MV - Numina - Trailer, Release Date + FREE DEMO LAUNCH!

Step through the 4th Wall…​

…into the world of NUMINA. You get in contact with Shawn who is able to hear your voice through the 4th wall! You meet in a very critical moment where Shawn loses someone very close to him while being swept up in a conspiracy that involves your mutual bond. A plot threatening to shake the foundations of the world.

Your bond will be tested in an exciting adventure that fuses many classic RPG aspects: A character-driven story in which your relationships change the course of the story, a dynamic battle system, challenging puzzles, towns waiting to be explored and other exciting locations!

Key Features​

• Breaking the 4th Wall
  The 4th wall is a concept from theater where the actors on stage directly interact with the audience. In the same fashion, you partake in the story of Numina as a character in the form of a bodiless voice that only Shawn can hear - a guardian spirit. You can interact with Shawn and influence his decisions through dialogue choices in the game.
  
  
• Branching Decisions
  The decisions you make influences the relationship Shawn has with the other characters you'll meet in the game. Having good relationships with your party members unlocks powerful combo-attacks in battle and may open up the opportunity to take your relationship to the next level ♥ Your decisions also influence the overall course of the story to conclude into one of the four possible endings.
  
  
• Battle with the Elements
  Engage in a round-based combat system with action inputs for some attacks that require you to make timed inputs for maximum damage! Each character also has unique elemental abilities to exploit enemy weaknesses. Incorporate this into your strategy to quickly win battles.
• Explore the World of Alterna
  Most side quests in NUMINA allow you to dive deeper into the backstory and lore of the world. But you can also explore the beautiful scenery with your grappling hook to reach higher places and find new gear, spell scrolls or rare items.

Join our lovely Community over at Discord!​

If you want to chat with other lovely people and get some exclusive sneak peeks join the official Numina Discord!

This looks really fun! And your mapping looks stellar. I'll definitely check out the demo!

Agreed! I love your maps :) I'll grab the demo as soon as I'm back to my computer.

@Dust By the way, were the sprites made in Spriter Pro? I'm working on replacing the MV default chibis in my game, and the sprites I'm making in Spriter Pro look really similar! Beautiful work!

Thank you guys! :) Can't wait to hear your feedback!

@hppyniss The sprites are actually all based on the standard RTP from RMXP - I edited them with Photoshop CC :)

Okay, so some notes up to how far I've gotten.

Some positives first..

The game looks very pretty, I can clearly see you put an extreme amount of effort into your game and it was worth every drop of sweat.

I like the little interactions between the characters, the cooking of the food was nice.

There aren't really that many specific things to point out, I just like the game so sorry if my positive list is far too short.

Now for the negative aspects, most are nitpicks I think, but still I want to tell you about them.

1. The maps on your way back to Shawn's house are far too dark, I find that if I'm not sitting face into the computer screen it is near impossible to see all the unwalkable tiles, this also goes for the houses during night, it is just far too dark to be able to sit comfortably and play the game.
2. For as large and detailed as your maps are I find that there is little reward for looking around, I did find the shortsword, some potions and other little things that I enjoyed finding as a reward for looking, but it still felt like a lot of the maps were pure emptiness that were only there to pass through and never sit around and admire.
3. Your combat system, while different, I think it feels too much like a gimmick than an actual system. I find myself just smacking space right away and doing nearly the same amount of damage if I had attempted to time the circle, and this is a consistent thing. I really only notice it when i get a "perfect block", but even then it doesn't feel like a perfect block as it looks like it only takes off maybe 1 or 2 points of damage most the time.
4. Raph's axe attack is extremely confusing, I find myself never able to hit anything other than a failure with it as it doesn't explain how it works other than push right and charge up, but once i charge to any level of the meter it still says it fails and does kinda trash tier damage.
5. As flashy and well produced as the cutscenes are I think it feels like an exposition dump than anything else, I found myself losing interest rapidly after about 2 or 3 minutes and after that i just hit space and couldn't be bothered to read too much. I wasn't interested in the random guards, the four people running out of the temple, the villains. You will probably hear this A LOT and especially if you get greenlit as the steam community is pretty damn brutal, players just want to get into the action as fast as possible and find the story on their own or in small bits here and there.
6. The Lindworm is far too powerful if you don't collect a lot of potions as it can nearly one or two hit any of the party and if you aren't always using a potion you could easily lose a person or two.
7. Gold seems a bit hard to come by early and it feels odd to have that wandering trader there when you couldn't possibly afford even a potion at that moment in time.
8. There is a lot of backtracking from the village out into the valley for quests that don't reward much, the chicken was hard to find if i hadn't spotted it on my way out for the main quest and the flower I knew exactly where it was, but still a lot of backtracking.
9. The BIGGEST problem i've encountered that I think you need to patch right away before anyone else puts time into your demo is that your Crystallite boss is broken, I don't believe this was your intention at all, but he is impossible to defeat because he will use Crystal Harden EVERY turn, he also seems to get two turns to the player's one, so he attacks and than hardens making you go on guard with Shawn and Sarah and forcing you to use Raph's heavy attack and once you've damaged him he will just heal for 100-110 health every like 6 or 7 turns, about once you've broken his barrier a few times. I had to rage quit from the game because he cannot be defeated.
10. Also Guard seems to do nothing, it doesn't reduce any damage taken or it is so small i couldn't possibly notice it.

Also there is a spelling error when you are telling Sarah about the bathroom in that cutscene. Your is yuro.

Game looks great, upvoted on Steam!

@parallax Hey there! Thank you very much for your detailed feedback :)

Regarding the darkness of some maps: I guess, I need to figure out a way to incorporate brightness calibration into the game to make it work for every monitor & configuration.

And yeah, I'll need to do some rebalancing, especially for the earlier enemies since they don't deal a lot of damage and the whole perfect block / critical damage formula isn't so effective in these value-ranges, without going into too much detail. But regarding the Crystallite Boss: It's actually a puzzle boss!
I hope that boss didn't kill your motivation entirely for picking the game up again, since I feel like it would improve your general impression regarding some of the points you mentioned. And I get your point on the focus on dialoge, I'm definitely looking into loosen things a bit more up between scenes. It's a very hard thing with the limited amount of tools for expression when trying to tell a character-driven story :)

@Dust

Okay well that explains a lot. I think you need to find a way to suggest to the player that it is a puzzle boss as I would never have even begun to think that. I did notice the glowing crystals, but with all the fancy lighting and detail you have I figured it was just another piece of pzazz rather than a puzzle.

I'll go back in and give it a try again.

@Dust

Okay this is a seriously critical problem >.>

I just started the game up again and the menu system is gone, i have the title and it can move to where the options would be, but nothing can be selected, so there isn't a continue, new game, options or the support you there.

I got into my save, but that was a weird bug.

@Dust

Nevermind I didn't lose anything, the auto-save or my manual save is just REALLLLLLLLLLLLLY far back. That is very discouraging :l

When i talked to the old fortune teller in the Inn camp i got a syntax error and the game crashed.

@parallax I'll think of a way to give away a hint for the boss beforehand :) That bug you had with the menu sounds very strange, like the font couldn't be displayed correctly. I can't imagine what could have caused this, hopefully it was a one-time weird thing...

I have a small update for everyone: Numina was greenlit! Thank you so much for your support! I really appreciate that the project has it's followers after all the years I worked on it. I'd like to release one more update for the Demo with some fixes & improvements that from your feedback. See you soon!

Hello everyone!

I've just released the GOLD UPDATE for Numina's demo! It includes various fixes & improvements based on all the feedback I got from you guys. Download it now on itch.io & check the list with all the changes below:

• The game can now be played without the need to install it!
• Option to pick the game's language on the first launch.
• Additional puzzle in the "Shimmering Hollows" with a clue for the dungeon's boss
• Additional puzzle in the "Forset of Lost Memories"
• New "Preemptive Attack" gameplay feature when suprising enemies from behind!
• Enhanced "Inspect"-Skill with insights to elemental strengths & weaknesses of enemies
• General battle rebalancing
• Repacing of some early story parts & dialogue reworks
• Added missing english translations

This looks great. Unfortunately I don't have time to play it, might try it out later.
From what I can see maps are beautiful, but what I really like is lightning on these maps.
Anyway this project is not getting enough attention.From what I've noticed a lot of great projects with great presentations like this aren't getting enough support.Probably because a lot of them never gets finished and people became very skeptic.I could be wrong...
Keep up the good work, I wish you best luck with this and I encourage you to keep updating us with your progress as much as possible.
I'll let you know what I think of gameplay once I test it.

Downloaded the game, but when i start it the only buttons that work are my arrow keys and i have to alt tab to select anything. Also the menu disappears sometimes and is just replaced with a foggy box that moves up and down the menu options, but again nothing can be clicked.


EDIT: Got the game to play after i restarted my computer.

@J0pac Thank you for your kind words! I'm happy about every bit of attention the project gets and I can also understand that people tend to be sceptical when it comes to really elaborate and long-running projects like mine.

@KokoroSensei That sounds very strange, never heard of that problem before. I'm glad that you got it to work after all - looking forward to your feedback on the game :)

I played through the entire demo and I'm obsessed! You got my vote on Greenlight - and I'm super excited to see what you're able to push out! I do have one piece of feedback though - in battles, the timers aren't very responsive, and sometimes I'll get perfect blocks/criticals even by hitting the button at the beginning of the sequence. Otherwise though, everything was so well-polished!

@Euphony this reminds me of the old days of RMXP - and Nadir's Canon/Akasha Seal specifically. :kaoeh:

@IAmJakeSauvage Thank you so much for your Feedback :) I'm happy that you liked the demo! The responsiveness of the action-timings are definitely a big point I want to improve on for the future release of the game.

Second Chapter "Hoffnung" & HD-Glory!
Wow, it's been so long since I've been able to share some progress with you. I'm happy to announce that I'm not only making very good progress on Numina's 2nd chapter, titled "Hoffnung" (try to pronounce that :D It's German for "hope"). I'm currently planning on going into betatesting it in the later half of this year.



I've also updated the entire game to HD (1280x720) and I'm really happy with the results. Please have a look for yourself at the screenshots from this post. This was a huge undertaking since it required me to upgrade the project to RPG Maker MV, Which took a lot of time but also brought a lot of other advantages which I like to address in future updates :) ! "Numina HD" will release with the 2nd chapter.

The Road to Patreon
I've been thinking about creating a Patreon for a while now. This project requires a lot of my creative energy, sweat, tears and especially time. It would be my dream to work on it fulltime but sadly I can't afford that, so I've been looking into alternatives that would allow me to spend more time on the project AND also keep on collaborating with other artists such as my very gifted & talented friend Thomas J. Peters who contributed the majority of Numina's soundtrack.

So if you like the project, please have a look at the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/numina There's also a "behind the scenes"-like tutorial series, where I share my secret techniques for which I'd normally have to kill you :D If you ever wanted to look behind the black magic of a crazy effect or something you saw in the game, this is your chance! The first episode is free for everyone to enjoy while upcoming episodes will be Patreon exclusive:

If Patreon's not your thing you can also just buy the demo on itch.io or buy me a coffee.

Lastly, I want to thank each and everyone of you on here for staying with the project for all this time! Your comments are really motivating and interesting to read.

All the best and see you all soon!

It isn't RMXP?