(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!