It’s been far too long since we’ve had a catch up like this. Let’s talk about the state of CyberThreat’s development in 2024!

Pleaes note, these snippets of gameplay and feature descriptions are still being polished and refined, so changes may still occur depending on feedback. Also, the gifs have been compressed to heck and back, so they're not representative of performance, and are just being used to illustrate the new features!

Oh, Unity…

I think it’d be best to start with describing my Unity woes from over the course of the past year, which significantly impacted development for a good chunk of 2023. Basically, it was discovered after the last playable build was released that CyberThreat was a bit of a memory hog, to say the least. What was happening was the Unity build was loading everything into memory on startup, and made the initial load time take far too long. One tester’s laptop straight up crashed while trying to run it!

The fix required switching to use the Unity Addressables package, which basically is a way of loading and releasing assets from memory when needed. This required a BIG reworking of how CyberThreat was loading new scenes and systems, but thankfully it was for the better in a big way. CyberThreat’s initial memory load has gone from >8GB down to ~2GB thanks to making these changes! It was a bit of a learning curve, and a bit of a disruption to progress, but thankfully things are back on track now and for the better.

Further optimizations are ongoing, as well as upgrading the version of Unity I'm using, which is the main reason an updated trailer and playable build aren’t ready yet.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get onto the more fun stuff!

Making dungeons more “fungeon”!

I will not apologize for that one.

It’s no surprise to anyone that making a game the size of CyberThreat is hard to do, not just programming wise, but content wise too. Sometimes you need to step back and see how you can try to get more, by needing to do less. With that in mind, the first big change for CyberThreat’s dungeon crawling experience was one that needed a change of perspective…

Literally. Check out CyberThreat’s new angled down view for exploring the various CyberSpace dungeons! This change was not only a great way of improving map flow from a level design perspective (goodbye boring tiled ceilings), but also fits from a narrative perspective! This new view represents what someone from outside the computer looking into CyberSpace(hey, that’s you!) would be seeing, as well as what Adlai, the game’s navigator, is seeing while the party is exploring. This change only applies for the procedurally generated corridor areas. Other key areas and hubs will retain the 3rd person camera view.

New Year, New Battle System

You read that right! CyberThreat’s battle system has been overhauled into a more unique, fun, tactical experience! Let’s go over some of the changes and new features:

• Queue Based Battles

  

  • Actions in CyberThreat’s battles now take place “all at once”, so to speak. When it’s your turn, you queue up actions for everyone in your party, before finally letting them loose on the enemies.

  • Turn-order is displayed in the action order line before the turn is executed, letting you know how the turn may play out. The order is generally decided by each actor’s agility and luck stats.

  • There are certain ways the turn-order can be affected, such as:

    • Defending: Choosing to defend puts the user ahead of any other actions, so you can endure any incoming attacks and negate criticals or weaknesses.

    • Criticals & Weaknesses: Landing a critical hit or targeting an enemy’s weakness has a high chance of disrupting them and removing their turn from the queue.

• Swap Party Members mid-battle

  

  • Ever been in the situation where you’re in a battle with an enemy who’s weak to Ice, but no one in your current party knows any Ice spells? And as the “Game Over” screen loads, you curse your luck for not having your Ice spell master in your active party? Been there buddy, been there…

  • Worry not, as you won’t have this problem in CyberThreat! During your action planning phase, you’ll be able to swap out your active party members with those in reserve whenever you want.

  • There were a few reasons behind wanting to include this feature:

    • XP is shared from battles to everyone, regardless of battle participation or not.

    • Targeting weaknesses in CyberThreat isn’t always guaranteed to disrupt the enemy’s turn as a way of keeping things balanced.

    • Narratively, it makes it feel more like the entire party is able to play an active part in battle at any time, and not feel relegated to the sidelines.

• Virus-For-Hire

  

  • Viruses in Cyberspace are all motivated by one thing… Money. CyCoin, to be precise. When they attack, it’s in the pursuit of generating more CyCoin by corrupting the player and their party members. But what if there was an easier way for them to earn CyCoin, guaranteed?

  • Introducing, Virus-For-Hire! For the cost of some of your CyCoin, you can summon a virus to take your place and fight for you in Cyberspace. The process is simple:

    • Speak with Byte Businessman and review his roster of available Viruses.

    • Select a Virus for each Party Member based on Level and Summon Cost.

    • To summon a Virus, make sure you have enough CyCoin to cover their Summon Cost. This will have to be paid every battle, but once you summon them once, you won’t have to pay again until the next battle.

    • Once summoned, you have full access to the Virus’s Hack list and abilities, as a full fledged member of your team.

    • You can switch back to the original caster at any time after that, and the summoned virus will be waiting in reserve.

    • Once defeated, the original caster is returned and cannot summon a new Virus for the rest of the battle.

• Mining Modifiers

  

  • “CyCoin is what makes Cyberspace go ‘round”, to quote a certain Virus, “It’s all about the moolah, baby!”

  • CyCoin mining is all about applying different “modifiers'' to battles in Cyberspace to boost the amount of CyCoin generated per battle. These can include:

    • Stat reductions (Str, Int, End, Agi, Luc)

    • Chance for ailments to be applied from the start of the battle (Poison, Charm, Burn, Freeze, Confusion)

  • You can select from a list of viruses who are willing to mine it for you, however the mining process takes its toll on the party in Cyberspace, which is where the “modifiers” come in.

  • Modifiers work in most battles, apart from boss battles and certain story related battles.

• Corrupted Viruses

  

  • Corrupted viruses are especially dangerous viruses to encounter in CyberSpace. They are generally stronger and more unpredictable than their uncorrupted counterparts. Defeating these viruses will earn more CyCoin and XP than usual.

Story time, fun time!

There's also been updates around the game's story, dialogue systems and behind the scenes work.

• The procedural dialogue systems have been greatly improved for hangouts and activities, with a focus on solo experience vs. bringing a friend/date. Going solo means you will receive the full benefit of the stat boosts on offer, but bringing a friend/date will dilute the benefits, but will improve your relationship with them. Of course, each character has their own preferences for activities, make sure to keep those in mind too to maximise how much your relationship level increases! Check out Zia, Conrad, EVE and Kaori reacting to the same horror film on a cinema hangout.

  

• A lot of the game’s story will be told through 2D VN dialogue scenes. 3D scenes and 3D VN scenes were experimented with for a long time, but unfortunately would have taken resources away from everything else if I continued with them. The plan is to keep experimenting with the 2D presentation to make it even more engaging and entertaining going forward. Certain important scenes are still planned to be in 3D.

• Voice acting was also kicked off last year! It’s truly amazing to hear the characters come to life after all this time, thanks to the incredible talent that voices them. This year should hopefully see a majority of voice acting completed, all going according to plan.

• Finally, the game’s story script is nearing completion as well, with only a handful of chapters left to go. As we are reaching the grand climax to the story, we’re being very particular to make sure the story is the best it can be, but even in its current state, I can confidently say CyberThreat’s story and characters are going to resonate with a lot of people, and I can’t wait to be able to share more of it with you.

Dress to impress

CyberThreat has plenty of costumes for using while exploring Cyberspace, but what if you’re not vibing with your character’s dress sense outside of Cyberspace? Not a problem! CyberThreat now features the ability to not only set your own outfit for use in daily life scenes, but also the party member’s outfits.

The player’s eye and hair color can now also be changed after initial creation in the bathroom in their apartment.

There's so more to show off, I could have gone on for longer, but I'll save that for next time! For now, enjoy this new CyberSpace Portal animation:

So what’s next for CyberThreat? Well, I hate promising Soon™ for anything, but once my current Unity upgrade is finished, and with the game in a good state, I’m going to be working on an updated internal build to share with the game’s writer and musician (who has been cooking, btw). I’m very keen though very soon after that to release a public demo, since it’s way overdue thanks to my issues with Unity last year. I’d love to know what you’d like to see in a demo as well, so be sure to let me know!

The list of main outstanding things to-do are:

• Animations

  • Mainly just adding unique battle animations for the viruses.

• Sound effects

  • Mainly the battle system as well, the hacks in particular need sound effects.

• Unity upgrade

  • Moving from Unity 2020.3.25f1 -> Unity 2022.3.19f, the difference in editor performance is honestly huge. Mainly my fault for the bloat in the project for the older version, selectively migrating the project has helped cut out a lot of unused free assets and deprecated parts of the game.

And that’s all! Thanks so much for taking the time to read through CyberThreat’s 2024 ‘so-far’ update! Be sure to follow on the game’s socials here:

YouTube: Youtube.com
Twitter: Twitter.com
Instagram: Instagram.com

And be sure to join the CyberThreat Discord server here!
Discord: Discord.gg

And wishlist the game on Steam here!

I’m excited to share more CyberThreat with you this year, I hope you’ll stick around to… Wait… am I forgetting something?

Here comes a new challenger!

More on that later... Thanks as always! Let’s talk again soon!
Conor