After long preparation, we're excited to kick off Season 3 of 100% Orange Juice in the roll-out of version 3.14 ~CutiePie~!
Season 3!
Season 3 kicks off with an introductory event, School Grudges! Marie and Kai don't seem to have anything in common. Marie is a popular girl with a strong personality, while Kai sort of fades into the background. But both of them are hiding something about themselves. Because her mom works full time, Marie has to spend most of her free time caring for her younger sisters and herself. Meanwhile, Kai is hiding a more nerdy side - he listens to idol music wherever he goes, and carries a deck of cards that he never shows anyone.
The two might not have much in common, but they do have camouflage. That's enough to spark a beautiful relationship.
The Old Guard Is Here!
Two long-awaited new characters slide into 100% Orange Juice! Suguri (46 Billion Yen) and Sumiko are now playable for owners of the Old Guard Pack!
Create chaos on the battlefield with Suguri and Sumiki's unique mechanics!
Suguri (46 Billion Yen)
HP 5, ATK +1, DEF +2, EVD -2, REC 6 Gain a Stock Counter upon playing a card.
All Stocks at the Ready (BOTTLE) Level 3, Cost: 30 Pay all Stock Counters owned. If you have more Stock than your opponent, you buy the company and defeat them. Repeat this as many times as the Stock Counters paid.
Sumuka
0/+1/-1, 7 HP, 6 REC Every time you take a damage, your current HP goes down by 1.
Heart of Dorkness (BOOT) Lvl 2, Cost: 20 Target another active player. Next time they are challenged or challenge a unit, play a game of Tetris (the hard one). If you win, gain 1 star. On game over, lose the game.
Chaos Mode Added!
A new Chaos Mode has been added to the game! The mode is permanent and we promise a minimum of 5 years of support for it, including 2 new game modes, a battle pass, new characters, a helpline and increased banner rates. Chaos Mode will be retired on April 30. Thank you for your support!
Players finishing the Chaos Mode will receive a Mikky Mousse (Steamboat Willie version) skin for Marie Poppo.
Other Changes in Version 3.14
Added new shop to Bounty Hunt mode: Stockbroker, which sells new Share Cards (RBIT, WRDA, HBBY) which function as cards whose purpose is to be resold back at star amounts that will vary throughout the course of the game. A Stock Market graph has also been added to the GUI to display current market trends for the convenience of all players.
Added Idle Mode: In this mode, you can only spectate, while your avatar of destruction plays against other CPU-controlled characters. You can also bet on the winner (in select countries). The winner gains stuff.
OJ Chess has been added! We're not quite sure what it does yet, but it's looking cool!
Balance
Self Destruct causes you to always roll 6 in battle. Dev note: This is just a description change. The functionality is unchanged.
Store Manager (Boss) now gains +2 EVD at 1 HP. Dev note: We found this boss was massively underperforming compared to the rest in our sample of 2 games played.
If you have 5 stacks of Golden Egg as Chicken, you can summon Eggs-odia and automatically win the game. Dev note: eggcellent.
Sweet Creator has resigned as CEO of the Sweet Gods due to increased public scrutiny for being under investigation for connections to organized crime, counterfeiting and willfully disregarding FDA regulations. Dev note: We take all rules and regulations seriously.
Fixes:
Fixed a Co-op issue where Big Poppo's minion would erroneously show up as the boss.
Fixed an issue where Star Breaker would erroneously win the game when landing on a home panel with 14+ wins.
Fixed an issue where Chaos units could not be leaked into other modes.
Full patch notes can be read on the Steam forums! Happy crawling chaos!
Community Card Pack 4 has been added to the game! The pack contains 6 new cards based on community card ideas, and illustrated by community artists! The pack contains 3 Common, 2 Uncommon and 1 Rare card.
Contest of Cuteness (BATTLE)
Lvl 3, Cost: 5 May only be used by the attacker. The battle is decided by a contest of cuteness. Cuteness = 10 - Max HP - ATK + EVD, but no less than 0. Instead of rolling for attack, both units roll two dice and add the total to their Cuteness. If one unit has a higher Cuteness, they steal 5x the loser's Lvl stars and gain 1 Win. Then end the battle. Can only use against players. Illustration: WoodChin
Warp Control (BOOST)
Lvl 1, Cost: Lvl x5 Upon activating the next Warp or Warp Move panel, choose another Warp or Warp Move panel to warp to. Illustration: Ritsu
My Wild Friends (BOOST)
Lvl 2, Cost: 10 Summon a random friendly unit on your panel that is an available wild unit type. It gains 1 HP. The summon will challenge any enemies and gives half of the stars it gains to the summoner. Replaces any previous summon. Illustration: ScorpionCard
Rebellion (EVENT)
Lvl 2, Cost: 20 Effect Duration: 3 chapters. All players will receive +1 ATK, +1 DEF, and +1 EVD when fighting a player with a higher Lvl than them. Illustration: Calamari-Pop
Nanako's Bit (GIFT)
Lvl 1, Cost: 0 Randomly gain +1 ATK, +1 DEF, or +1 EVD at the start of battle while this card is held, and lose 7 stars. This card is discarded upon KO or use. Illustration: Baedong
Bank of Poppo (TRAP)
Lvl 1, Cost: 0 The first unit to activate this trap loses Lvl x10 stars. If any stars were lost, the trap stays on board and the lost stars are given to the next player to trigger the trap. Illustration: pencilchewing
Version 3.16 also includes a multitude of other changes, please see the full patch notes on the Steam forums!
We hope you'll have a lot of fun with the new cards!
Ho-ho-ho! Merry Xmas from your local Santa! Hope you have all been good kids!
The promised Xmas event is now live with the Scramble!! for an Xmas Miracle! event returning for 2 weeks!
Please note that this is an unaltered rerun with no added rewards - if you have completed the event previously, it will immediately show up as completed for you. However you can still participate in handing out the present for extra rewards, and earn Xmas Cakes to unlock Xmas costumes for all characters!
2023 was in many ways a challenging year for us. Some reasons may be obvious - the post-Covid economy which has been hitting creative industries hard for the past year, as people have less disposable income, others less so, and though I have hinted at some developments in a past livestream, I promised to go into more detail though I find it a heavy subject to write about.
During the early Covid years, we were lucky enough to enjoy a large influx of new players, thanks to both people staying at home more, and us giving away millions of free games in a stay-at-home campaign. We invested the increased sales into hiring more developers so we can put in more work for you - the team currently has 5 developers working on 100% Orange Juice alone, in addition to artists, translators, QA and other support staff.
A specific goal in this recruitment drive was to be able to work on a certain project simultaneously with the ongoing 100% Orange Juice development.
For many years, people have been asking, "when will 100% Orange Juice be ported to Switch? Will it be available on mobile?"
The answer to that question has been that the engine made it rather impossible to port the game to other platforms. But in fact, we've been secretly working on a full remake of 100% Orange Juice in a new engine since 2018, with the goal of both modernizing the internal architecture and visuals of the game, and being able to release it on other platforms as well. The project restarted once on the way after staff changes, but the latest version was getting far enough that at the start of 2023 we temporarily assigned most of our developer team on it in the hopes that we could boost it to completion before the lower dev time spent on the live version of 100% Orange Juice becomes an issue (working on a remake of a game that's also getting constant changes at the same time isn't the most efficient way to develop something, after all).
It was supposed to be a fun surprise when we can reveal it to everyone (which we were planning to do soon). Then something happened.
You may have noticed I avoided mentioning the name of the engine we were developing the remake in, and some of you might've already guessed where this is going from that.
Yes, we were porting 100% Orange Juice to Unity.
From the beginning this came with some caveats, as the development cycle for the Unity engine has always had some issues, but it also had the best terms of use, and was determined to overall make development much easier once the remake is finished.
Then in September 2023, Unity announced their "controversial" new pricing model, which would've completely annihilated us as it was originally laid out. Shocked, we instantly froze work on the Unity version while waiting on more news to come out. While Unity eventually walked back the worst details of that decision, all the info that came out as a consequence coupled with the way they rolled out that change out of the blue in the first place had already done the damage. With our port approaching the halfway point to completion, we could either continue working on the Unity port full power for another 2 years, hoping things don't get worse, or we could cut our losses and kill the project. Given the status of the project and our loss of faith in the engine for the game that's basically keeping the food on the table, we chose the latter with heavy hearts.
That doesn't mean we're giving up on porting the game to other platforms, but we don't have the resources to start a new full port from the scratch. Instead we're now looking at steadily replacing the old modules of the live version of 100% Orange Juice to eventually make it compatible with more hardware and other platforms. What it does mean, though, is that all the time and money spent on the Unity version over... 6 years was more or less entirely wasted, apart from the experience gained from it.
Due to the aforementioned dev reallocation, 2023 was a slow year for new content in 100% Orange Juice. At the same time, with the economy at large returning to normal, 2023 saw an overall drop in sales, leaving us with a bigger development team, less sales, and at the same time people understandably complaining about a lack of new content.
Sometimes stars just don't align the way you want them to.
I want to emphasize that this doesn't mean we're going to have layoffs, or that we're stopping work on our games, or anything like that. This post isn't about that. While 2023 left us in the red, we're dealing with it in other ways as best we can. In fact, this Patreon is one of those ways - we're seeking alternative revenue streams to help support our ongoing development work.
As of late 2023, all of our 100% Orange Juice developers are back working on the live version, and while we had a lot of backlogged content to wrap up (such as the Bounty Hunt rework), you can expect a lot more in 2024 - the 10 year anniversary of 100% Orange Juice on Steam! There are a ton of things we've wanted to do but figured out make more sense in the Unity version, which has become almost an internal meme at this point. Now we will be focusing on gradually implementing those in the live version.
If the Patreon doesn't take off, or ends up being more trouble to maintain than it's worth, it may end up short lived, but I figured it's worth a try.
So what will you actually get in return for supporting us on Patreon? Not much, really, and we don't recommend you do it if your finances are tight. We will be posting random stuff from behind the scenes irregularly relating to whatever we're working on - some disaster screenshots from things gone wrong in development, ramblings by developers, and possibly teasers for new content. For those curious, I've attached a small gameplay video from an earlier Unity build on the page. There might be more stuff like that. The last thing we want is for people feel they need to sign up on Patreon for exclusive in-game content, so that's not going to happen.
If we get good ideas, we might add more tiers later, but for now there's just a single $5/month support tier that will give you access to all of our posts.
Thank you for reading this far, and thank you for your support over the years.