Hi, we are Rocket Juice! We are a tiny team of 3 full time Indie Games makers based in Taiwan.

Neon Tail  is an open world roller skating game where you follow a young girl’s adventures and save the streets of Bluepulse City from dimensional disaster. She will meet many colorful characters and explore many fantastic locations of the city, from its various districts (shopping, business, residential etc) to its subways and sewers, to the unknown planes of existence.

The game is inspired by the urban dynamism of Jet Set Radio, the character development, narration, and emotional connections from Life is Strange, and the open world freedom from new gen Batmans.

This is  early prototype video:

Features

• Plot missions
• Side Missions
• Unique roller skating controls
• Fantastic sci fi city to explore
• Free roaming activities
• Explosive soundtracks
• Memorable characters, playable and NPCs
• Interesting Collectibles

Links

• Website: Neon Tail
• Early Access: Steam
• Support: Patreon
• Community:  Discord
• Facebook: NeonTail FB
  
• Twitter: @rocketjuicegame

We will update the progress of Neon Tail  here!

This looks like a a really interesting game. Have you considered customizing your game page at all? I don't think the default theme does the project justice.

Thank you for your interest in our game! And yes, we'll customize it :)

Neon Tail - Devlog 01   (March 10th, 2018)

A lot of things are happening lately. I’ve laid down several courses for the project to take depending on our situation. But beside preparing documents, plannings and other stuff indirectly related to the game content, I improved several basic control details, actually changing a lot to the playing feels.

• The grinding control, feels and orientation.
• The jumping has a smart animation selection, avoiding flips when detecting walls.
• Added slight aerial control, making a tremendous difference in combo difficulty.
• Wallrides are now separated into 2 states : classic wallride, with gravity pull and no control over direction and Boosting wallride.
• Added a mockup of the residential area, preparing a whole new environment workflow as given the size of the levels, the usual way won’t make it. (back to the ugly checker environment for now, but we’re working on it!)
• As usual, lots of miscellaneous bugs fixed.

Neon Tail - Devlog 02  (March 18th, 2018)

I've been poking around level design ideas in the residence area and been figuring out how a giant spill of coffee can serve as a grindable rail from many angles.
Other than that :
- Set up and testing new environment and props workflow.
- Refined mockup, reorganize, updated or modeled environment and props.
- Created a bunch of tilable normal maps.
- Grinding now zooms out on player's left stick input.
- Head follows camera all the time, instead of following only at low speed and looking forward at high speed

Neon Tail - Devlog 03(April 21th, 2018)

Hi there! I've been busy writing the game's designs, designing workflows, testings, modeling props, adding small animations, writing editor tools, and tweaking small changes to the wallriding code.I'm slowly replacing the mockup geometries with occlusion cullable props.Previously for the prototype, the environment meshes were huge, so no occlusion culling, and we had big pixel ratio problems. It wasn't optimised at all but I knew it, we were simply rushing for a presentation. Now with the LOD and the occlusion culling and a workflow written down, these should allow us way more details and flexibility as we slowly build up our props library.Hopefully I will be able to put up tons of NPCs, destructible objects, fun things etc...

The environment is completely a work in progress, as well as everything actually, but I believe the foundation of everything is ready for the executive work, so it's getting there, one small step at a time.

Have a nice week end!

Neon Tail - Devlog 04(April 29th, 2018)

Hi, this week’s devlog shows some progress over the props, slowly but steadily appearing in the environment. Still a long way to go, but I’m on it.
The lighting needs some attention too, I’ll get at it when all the props are created and placed.
Falling from the glass building’s slope sprung me out super far, I wasn’t expecting that… I’ll have to take a look at what happened there when I have the time.
Anyway, one thing at a time, too many things to do, not enough time, I’ll see you next week! :)

Neon Tail - Devlog 05(May 12th, 2018)

Well, I did some props. I'm taking a little time to try out design ideas on props.
I'd like to add the ability to place the character on either side of the screen for the selfies, will do that later.
I should probably move on to character modeling and animation, there's a lot to do and doing one thing for too long is dangerous for my schedule. I don't want to get entangled in design too long even if I'm not satisfied, since anything can be tweaked forever without improvement, and that will make me come back with fresher eyes.
See you next update! 

Looking nice, and the updates are very informative.

Neon Tail - Devlog 06(May 20th, 2018)

This week's #screenshotsaturday is just me skating around to show a couple of new props I did, such as the Doggoshop, a small empty booth, where I can sell smaller props, either fruits, magazines, toys, anything actually.
I also did more level design friendly stairs grounds and ramps.
Ah I also did cool giant speakers and animated them so they bounces to the beat, but I didn't have time to implement them in the game yet, so that's gonna be for next week.
See you next update! :)

Neon Tail - Devlog 07(June 16th, 2018)

Hi, my computer broke so I couldn't work for a while, but I'm back on track with this #screenshotsaturday !

I'm sorry the videos all look kind of sameish, but at least the progresses are clearly visible, however small they are.
Right now we're just creating more props, there's a huge amount of work to do, and a lot of visual decisions to think about.
I'll try to work more on the different grounds transitions, and create more of them. I found a bunch of bugs to fix to with the wallriding (again).
This is going to be a busy month.
Have a nice week end!

NeonTail_DevLog08 (June 30th, 2018)

Hi, this week's #screenshotsaturday I've created a hologram menu, and made it so the character would follow the screens as it rotates around.
I've updated both the anatomy and the clothes of the guy to match more with the girl.
I've added a small slide park with frogs, with a big statue with a grindable tongue, but the climbing design sucks as the bar to get up there aren't conveniently placed.
I've also started modeling another character, will try to finish him for next week. :)
Anyway, have a nice week end!

NeonTail_DevLog09 (July 14th, 2018)

Hi, for this week' #screenshotsaturday I got 2 new characters, one is made from another character base and the other a remodeling of style. I'd like to add a big flashy plastic belt to the new girl but I keep on wanting stuff and time is rolling, so I'll see that later.
Other than that invisible bugs fixed, again on wallruns and on landing. Unsurprisingly, new bugs appeared, like when landing the turning animation blend is wrong.
There's also that other animation transition bug from skating to idle that you can see in this video. I'll try to fix those quickly.
Anyway my characters are a bit all samish because I lazily used the same bases to save time, so next week I'll try to model an NPC that will have its own unique look.
A kid, a fat bearded dude, or an old groovy grandma maybe? 

Have a nice week end!

NeonTail_DevLog10 (July 22th, 2018)

Hi, this week is just 2 new characters. I added a groovy grandma, still wondering what to put on her T-Shirt, maybe a hippie color pattern or some fictional rock rap or metal band. She will be a shopkeeper, although I leave open the possibility to play with her as a character. Leaving that for later.

I did "extracted" a shirtless dude from the work I did on the other male model, as it didn't take much time. That actually means I duplicated it and quick tweaked it, that lacks design work, but I don't think it's that bad, I'll just need more different characters in the future and I really gotta move on now.

See you next update!

NeonTail_Poster

Hi, this week's  #screenshotsaturday is a sort of concept art that can be used as poster, cover, or presentation visual.
In short I've just been drawing for the last 3 weeks, this isn't my main thing and I learned too late some techniques I could try and experiment to shorten the production time for my future drawings. Drawing everything in clean line then painting over in crazy resolution wasn't that smart of me but meh it's something .
If some of you artists have general tips or critiques I would be happy to hear them, I will take note for later, but I have to move on for now as my schedule is pressing me on.
Have a nice week end!

NeonTail_DevLog10 (August 18th, 2018)

This week on#screenshotsaturday I finally started working on the gameplay, hitting those energy spheres to gather as much points as possible before shooting them all in a goal.
The winner is the one who shoots the most points in the goal. There are bigger versions of these spheres, that contains more points, that have their own bigger animations, and are climbable.
This week I've just created some sphere hitting animations and started coding the implementation. Tons of bugs for now, but it's kind of functional.
The update to Unity 2018 broke my UI, as well as the hair physics, but also revealed why I struggled so much with it.
By default Unity can have good physics handling with thing that have bigger scales, like planes tanks and car.
The ponytail is too small for the physics to work except if I made my character as big as Godzilla. I did tests, it's kind of funny as she looks gigantic.
Only 2 solutions : Either scale up EVERYTHING so that my ponytail is as big as a bridge, or code my own physics.
I'll do that later as either way it's quite a big amount of work.
That's it for this week, have a nice week end!

Neon Tail -  DevLog 12

This week's #screenshotsaturday I did a lot of small fixes.
- Fixed many bugs tied to the slapping of green spheres. The code behind it was a bit sloppy, now it is quite solid. Mainly been about a satisfying input feel, allowing the transition anywhere between the start of an attack to a little while after its ending, while keeping a smooth transition.
- Created a very primitive physics for the ponytail, it's missing the usage of mass and I'm hacking some fake gravity in it for now as time flies and I really need to move on. It will do for now, will come back at it later.
- Created a mockup level for a demo build, as the people who will play it will have never played the game, and as previous tests showed, people would mainly hit walls for 10 minutes, not knowing where to go this level is designed to be less opened to choices, with one large road to test the movement, introducing this dynamic city with many pedestrians and fantasy sci fi, including some basic skating, grinding and introducing the sphere slapping game at the end : hitting the spheres to gather points then unleash it all at the goal at the end of the wall, scoring enough before the timer goes out. Some AI and traps will try to stop you.
To do :
- Air attacks, backward combo and goal shooting animations and implementation.
- Big spheres are special, they hold more points, and I'll have to think of a cool animation where you end up standing on top of it, on the metallic circles around it, from where you can jump again. They can be used as platforms to access higher locations.

Neon Tail -  DevLog 13

Hi, this week's  #screenshotsaturday got me working quite hard :

- Added and implemented sphere slapping animation backward and aerial, as well as big sphere's jump and stand on it loop.
- Worked on this demo level a bit more with the materials and spheres placements, the grinding rail setting took me forever, and the collisions are mostly done, but still WIP.
- Fixed many invisible bugs.

Things are slowly coming together for this level. Still a lot to do, pedestrians, destructible objects, NPCs, Game Rules, points and timer, goal animations, pedestrian interactions, pedestrian animations, etc...
Made this video quite in a rush, but it's still saturday so it's all good.
See you next week :)

Neon Tail -  DevLog 14

This week's #screenshotsaturday shows steady progress :
- Environment update.
- Re positioned Spheres and rails.
- Created the game rules, simple timer, score, scoreboard.
- Added the "Style Tracker System", tracking jumps, grinds, wallruns, on beat grind and turn around. When a sphere game starts, style combos adds time to the timer.
- Added entering proving ground cutscene.
- Found a funny bug. See the end of the video! :3

Next week I'll add hitting goal animation, sphere game ending cutscene, environment props and start working on pedestrians.
Have a nice week end

Neon Tail -  DevLog 15

For this week's #screenshotsaturday a lot has been done, while a lot of sleep were lost. Also a lot of retries for this video haha.
- Environment update
- Hitting Goal cutscene (missing FX, WIP)
- Intro and outro added (WIP)
- Created and placeholding textured dummy pedestrians
- Animated many moves the pedestrians can do, like watching smartphone, lean on wall, sit on ground, sit on chair with without smartphone, party hard, evade, getting angry, getting hit hard, etc...
- Wrote the Pedestrian Manager, optimizing spawn amount and activities based on distance to player and camera visibility
- Integrated interactions with pedestrians
- Added pushable props physics
- Added secrets in the streets with good precision skills required (hence my many retries)

I'm looking for some electro pop music that are very dynamic, if possible with female vocals in. Something like "Fusq - Perfume" or "She - Coloris" would fit.
I don't have budget for now but arrangements can be made. Or if I really love the tracks I'll sell a kidney or something. ;)

Anyway, I'll keep rushing. Have a nice week end, see you next week!