Preview of one of the new locations and a glimpse of one of the two new characters!
Gonna be a bit more of a candid update compared to usual, but I wanted to go into a bit of detail on what's been happening with Cyber Rift as well as some updates on the path forward for the game. Got a lot of stuff to cover today so let's get to it starting with a bit of a screenshot preview!
Development wise I've been making a massive effort behind the scenes to make some very major changes to the game in order to both fix up the foundation as well as add some major features. Currently the progression has some pretty big underlying issues and I wanted to go into a bit of detail on why that's been happening. Basically every single background is set to a different scene in Unity, which doesn't sound like a big deal but it makes it so you have to load the new scene every single time you enter a room.
Consolidated scripting for the ship is going to make things a hell of a lot more consistent!
And in that process a lot of the checks were done differently or strangely at times, which has caused inconsistencies to form throughout the entire game. A great example of this is if you gave the jackets to the girls in the wrong order this could completely bork the game's progression. In order to fix that I've decided rather than continuing to work in the same way, I'd change up the format of the game's underlying code to accommodate a more stable progression path. A major part of this is to group the bulk of scenes within their respective planets/sections to not only fix progression, but also reduce the amount of loading overall.
Sketch of the brand new shop UI I'm adding for outfits since the current version in the game is quite barebones.
Another major change is I'm currently reworking the entire UI with newly created art and doing it outside the tool I had mainly been using. Along with this I've also been working with a friend to create an entirely new dialogue tool with some big quality of life changes. Stuff like being able to make the dialogue box transparent to allow for easier visuals, and even hide the dialogue box entirely for the more exciting scenes. Even more I wanted to add the possibility of including localized dialogue, but the current setup didn't allow for that at all because so much of the dialogue was not made in the same tool. Finally the last major thing is the entirety of the UI is getting switched from Adventure Creator's UI setup to a normal Unity prefab one. This allows for stuff like animations, smoother transitions, and easier adjustments to be made all at the same time. Unfortunately this meant having to learn exactly how Unity likes to do it with their default UI setup, so lots of coding and just learning the inner workings of the engine. Also all dialogue in the game has to be converted to this new tool, which at this point is probably close to around 100 or more pages of dialogue lines.
Been a lot of crazy stuff happening lately and it's led to a lot of introspection for me personally with the game
As many of you are probably aware, last week was a bit of a mess for the adult games community as a whole to the point where a lot of developers were completely blindsided and struggling to figure out what the hell was going . The fact is there's a massive push towards censorship and new regulation towards adult content, and at this point the real question is whether or not Cyber Rift is going be able to be able to continue at all in its current form. The easiest and smartest path forward is to add a new feature for a SFW mode. This will allow for alternative scenes when NSFW ones are meant to appear, so if worst comes to worst I'll be prepared to make the switch. Since I'm changing the progression anyways it made sense to work on implementing this into the core experience. If things go south with platforms and it means removing NSFW entirely I'd like to at least add the option for users to get their fix in an alternative way. Decisions need to be made soon but I would definitely like to hear what you guys think in this regard.
Lastly we had a bit of an announcement planned last month but the past two weeks or so have kind of put a wrench in things. But to do a small announcement of a bigger one I'm working on getting Cyber Rift onto Steam by publishing through a publisher. When this happens it'll feature Chapter 2 Part 1 as the release update which will be equivalent in content to the past 3-4 updates of the game combined. It will be the biggest update the game has ever had and I'm doing my damndest to make sure it's the best game possible I can make for you guys.
That's it for today's lengthy news update, but definitely let me know what you guys think of the current development and this whole mess that's going on.