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 (UWE)! Players use Elgato Stream Deck XL’s to match colours in time with the beat to defend their devices from incoming spam emails.
The game was a hit, with over 1,900 people attending the Cyber Security 2022 event. A diverse range of students from various academic disciplines, along with numerous faculty members, eagerly tested their musical aptitude in Cyberus; with some regularly returning to set new highscores!
It was the first full game developed by us at Manifold Games! I worked on developing the core beat matching mechanics, which went through many iterations, and VFX. The game had a unique design challenge as each block are words from a spam email that turn into blocks in each players lane, the blocks then head to the players ‘spam box’ which fills up with miss timed beats. The most significant challenge was creating a system that would work seamlessly with the unusual input device of the Stream Deck while ensuring the beat matching game felt fluid and responsive.