(This progress update originally came out on January 23rd 2022 on Patreon)

Hey everyone! Wanted to make a new art update to show off what we've been working on. This one is focused on the brand new character redesigns to be more in line with the new artstyle and environments.

One thing with the original version of Cyber Rift was that we hadn't become very confident in the artstyle, and although the designs we had were pretty good, we thought we could do a bit better. Every character including the protagonist has been redesigned from the ground up to fit better, and we've also added a brand new character! She's inspired by Jinx (you will really see it from some of the sketches).

Everie in particular has had a pretty extensive redesign, but we did want to keep close to her original concept with a reworked character motivation. One criticism we did receive with the original version of Cyber Rift was that the characters were a bit too flirty, and we really wanted to focus on giving every character their own unique personality and motivation. Everie in particular had a decently strong concept of an android trying to find her place in the universe, and since this is core to her character that will remain the same. The steps in which you'll find her will be a bit different however!

Elsie and the new character are something we've been working on pretty extensively as of late, and we wanted to show off a bit of our design process. Elsie's personality of a ex bounty hunter made a lot of sense for her character, but her design felt a little lacking in some regards. Now with a bit more of a punkish hairstyle and cybernetic attachments, we felt this was a more fitting design for her character. The character on the right side is the new addition to the crew, we've not yet determined what name we want to give her but we had a good feeling for what we wanted design wise. The initial outing of her character though a little too punkish and tattooed, so we toned that down a fair bit to this new version.

Finally character wise is the main protagonist! He also really needed a rework as we've had a fair bit of criticism where player did not enjoy the original version. This initial sketch was a little too chad for our liking, but you can see the initial concepts of cybernetics integrated into him. Since this is a process that we want to include our paying patrons into, we've added a few different versions of the characters and the current one we're happy with. We wanted you guys to be more into the process, so any feedback or criticism is greatly appreciated! This is project isn't just made by us, and we want as much patron involvement as possible!

Here's a few of the iterations:

And final version!

Hope you guys have enjoyed this Progress Update! We're working pretty hard on getting the build into a workable condition, no ETA just yet but we're very happy with progress so far. Next month we'll be showing off some of the new planet environments for the first demo!

(This progress update originally came out on December 2nd 2021 on Patreon)

Hello everyone! Today we're excited to show off a bit of the new concepts we've been developing for the reboot. Changing engines has definitely been a massive challenge for the team, but the overall benefits to the change have been 100% worth the ordeal. Our wonderful artist Pluzer has been extremely hard at work on the new ship and today I wanted to go over some of the concept art and mostly finished versions of art. 

The two main improvements we wanted to focus on when designing new areas of the ship are player interactivity and detail within the actual environments. What this entails is a more lengthy design process, but it also allows us to focus on the art and really improve every aspect of the game through it. Each environment will have some level of interactive things within it, and also the occasional easter egg for eagled eyed patrons as we continue to add and improve them. Engine wise Unity is a lot better than RenPy when it comes to this type of thing, and stuff like ambient effects, depth of field, and proper highlighting can be achieved a lot easier.

Other aspects such as character design are getting an equal focus. We've taken a hard look at how we try and design each and every character, and are working hard to make it a lot more tonally/visually distinctive for each encounter. This concept is actually of a brand new character with some inspiration from a recent pinup we've done, and we're going to be working on showing a much more detailed and interesting idle for her. Another aspect is we're going to work on more unique idles in general, and have the characters actually properly living in the environments. With the new day/night cycle this will be even more impressive, where specific times of the day can lead to unique character interactions.

As you can see the level of detail within the environment is up to a much higher standard, and Pluzer has been doing an incredible job working on each and every aspect of the new game. Storywise the game has also been dramatically revamped and we will have a dedicated update devoted to talking about the new changes. As we progress through development we really want you guys to have an active outlook on how far we're developing, so we will be having Patron polls asking you what types of things you'll want to add to the ship environments, potential different choices for how things should look, and finally how characters will be dressed! That's enough for this progress update, and hope you're excited for the next one!