successfully on going process.
Next would be the exclusive summoning skills which allow you to have one ally with you on the battle field until they die or expire. They may not be the most intelligent helpers but their assistance may prove extremely beneficial nontheless.
Lastly would be the maps and story (First layer). The reason why it is, story-first layer, is because it is confusing to simply toss players into an open world and tell them to find it and as such, the story will be written with first a focus on unlockable areas as the first layer and missions that direct the player on the second layer. The subsequent layers will be considered as development progresses.
Special thanks to these resource creators for making this possible: - whtdragon - hiddenone - Avery - Pearsona - RavenBlackBird - AlephNull - Jack Saintsworth
