We've been a bit quiet lately and we wanted to go into a bit of detail on what's been happening lately. Currently Part 3 is making some decent progress, but because our lead has been a bit swamped IRL lately progress hasn't been going as quickly as we'd like. So in order to make it a bit less of a drag we're currently in the process of making two new pinups and most likely even more before Part 3 is out. We're also going to be doing another patch to clean up the Mini-Update with the feedback we've gotten so far, and once it's more stable we'll add this version as a Newgrounds/public build. To go into a bit of detail for what had been added if you haven't seen the patch notes: 

What's been added:
-New wardrobe feature
-Cheat codes in game (with a nude code that's limited to Cyber Owl tier patrons until story progresses further)
-Lunar New Years! ( we know this is a bit late but we didn't want to remove the treasure hunt for red pockets, so the code will still be able to be enabled.)
-Updated minigame!
-Updated Shop with bras/panties for Everie and Fae!

This is the last NSFW scene for Part 2, it's taken a bit but we'll be adding next week into the build for Patrons!

Part 3 we've been planning on making a similar amount of content to Part 2, and we've been working pretty heavily on making sure the narrative is in a solid place. We're also aiming to add a bit more gameplay with puzzles in the Syndicate facility, but that's been a little more challenging than we were expecting. It's something we're going to be putting a lot of effort with and we're hoping it'll expand our abilities for puzzles/gameplay in the future!

Highly recommend watching Frieren as well!

For the patron pinups we decided due to how much we love the new Frieren: Beyond Journey's End anime to do two new pinups! One is of Frieren which is pretty far along and will be released for patrons very soon, and the other is of Ubel. If you guys enjoy the pinups we can always do more from the series, or even if you have a suggestion for the next one just let us know below! 

Bit of a shorter news update today but wanted to keep you guys informed! We'll have more news on Part 3 soon, but keep an eye out for our brand new pinups as well!

So we've been a bit quiet as of late but now we wanted to give a bit of detail on what we've been cooking up! This mini-update we've been focused on adding a few features that were highly requested by fans and also tried to include a few surprises as well. On top of major improvements to the Junky minigame, we've been working on adding new items for players to purchase on the shop with the money they earned from shooting junksteroids. We've also added another fun feature: Wardrobes! Coming this mini-update we've fixed up the outfit system to become interchangeable and you can now customize the Hair, Shirts, Bras, Pants and Panties for both Fae and Everie (Elsie's wardrobe will come in Part 3).

Currently we've just added three sets of lingerie as well as some brand new shorts for Everie! We plan on adding more in the future :D

The trickiest part with getting this outfit system to work was making sure it remembers the player's choices regardless of where they are in the game. We've managed to create a system that will keep the player's selected outfits, and we're going to be adding even more in the future. Currently you won't be able to make the characters fully nude, and the reason we're not making this an option just yet is because it's so early in on progression it wouldn't quite make sense for the girls to show off everything to someone they don't know super well. However we will be giving a code for Cyber Owl tier patrons that'll allow you to bypass this and have the characters fully nude despite the timing with the story (it will be available to everyone further down the line we just wanted to give a bonus for our higher tier patrons). The system is fully modular and we're going to be asking patrons soon what types of outfits they want us to add in the future, we just needed to make sure the groundwork was done for it to work perfectly every time.

Everie's looking great in her new shorts! (we also wanted to show she kept her cyber knees from the original version).

On top of this wardrobe update we wanted to include a little bonus to celebrate Lunar New Years! We'll be giving a code to all patrons to enable some new dialogue with Junky and he'll be hiding some red pockets around the ship. These red pockets will include some money which can be used in the shop. We want to make Lunar New Years a recurring event with Cyber Rift, and we're hoping to expand on this even more next year, but we hope you enjoy the treasure hunt!

Junky's minigame got a major glow up with some brand new sprites and sound effects!

Finally we've updated the minigame to have some brand new updated sprites and a whole new way to play! Rather than being stuck to a single screen you can now roam around an area to shoot the junksteroids. Each junksteroid now has a health bar before being broken up and they can spawn 3 different types of valuable junk to collect for Junky. We want a lot of feedback on this minigame and we're happy to add more based on what you guys want in the future so please let us know what you think once it's out.

And finally to cap off this news post the mini-update will be released February 18th! Hope you guys are excited for this update and if you have any ideas for new outfits or even just ideas for the game in general let us know!

Progress with Cyber Rift has been going pretty steady but it's definitely been a bit of a hectic time as of late! One of our team members ended up having a baby last month so that's been taking a lot of their time, but lately things are going back to a steady speed and we're happy to give a proper update on happenings now. We're really trying to make sure the wait is a lot smaller compared to the massive gap between Part 1 and 2, so we're aiming to make smaller updates in between each Part. This coming update will be the wardrobe and minigame update, which will be adding a newly improved asteroids minigame as well as the first iteration of the wardrobe for characters. There will be a few bras/panties to buy on the shop for the girls, and we're hoping it'll be a fun addition for people to check out!

Writing and Story:

Elsie definitely has an interesting relationship with the player!

So far Part 3 has been progressing steadily and we've been working on adding a lot more smaller talking scenes with the characters to help develop the story. Part 2 was already a fairly big improvement on building relationships between the characters, but we want to have a lot more of that as we delve deeper into Cyberia. We've also been looking into potentially making skits with the characters as a way to make the wait for more content a little less annoying, and we'll try posting smaller stuff on our Discord and social pages fairly soon.

Coding:

Still rough looking UI but the health bars are properly working!

Because of the work done earlier for fixing Parts 1 + 2 the games actually in a fairly not buggy state in terms of progression, so the focus lately has been on adding new opportunities for more gameplay. One big change in that regard was based on feedback given for the minigame, where we wanted to change up how it's played to make it a bit more dynamic and interesting. So now the minigame will have a longer timer and have a wider and open area to fly around in. This also means it's not stuck to a single screen and players will be able to roam around an area shooting asteroids instead of squashed in a smaller space. Another big change is adding health bars to both the player and asteroids. These are based on the asteroids size and your damage will affect how fast they get destroyed. Since this is a major change we'll be giving out a build to Cyber Owl tier patrons earlier for testing in the next two weeks.

Lately arts been steadily progressing and we're just about finished the last NSFW scene for Part 2. This got delayed a bit during the holidays (and what we mentioned in the first paragraph) but it'll be in a patron build very soon. We also recently released our first parody poster a few days ago! This was something our artist had been wanting to do for a while and we think the results were really good! We haven't fully decided on all the art for Part 3 but we're going to have at least one new background at a minimum for interior syndicate facility, but we're still still figuring out which NSFW scenes we want to include with the characters (feel free to suggest some!). We also have another small surprise for patrons that we'll be posting in the next few days and you'll see that very soon!

That's it for today's news update! Things are definitely still cooking on our end and we're working really hard to deliver some good content for you guys, and we hope you guys are excited for more to come!

So last month we released the alpha version of Cyber Rift Chapter 1 Part 2 and the feedback has been incredibly helpful and supportive! So far we've squashed tons of bugs, and lately have been extra focused on improving based on the feedback we've received so far. Because there were so many changes compared to 0.1.9.6, we've been taking the extra time to make sure everything has been working perfectly before we release an updated Part 1 to the public. There's still a fair amount of work needed to fully finish Part 2, and today we wanted to give a bit of info on what we're working towards right now with the current build.

New and improved Player Sprite!

New and improved Everie Sprite!


One of the biggest changes compared to the older versions besides the new dialogue system was the change in character sprites. Right now we have Everie, the player, and Elsie's sprites fully finished in the new system. One issue however is that due to the sprites having so much more ability for expression, this also meant that each piece of the expressions during dialogue has to be adjusted accordingly. The sprites are broken down into these parts: Mouth, Eyes, Eyebrows and Arms. For every single line of dialogue that involves a character on the screen we'll have to be changing these parts of the character to match the words. This process is quite tedious, but in order to really perfect the build completely we're currently going through the entirety of the game and matching each piece accordingly. We're honestly super happy with the progress, but in the meantime our artist has been cooking up the last character sprite before he gets started on the last pieces of needed art for Part 2.

Fae's sprite has been taking a bit more time than expected, but she's had quite the glow up with the new sprite system!

Two other things we're working on adding to the build right now are sounds for the UI, and different camera angles to match dialogue. These are features we've been wanting to add for a long time but didn't have a realistic method of doing them until very recently. Luckily compared to the sprites their implementation has been pretty straightforward, but for camera angles it has to be decided on a per scene basis to make sure they look correct for the dialogue. UI sound wise currently the main menu has sound effects along with the pause menu, and the phone UI. The goal is to eventually have them everywhere across the game to make everything feel much more responsive for players. We're aiming for this specific improvement to also be in the Part 1 build which we want to talk about today.

Close-ups! Along with moving the camera during key dialogue moments we want to have fun zoom ins and character close-ups during conversations.

The last things that are currently needed for Part 2 are the Fae sprite, 3 NSFW scenes and hopefully a final background. The Fae sprite in particular is very important right now since we need it to fully finish off Chapter Part 1 along with Part 2. The 3 NSFW scenes will be included along with some new dialogue sections to accompany them, and finally a last dialogue section to fully cap off the update that'll lead into Part 3. The aim for the final background is a picture of where Part 3 is going to be headed, and we're hoping to be able to include that pretty soon. We're expecting the Fae sprite to be done in the next 1-2 weeks, and ideally if things go smoothly we'll have an ETA on the NSFW scenes very soon as well.

Everie's jacket is now properly in the game along with player's one for their journey to Cyberia!

Cyber Rift Chapter 1 Part 1 will be the new and improved demo version going forward. This build will have the same story progression as the previous demo, but we'll be adding every single improvement that has been made in the latest build. This includes all the new sprites, the dialogue system, the new responsive UI, and all the various improvements that we've been making for the past few months. It'll be released on Newgrounds, Itch, and our Patreon pages as a new free version. Our new release strategy from now on will be to update in a staggered fashion. What this means is when Part 3 is released we'll be making Part 2 the new public version. Our plan is to do this at least until the end of Chapter 1, but depending on people's reception we may extend this to the end of Chapter 2.

Updated Roadmap! The Cyberia updated ballooned quite a bit and it's now going to be Parts 2 through 4 as separate and equally sized updates.

We just want to make it very clear that with all these new improvements future development on updates will be a lot smoother compared to before. Pretty much every major issue that was slowing down development has been addressed in some way and we're really aiming to get content out a lot more consistently and at a higher quality bar than before. We're extremely excited for the future of Cyber Rift and hope you guys will tag along for the ride!

Public News Update: Release Date for Cyberia

So we got some very good news to announce today and we wanted to go into detail on what to expect, as well as what we've been up to. But first of all the Cyberia Update will be releasing on the 27th of September. This update has definitely been a long time coming, and we wanted to go into a bit of detail on what's really caused this to take so long, as well as give a detail on the future of the game. Originally when we had released the rebooted version to Newgrounds things had actually been going very smoothly. We had a plan on how we were going to approach Cyberia, but due to unforeseen circumstances (not to go into too much detail but they were pretty significant IRL events for our team) we had to push stuff back a lot longer than we had originally wanted. During this period of time we did put a lot of effort into really figuring out the direction for the game, and also what really made it tick and where we could improve.

One of the new backgrounds we're adding in the Cyberia Update.

This update when fully stable will actually be Cyberia Part 1 of 3. Our goal is to release the updates in a faster pace than what we were doing before, but we had to get the groundwork done in order for it to work. Our new dialogue tool now allows us to instantly code interactions through raw scripts, and will end up saving us an enormous of time getting new scenarios into the game. The new sprite system we've developed is also going to allow us to switch out outfits very easily, and we're aiming to have a lot more outfits/accessories for all the characters. We'll also allow patrons/fans to vote on new outfits to earn in game in the future!

Concept of our brand new Elsie character we're introducing in this update

 

To give a bit of detail on what to expect in the Cyberia Update:
-New planet Cyberia
-3 New backgrounds
-3 NSFW scenes
-Brand new character: Elsie
-All character sprites redone in new sprite format
-New panning backgrounds
-New dialogue system that's more responsive
-New sprite system (blinking sprites as well!)
-Tons of new interactions throughout (double if you use DD-9 on them!)
-2-3 New music tracks
-and much more...

Everie's new sprite is complete and has a bunch of new poses and expressions!

Once this update is released and stable we'll be updating our public/Newgrounds build with the updated experience. This will not include the Cyberia update since we want to make that waas Patron only for now, but when Part 2 of Cyberia is released we'll be updating accordingly. Our plan is to keep each version with fresh features at least until the end of Chapter 1. Chapter 1 will be split into 4 parts, and Cyberia is going to be parts 2 through 4. Our overall plan for Cyber Rift is for the game to be a full 7 chapters, so you guys are going to have a lot of content to look forward to! We've already got all the events planned for the next two updates, so hope you guys are excited for some brand new content!

TL;DR: Update has been expanded, systems needed to changed to make this happen, no firm ETA but one more small update before Cyberia.

So development for the Cyberia update has been pretty productive so far, and we've actually been expanding our goals towards it. Initially it was going to be a bit smaller, but we realized we really wanted to go all out for the newer content. So these past few updates to the game have been focused on fixing core issues throughout, and also slowly building the foundation towards what we'll be talking about today. The Cyberia update is going to bring some very significant changes to the game besides overall content, and we wanted to go into a bit of detail on what we've working on to make this happen.

New interface streamlined to remove any of unnecessary buttons and make the game feel a lot more cohesive

The current version we've released to patrons has been focused on completely uprooting the UI, and fixing a lot of the issues with overall interface cohesion with the previous versions. Each of subsequent updates have been on making sure the UI was working as intended, as well as streamline the experience to feel a lot more enjoyable. One big aspect was removing all the extra buttons, and consolidating them into 4 total buttons for the screen. We now have a dedicated Settings/Pause menu in the top left, and on the top right we have the Map button, Inventory button, and finally reworked Phone button.

Phone can be accessed over gameplay without going to a whole different menu. We'll be expanding this with new apps in the future too!

The Phone is actually a much more expanded feature than before, where previously it was only used to buy a single item. We've added a proper interface which includes a few highly requested features. The Objectives Menu now has a new interface and allows for easier access during gameplay with proper descriptions and information for each objective. The Pinup Gallery is a whole new gallery devoted to each of the pinups you collect throughout the game. And finally there's a Scene Gallery which can be used to replay the NSFW scenes throughout the game. We're most likely going to be expanding this to include more than just the NSFW scenes, but we wanted to have an easy way for people to repeat them. Finally we now have a proper shop interface which allows you to buy items with the money you get from doing work for Junky, and will be used for a lot more fun stuff in the future (like outfits to buy for the girls).

Even though it looks the same, it's actually built entirely with the new system which is much faster and responsive. This is also the newly reworked Everie sprite in action!

One of the biggest issues with the game has been the dialogue system. When the initial reboot happened we had switched to Naninovel, and though it had a lot of benefits, we realized the Adventure Creator tool was a much better fit for the game. However, because the Nani tool was still the game and used for a lot of the dialogue it wasn't as simple as just removing it. So we went back to the drawing board a bit to figure out a method to completely remove it from the game. In a great bit of news with that is we've finally figured out how to do so, and we're currently focused on converting all the older scripts to get the game ready to remove it. This has been a bit of a greater endeavor than we were expecting though, and we have figured it out but it's going to require rebuilding and remaking the sprites for each of the characters.

An example of how we're working on the new interaction dialogue and what you can expect in the interaction update.

Since this will take a while and we're still working on the art for the Cyberia update, we've decided we're going to have one more smaller update to increase the amount of interactions throughout the game. These new interactions will be built with the new dialogue system, and pretty much every interactable object in the game will finally be able to be clicked and have dialogue. This is actually doubled when you include using DD-9 as an item on stuff, and we're going to try and make a lot of fun dialogue with the characters to expand the game. Since this will be built with the new dialogue system you'll be able to get a preview on how much faster it feels, as well as get a preview on what we're aiming for.

The landing area is one of three backgrounds for the update but it's actually more than double the size of any of our previous ones to work with the new panning tech

We're also going to be updating the Newgrounds/Public versions the stable version once the Cyberia update has released. We wanted to create a staggered release schedule for at least all of Chapter 1, and let people experience new stuff with the option to see more if they subscribe. If all goes according to plan we might have something playable next month with unfinished art, but we want to make sure you guys are well informed before that. We still have a lot of work to do but we think this update is gonna be a pretty dramatic improvement overall. That's it for today, and we'll be adding a character preview for Elsie for our Cyber Owl tier patrons in the next few days.