#include <williamwhitehouse.dev>

Cyberus: Neon Rhythm

Cyberus is a three-player competitive beat matching game designed from the ground up for Cyber Security week at the University of the West of England! Players use Elgato Stream Decks to match colours in time with the beat to defend their devices from incoming spam emails. This was a project produced by Manifold Games!
Here is a short playthrough of the game:

Cyberus: Neon Rhythm Cyberus: Neon Rhythm
Cyber Security Event 2022
The game was a hit, with over 1,900 people attending the Cyber Security event. A diverse range of students from various academic disciplines, along with numerous faculty members, tested their musical aptitude in Cyberus; with some regularly returning to set new highscores!

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The Cyber Security Event 2022.
Cyberus: Neon Rhythm
Cyberus: Neon Rhythm running at a Foundry event!
Development
The game is written in C# and uses the Unity Game Engine. I focused on the tooling and integration of Stream Decks as input and display devices within Unity. I developed a system that would pre-generate packets of data from JPEG images during editor-time, enabling rapid updates to the Stream Deck display over the USB protocol while the game is running.
The images are pre-processed through Scriptable Objects which facilitates the quick introduction of new images for the other developers. I experimented with various approaches throughout the project with the goal of optimising response times and maintaining user-friendliness for the entire team.
Input was managed through custom wrappers tha emulated the same workflow of Unity's New Input System in order to ease the integration of Stream Decks into the project. With the addition of custom editor inspectors and field attributes that allowed developers to visually see which buttons they were listening or pushing an image too.
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Custom editors for the Stream Deck button layout.
Cyberus: Neon Rhythm Cyberus: Neon Rhythm
Cyberus: Neon Rhythm Cyberus: Neon Rhythm