Ultrakill Skyboxes

[Geri Cutcher]

The Cyber Grind is a wave-based endless survival mode in ULTRAKILL.

In this mode, the player is put on a 16x16 block grid floating in the void and is tasked with eliminating every enemy in the wave for the terrain to shift and new groups of enemy to appear for the player to fight against until the player dies. Non-boss enemies, as well as some minor bosses, are able to spawn in The Cyber Grind.

Global leaderboards can be found on Steam for each available difficulty: Harmless, Lenient, Standard, Violent, and Brutal.

Before starting a run, the player begins in a starting elevator in which can be found a yellow Terminal on the right, just like in most other levels, but also a blue Terminal on the left. This special Terminal allows the player to customize their Cyber Grind experience in many ways.

The first menu titled "Themes" allows the player to change the Cyber Grind's grid and skybox. There are two presets available, one light, and the other dark, and a third option which allows the player to further modify the appearance of the level.

The "Light" preset makes the grid use a white texture and changes the skybox to a grid of white squares. The "Dark" preset makes the grid use a gray texture and changes the skybox to a grid of dark-gray squares.

Selecting the "Custom" option will open a submenu in which the grid and skybox can be freely edited by the player. All textures found through this menu come from image files inside of the folder [Path to Game]\ULTRAKILL\Cybergrind\Textures.

The first tab, "Grid," is used to edit the grid's appearance. The player can independently change the texture displayed on the sides and bottom, on the top-most square on the sides, or on the top of all of the grid's blocks. Multiple sides can be changed simultaneously by having multiple options selected at once (highlighted in red.)

The second tab, "Grid Glow," allows the player to change the grid's glowing effect in a similar fashion to the grid's texture. The textures used for the glow are only in grayscale, where the closer a pixel is to white, the more intense its glow will be. Picking an image which has colors will result in only the image's pixels' brightness value to be taken into consideration. The player can additionally change the glow's global intensity on a scale from 0 to 10 on increments of 1.

The third and final tab, "Skybox," allows the player to change the Cyber Grind's skybox. The projection format used by skyboxes is an equirectangular projection. Selecting any texture will change the skybox to this texture.

Unlike any other level, the Cyber Grind offers the player the ability to change the music which plays inside of the level. Opening this submenu will reveal the player's Playlist. By default, the player will find four songs in their playlist: The Cyber Grind by Meganeko, HATEFUL by HEALTH, an instrumental version of HATEFUL, UltraChurch by KEYGEN CHURCH. These four songs are exclusive to the Cyber Grind within the game.

Tracks can be selected, rearranged or removed to the player's preference. A button is found at the end of the playlist which, when pressed, opens a submenu that allows the player to add more tracks to their playlist. They can either add tracks from the game, or add custom sound files that the player can add inside of the folder [Path to Game]\ULTRAKILL\Cybergrind\Music.

Tracks from the game are by default locked, and can be unlocked by completing the challenge of the level in which they can be heard. If the level the track is heard in does not have a challenge, reaching the end of the level will be the only requirement. Lastly, if the track is not associated with any level (such as Take Care), or that the level it is found in does not have an end (such as in the Developer Museum) it will be unlocked automatically.

Shuffle Off will make the playlist follow the order of the tracks from top to bottom and go to the top of the next page once it reaches the bottom of a page. The starting track will always be the top-most track of the first page.

Some specific tracks have their own dedicated intro. This starting piece will only play if a track which possesses it is the very first track played during a run. Tracks which have their own intro includes: The Cyber Grind, UltraChurch, Hateful, Versus, and Duel.

Due to the many different versions of Take Care throughout the game, this track behaves in a much more complex manner. If Take Care is listened to with the option Loop One, the track will cycle through the different versions. It will first play the Shop Terminal version, then the Cyber Grind Terminal version, and finally the Prime Terminal version. This loop will repeat three times before a new exclusive part will play. After the third instance of the Prime version, a vocal piece will follow. This is the only instance of the vocal part of Take Care playing in the game. Hearing this unique part takes around 8 minutes of only Take Care playing. Internally, 4 versions are played with only the instrumentals 3 times, and then the 2 next versions contains both separate parts of the vocals.

The third menu allows the player to change the patterns used during the run, enabling this option will disable leaderboard submissions on Steam. For more information about the pattern system, see Patterns.

The last menu can be used to change the starting wave. By default, starting a run will set the wave to 1. Using this menu, the player may set the wave they start their run from to either 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, or 25. The player will begin with only the first option available. To unlock higher starting waves, the player must reach the double of the starting wave. This means that unlocking wave 5 as a starting wave requires the player to reach wave 10, starting wave 10 requires wave 20, 15 requires 30, and so on. The unlocked starting waves do not carry over difficulties. For example, if a player has reached wave 30 on Standard, but not on Lenient or Violent, they will be able to start from wave 15 on Standard but not on these two other difficulties. If the last selected starting wave is higher than the available starting wave on the difficulty being played on, it will default to 1. If it is available, the starting wave will remain the same than the one already selected.

Each enemy has various strengths and weaknesses that can make or break runs.

For instance, enemies such as the Filth and Stray can provide much-needed style and health when the player is weak, while enemies like the Mindflayer provide challenges on later waves that can end runs if players aren't careful.

The enemies selected for each uncommon spawn are determined by 1 random range per spawn between 0 (inclusive) and the amount of available uncommon enemies (exclusive).

If an uncommon enemy is selected whose spawn wave is higher than the current wave, then it will keep selecting previous enemies in the list until a valid one is selected or it reaches the start of the list.

For the second spawn (if one occurs), the above process will also be repeated if both enemies are the same. If the list is exhausted, the second spawn will not occur.

There can only be a certain number of uncommon enemies in each uncommon spawn, depending on two limits.

The first limit is a random range between 0 (inclusive) and Wave/10 + 1 (exclusive).

If the uncommon buffer (see next paragraph) is at or below -0.5, then this range will have a minimum value of 1 instead of 0.

The second limit starts at 0 per enemy, and increases by 1 every number of waves, up to a hard cap.

After an uncommon wave occurs, another cannot occur for a certain amount of waves, depending on the types of uncommons spawned.

If a spawn selects a Stalker or Idol, the buffer increases by 1 wave, while other enemies increase it by 0.5 waves.

This buffer decreases by 1 every non-uncommon wave. Note that if the game attempts to spawn uncommons, but fails to do so, the buffer will not decrease.

Uncommon spawns can occur if the buffer is at or below 0.5.

For each Hideous Mass that was spawned and each uncommon spawn that occurred, specials are blocked from spawning for 1 wave.

The threshold at which Hideous Masses and uncommon spawns begin blocking specials increases by 1 every 10 waves.

After a special wave occurs, another cannot occur for an amount of waves equal to the amount of special enemies spawned.

This buffer increases by 1 for every special enemy spawned. It decreases by 1 every non-special wave.

Special spawns can occur if the buffer is at or below 0.

The Cyber Grind has a pool of 38 official patterns which are used by default. The player is given the ability to make their own patterns. These custom patterns can be used by enabling them in the Cyber Grind Terminal. Using custom patterns will disable all score submissions to the Steam leaderboards.

Patterns are saved under the extension .cgp (which stands for "Cyber Grind Pattern"). This file format is, however, only a .txt file with another extension replacing it. The file can generally be opened with any text editor.

The upper grid contains the height data of the pattern. Each number is written in decimals and can be of any whole number. If a number is not within a range of 0 and 9, it will be surrounded by parenthesises as to not be confused with other numbers (e.g., 10 will be written (10) as to not be confused with 1, 0. This logic also applies to negative numbers.)

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