Behind the scenes of CyberBlade' largest district. Art Director Marcelo Dias shares how New Kyoto's iconic skyline was born — from a whiteboard sketch to the neon-soaked megastructure you explore today.
Where It Started
The Megaplex wasn't in the original design document. It emerged from a single concept sketch by junior artist Paulo Reyes during a late-night jam session in January 2024. He drew a building that was also a city — 200 floors of stacked districts, each with its own culture, economy, and criminal ecosystem.
When the team saw it pinned to the whiteboard the next morning, the response was unanimous: this was the heart of CyberBlade.
The Design Challenge
A building-sized city presents unique design challenges. Every floor needed to feel distinct — different lighting rigs, different ambient audio, different NPC behaviour scripts — while maintaining vertical navigation that felt intuitive.
We ended up building a proprietary "vertical zone" system that dynamically loads and unloads floor clusters as players move through elevator shafts, stairwells, and the external glass-cage lifts that have become one of CyberBlade' signature visual moments.
The Light Rig
Lighting the Megaplex was a 14-month project in itself. We needed a system that could transition from the harsh industrial amber of the lower floors to the cold clinical white of corporate zones, and finally to the purple-neon opulence of the penthouse districts — all in real time, all tied to the time-of-day cycle.
Our rendering engineer, Siosaia Taufa, developed a layered emissive masking system that allows 4,000 individually addressable neon elements to shift colour and intensity based on faction control, time of day, and active story events. When the Chrome faction takes a floor, every light on that floor shifts to ice-blue within 60 seconds.
The Human Element
The Megaplex was built by a team of 23 artists spread across four time zones. Every floor cluster was owned by a single artist who was given creative authority within their zone — they designed their own NPCs, their own faction aesthetics, their own ambient soundscapes.
The result is a structure that feels genuinely lived in — inconsistent, layered, and contradictory in the best possible way. No two floors feel like they were built by the same person, because they weren't. That's New Kyoto.
What's Next
Season 2 adds four new floor clusters to the Megaplex, including the long-rumoured Null Server Room — a floor-spanning datacentre that functions as the faction's nerve centre. We can't say more yet, but expect the most lore-dense environment we've ever built. See you in the neon.
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