Cyber Owl Games
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Art Update: Addressing Feedback and a Retrospective
🕑 Added 2023-02-25 10:46:55 +0000 UTCTLDR: Addressing feedback with bugfix in the next 1-2 weeks, showing our history from RenPy to Unity, and Cyberia Update coming in 1-2 months.
Things have been pretty interesting since we released our first public build for the reboot! We've had a ton of interesting comments and feedback, and we've been carefully going through all of them to figure out what's the most pressing issues to address in the future.
Complaints:
-Players want to be able to change their character's name instead of being called "Player"
-Players want the ability to instantly go to the floor layout rather than clicking aimlessly across the ship
-People really enjoyed the art and environments, but they want more to do and more interactivity
-Plot needs a little bit more work to feel more coherent overall.
-More types of gameplay for rewards rather than the wire minigame
All of these are extremely fair complaints, and we have some solid news in that regard! The first bugfix for the public version will include a new minimap/elevator button so players can immediately jump to anywhere on the ship. This will also remember the location they pressed the button from. We're currently fi
guring out how to change the player name through the various tools we're using. Since we're using a visual novel making tool on top carrying the variables can act a little weird, so we're just ironing out the kinks currently. The ability to change the player name will be included as well. We're also reworking some hallways, but those fixes will take a little bit longer to implement compared to the other features.
We're currently looking into adding a proper minigame for players to earn credits from, as well as a proper shop interface to buy items for the girls. This is something we're going to be developing in the future but we wanted to announce it a bit earlier. We'll have a lot more details soon on this, but for now here's a look at our new minimap feature!
When pressed it'll take players to the map of whatever floor they're on. It'll remember location of what room the player is in when pressed as well! (UI still WIP and will have an icon)
Today we also wanted to look back at how much has changed overall, as well as just showing some of the older environments that we started with. Originally Cyber Rift was designed on RenPy and its creation was inspired by a ton of various NSFW VNs like Four Elements Trainer and Summertime Saga. From the very beginning we wanted to have a galaxy faring space adventure inspired by Cowboy Bebop, and wanted to use space travel for some really fun and unique locations, all with cyberpunk inspired visuals and themes.
This was from the very first version! The team was a bit different, and we were still trying to figure out what type of game we wanted to make.
Before our artist originally hopped aboard the style of the game was completely different. It went for a more industrial and gritty take, which leaned far more heavily into the cyberpunk genre. The only issue with going this far industrial wise is it created a bit of a mish mash in terms of genres and settings. It created a variety of issues, and made it a little bit difficult to establish what we were trying to do.
Everie went through a lot of design iterations over the past few years, and we really feel like we found something special with this new design
Characters originally looked completely different, and we were definitely having trouble figuring out exactly what we wanted to accomplish with the overall story and visuals. The plot started pretty similarly where the player ended up on Jukarya and meeting Everie, but there was no pod or anything holding her. Within the first few minutes of meeting her she gets completely naked and flirty. Although nudity in these types of games is great, this was extremely fast for a character you only just met, and the flirtatiousness of every character created issues plot wise. Cyberia was also introduced extremely quickly, and although we're bringing back Elsie in the new update, the context to going to there is going to be a lot different.
There were a ton of positives to the old artstyle, but there were a lot of inconsistences with the characters and the environments.
One absolutely major issue with the game which also proved to be a serious enough problem for us to reboot was that our artist lacked experience with these types of games. A lot of the issues were caused by simply not knowing what to look for, or how to make environments make sense without having a proper reference. Near the end of the original version's development the build kept feeling more and more strung together, and it took some time to reevaluate exactly what we wanted to do with the game. Our artist ended up playing through a variety of different VNs and point and clicks, and he proposed the idea of completely scrapping what we had and starting over. Initially we were hesitant, but after some consideration we realized a fresh start was in order to fix the problems we had.
Though the original pitch room was cool, it didn't quite make sense from a gameplay perspective so we weren't able to use it.
When the team first got this image we were extremely impressed and immediately wanted to consider the idea of a reboot. Originally we considered using RenPy again, but the amount of issues we had with adjusting art and allowing for different gameplay caused us to consider different alternatives. One of the greatest strengths with Unity is the ability to drag and drop art directly onto a scene environment. RenPy you have to structure every single piece of art through code and pull it based on where you want images to appear directly in script. This alone really made the switch a hell of a lot easier, and it allowed us to completely revamp every part of the game.
Cockpit had a major overhaul, and we were extremely happy with the results!
One major issue we discovered was the tool we were using did not save Unity environments within their save system. When you're making progression based game this can completely ruin everything, and we realized if we didn't find a solution the game was pretty much dead in the water. After a lot of searching we realized that the game was actually stuck between two genres, and it was a creating a conflict of interests between the two. We had to decide on whether to stick strictly to a Visual Novel version, which completely defeated the point of using Unity, or we could take some time and convert it into a full blown point and click adventure. This decision was definitely a not an easy one, but in the end we really believe it was worth the effort.
The new artstyle takes a different approach in creating the environments, and the amount of detail really speaks for itself.
Our aim with the new version of Cyber Rift is to really focus on developing our characters, and creating a very memorable player experiences through the new point and click adventure gameplay and story elements. We have an enormous amount of content planned, and this really is only the first piece of a much bigger picture. Chapter 1 Part 2 The Cyberia Update (name still WIP) will be released in the next 1-2 months for patrons, and our demo will be updated until all four parts of Chapter 1 are done.
Amazing the difference a few years can make.
Overall we're extremely excited with the reaction so far to Cyber Rift. This is only the beginning of our journey, and we really hope you guys stick around see what we have in store!
