Hello everyone, this update is a special one as I just released the biggest update to Numina yet! Version 1.14 brings many improvements & new features which I like to get into below! Also stick around for updates on Numina Part II further down. New Relationship Gameplay Mechanics Improving relationships to Shawn and other party members previously mostly affected the story. Each character had a battle skill that scaled with the relationship level, but apart from that there wasn't much interaction. This changes with the added relationship mechanics in 1.14! Each character gets a specific sets of special abilities that unlock once you progress their relationship level. These can be seen in the status screen for each member:
These abilities can increase the max TP amount, reduce costs of certain techniques or even grant TP bonus when a loved one takes damage in battle! The goal was to deepen the impact of the relationship system on the actual gameplay. As you can see not every level unlocks a new ability. But each character have their own unique set of them! General Rebalance Pass This is another big update. I've went through the entirety of Part I and rebalanced the battle system. Party members with Arc have more of an edge now as he can do more damage and gain TP more efficiently. Apart from that I've also adjusted some battles to be more challenging, or less frustrating. Another big addition was a new rule for TP generation, whereas you gain at least 1 TP each round. If you already played Numina, you know that TP are accumulated during battle by doing & receiving damage or guarding and can be used for elemental techniques. This means that as long as you're not K.O. you'll be guaranteed to get 1 TP per round. Previously some characters like Arc or Sarah had difficulties in some parts of the game actually putting damage through tougher enemies, so their only option was to defend to gain TP. I will keep monitoring these adjustments, so any feedback is greatly appreciated and will help me for future adjustments to make the game more fun! Translation Improvements While replaying Part I it was also important for me to rework the English translation of the game. I have to admit that the quality of the translation wasn't up to my personal standards mostly caused by the time constraints of hitting the release date of Part I. But now I've updated a huge chunk of the main story dialogue. Not just to be more grammatically sound, but also to hopefully be more natural and less jarring in places. More Options! I added a bunch of minor new options, the biggest one (in my book ) the possibility to chose your own Guardian Spirit color for the dialogue choices!
There's also a new difficulty option: Story. Enemies almost all go down with a single hit, when you want to focus more on the story. Smaller Fixes - Added webGL Support for the Overworld Map (this previously caused issues for some players with older GPUs) - Fixed weird sequence break where Player could agree to help Cassandra go to Elnath but then go back to Phaladar and cause weird cutscene glitches - Fixed wrong dialogue when Player didn't help Sarah with Jael - Enemy Selection in Battle now stores last selected Enemy (Bugfix) Update on Numina - Part II Now, I've already alluded to this in the last Devlog. But sadly, I won't be able to finish Numina Part II in time to release this holiday season. So I'm moving the release window to early 2023 with more details on the exact release date & pricing as we get closer to gold status. I'm almost done with the final parts of Part II, the endings and after that, the beta test can begin. But I'm expecting people to have less time with the holidays around the corner, so it's probably for the better to move the release into early next year. Thank You! This year has been very special in a lot of ways to me personally. But one of my biggest milestones was to finally get Numina out into the open again and the support and appreciation I've seen from you guys makes very, very happy. So thank you everyone for your continued support! It truly means the world to me. I'm currently finishing up a second smaller soundtrack release with all the pieces I've worked on (many of them from the upcoming Part II), which I'm going to give away to everyone who bought Numina Part I this year as a little holiday present. These are pieces that aren't on Tom's OST release and one of them being a very special central theme of Part II I'm very excited about! More on that in the next update!