CyberThreat is an upcoming turn based RPG with a modern day setting. You play as a young man or woman going into their final year of study in a new school. Up to and after their arrival however, there’s been a string of mysterious deaths of students their age. The one thing they all had in common, was that they were badly abused by their peers through cyberbullying. The death toll is on the rise and the police don’t have any leads on these unexplained deaths. But what happens when the target of the cyberbullies is you?
Lead a party of up to 3 characters into battle against the computer viruses, deep in the depths of Cyberspace.
Choose from physical attacks and a wide variety of hacks to take down your opponents. Use bits to cast elemental hacks and exploit the enemy's weaknesses. Level up through experience gained, and invest in better equipment to give yourself the best chance in battle.
Complete Contact Routes to unlock powerful hacks and equipment you can use in Cyberspace.
CyberThreat's in-game calendar system progresses the game forward and changes the world around you.
Experience different seasons, holidays and events throughout the year. Explore the city of Edendale, as well as other locations around the globe, and see each of their day/night cycles and weather systems in action.
Aside from the main story of CyberThreat, there are multiple side stories you can discover over the course of the game. Most characters you meet over the course of the year each have their own unique stories to tell.
Will you discover the epic awesomeness of "Samurai Teacher"? Or help an aspiring model follow her dreams, against the wishes of her father? Or perhaps even investigate an ongoing murder case across the city? The choice is yours!
Featuring the voice acting talents of:
Check out the trailer below for a glimpse of CyberThreat in action!
Kept you waiting, huh?
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:
Story time, fun time!
There's also been updates around the game's story, dialogue systems and behind the scenes work.
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:
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
Check out how CyberThreat is progressing in this new development update video! There's new characters, new music, new minigames and more!
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Welcome CyberThreat's newest member to the team, a new writer, who will help with the story, dialogue and more!
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