CYCOM Weekly Update #1: Game Title & Logo

Hello! Francisco here, though most of you met me as ClearlyNotBruceWayne on Reddit last week. We've decided to start a weekly update blog. On here we'll post everything that is new, feedback from last week, what we're working on now, etc. It won't always be me. Hopefully I can get others on the team writing as well. 

What's New?

We have a working title! ​

CYCOM: Cybernet Combat is our current title for the game. Took us hours of debate, but this name both fits the play-style we want to encourage and fits in well within our game's lore. Hope you guys like it as much as we do!

Community Feedback 

Teleport Movement vs. Smooth Translate Movement
One of the more prevalent comments made in our first post was a general concern of the movement shown in first post's GIFs. Most commented that the teleport looked jarring and some said that the world looked like the world was moving and not the player. We did a teleport approach instead of translation due to nausea concerns and testing out teleport did not leave a jarring feeling as much as conveyed in the GIF. Maybe it's because when you're playing, the act of pressing the D-Pad and wanting to move fills in the gaps in your brain of what is going on. I dunno. 

Regardless, we do agree that smooth translations would be better if we can get that to work without the nauseating side effects. The original effect was going to be a fade-out-and-fade-in effect during the teleport move to mediate the sharp movement. However, if translation works, it would allow players to not be blind for half a second which would be a plus. Thus our current plan of action is to test out the smooth translate. Unfortunately, GIFs didn't have high enough FPS to be noticeable if recorded, but we did test it out and we'll soon record a video. Hopefully that will be a better example of smooth translation. 

As of right now the effect is not as nauseating as previously thought, however it still feels off. Prolonged use of this movement can lead to nausea. However this movement did not take into account three things:

1. Our movement is a very short distance. 
2. There are no visual movement effects. 
3. There are no audio movement effects.

That last two are key. If we can trick the brain into thinking that we are moving we can lessen or eliminate the nausea issue all together. Thus we've decided to try out a sort of blink effect like Tracer from Overwatch. ​

This will take a little bit more of development time, so we will work on it when we are done with the current dev tasks.

In Progress

So far we've only shown one enemy and a few cards. Hopefully we will sprinkle new information about these cards throughout this blog. We currently have 2 enemies and 15 cards. We feel that the current 15 cards are good enough for a 40 card default deck so we're mostly working right now on debugging these cards and any other glaring issues. 

In addition, Jeremy is working on getting Kickstarter up and running. Now, it's important to note that this Kickstarter isn't about finishing the game. In fact, its goal will be very low. We've gotten a lot of requests to try out the game so we've started talking about what the best way of handing out alpha demos of the game would be. So we decided to start garnering a community and put it on Steam. The Kickstarter will only cover the costs associated with putting an alpha on Steam. This way we can get people testing and playing the game. We'd then start taking community feedback to have a better foundation to which to finish the game.  That being said, one of the reward tiers will give you access to all further updates of the game for free. So hopefully you guys can help us out in making the game that both the community and the team wants.

What's Next

That leaves us to what's next. Obviously 2 enemies is not going to cut it, so we've started game design on the next 3 enemies that will be available in the alpha. This includes, of course, a boss. ;)

Thanks for your continued support.
- Francisco