TL:DR: The game has been completely rebuilt to fix issues and add a lot more fun stuff

Patron and Itch Build Release: September 25th

Public Newgrounds Release: First Week of October

Today we wanted to discuss some crazy developments in the past few weeks regarding Cyber Rift (all good ones this time!). Over this past year when we switched to the Unity engine our main hope was to develop a framework to work quickly and effectively, while also adding in special touches to the environment as we went along. We've been using an asset from the Unity store called Naninovel, and tbh it's been really great! The only issue was our misunderstanding of how to use it properly. There was a fundamental issue with the way we were designing the game before, where instead of adding objects and stuff to an environment we were actually adding it to the UI instead. Naninovel is basically a UI layer that goes on top of the game, but we were only using that layer and ended up unintentionally locking ourselves out of all the features we wanted to use from Unity.

(bit of an extreme example but you get the idea!)

At first this wasn't an issue since the environments were fairly simple, but as we progressed pretty much every time we added a new button to the environment it wasn't actually locked into place. So any time someone with a different resolution than 16:9 ratio played the game it would mess up and cause some weird scaling to the art. This had always been frustrating and we had been trying to find a solution for a while, but now we realized we had to completely change the way the game was made to permanently fix this issue. At first this was pretty frustrating because Naninovel would keep taking over the Unity environment, but as we really delved into the code we discovered that it would be possible to have them coexist correctly, and allow us to create brand new environments in normal Unity scenes. Though this discovery was fantastic, we had to convert every single one of the backgrounds to work correctly. This meant over 25 separate backgrounds had to be reworked, and after doing that we setup special bits of code to let us plug and play new assets directly into the environment. End result is adding new features is going to be a lot faster.

(to give a perspective of how many environments we had to fix)

With the newly made environments however, we've been able to finally add the interactive elements that we sought after from the very beginning. You'll be to hover your mouse over the environments and have it highlight different objects to know what can be clicked, and also have unique dialogue and prompts based on what you interacted with. So we've managed to upgrade from just a simple Visual Novel with small interactive elements, to a full blown Point and Click Adventure that we'll be expanding quite heavily very soon. The best part of all these changes is we can now add assets far faster than before, as well as add fun stuff like particle effects and unique sounds to the environment without having to redo everything. Once this new version is out, we'll be working immediately on Update 1 and we'll have a lot of news on this once we're in full gear. 

(Reworked player room with all those green squares as interactive objects with unique dialogue. Players will be able to clean and discover things to their heart's content!)

To give a shortlist of all the changes you can expect:

-Reworked story intro and pacing

-Double the writing of first version with better pacing and structure

-25 new scene environments that we can easily expand on

-2 new backgrounds and 2 new CGs

-New live main menu and music track

-New galaxy map and live background

-New planet zoom in and area selection

-Tons of new interactive environment pieces and sprites

We also really want to iterate that this is only the beginning, and with these changes we're pretty much in overdrive to get the First Update started. We already have a few backgrounds prepared for that update, but we really wanted to fix the first part specifically to address all the various concerns and feedback that people have given. We're extremely excited to show off what we've been working on, and and we'll be publishing the reworked build to patrons 25th of September and the we'll be pushing the fully polished version onto Newgrounds by the beginning of October. And now to give you a sneak peak on what we've worked on, here's the brand new generator room!

(environment is full of interactive pieces and secrets, so we hope you'll have fun finding them all!)

That's enough for this news update! Hope you guys are excited as us for these new developments, and we'll have even more things to show off extremely soon!

For all the latest developments check out our links!

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