Huge neon billboards, flying cars, and constant rain mark CyberNeon, a 4-minute spin through a cyberpunk Chinese city created by developer Zhang Junliang using Epic’s Unreal Engine, “a suite of integrated tools for game developers to design and build games, simulations, and visualizations”.
The result is impressive as you’re guided around heavily branded skyscrapers and past roboguards on the streets. Comparisons to Blade Runner are inescapable, but there’s also a nod to sci-fi smash hit The Wandering Earth, courtesy of a safety warning used in the film ticking across LED signs above CyberNeon‘s highways.
It looks great. So when is this game out? Err, actually, it’s not a game. Abacus News explains:
This isn’t a game. But people wish it was. […] The release of this project coincided with Epic Games’ keynote presentation at the 2019 Game Developers Conference. During the conference, not only did Epic introduce more features and techniques such as photorealism and ray-tracing, it also said that it will give away US$100 million to those who use the Unreal Engine to make games, software and videos.
Thankfully, there’s a cyperpunk version of Chengdu that you can play your way through — details of that right here:
Neon Seas and Ink Mountains: 7 New Games from China’s Exciting Indie SceneChinese developers no longer need to shoehorn “traditional elements” into their work — they’re making exciting games for the whole worldArticle Jan 23, 2019