From a 2D prototype to a neon car chase
Cyber Surfer didn't start as a car game. It started as a tiny 2D platformer with a single button. Here's how it got from there to eight districts, nine skills and an armored police boss, and what changed when people started playing it.
The prototype: one button
The first version was a 2D auto-runner made with Phaser, using Kenney's pixel platformer art. The character ran on its own and turned around at walls, and jumping was the only thing you controlled. It had three short levels: "Jump", "Up and over" and "Turn around".
The two games share one idea: the game moves you, and you only decide when to act. In Cyber Surfer the car drives itself, and you choose the lane and the moment to jump. The prototype's save system and platform layer carried over into the new game.
Going 3D
The first 3D build was a lane-runner made for YouTube Playables: a rocket-thruster supercar on a curving neon highway, dashing between lanes, hopping traffic, surfing truck roofs, with police heat and a handful of skills. It already had the bones of today's game.
What the first playtest changed
The first playtest feedback asked for a boost, said the highway felt empty, and pointed out that the Hover skill flew right over all the pickups. So the second version added:
- Boost, with batteries on the road to fill it, so there was always something to collect and a button that felt powerful.
- Coins, laid out in lines, zig-zags and arcs over cars and off ramps, to show you where to go.
- Much denser traffic from the start, with slaloms, truck convoys, squeezes, brake-checkers and drivers who drift into your lane.
Hover was cut. It came back later in a better form: it now pulls coins, batteries and even skill boxes up to you, so flying over the traffic is a reward instead of a skip.
A city with a police force
The third round turned it into the game it is now: the garage, the police helicopter and the Interceptor boss, the stunt sections (half-pipes, grind rails and sky lanes), the districts with their own weather, online leaderboards and cloud saves. Then the world grew to eight districts, each with a twist: rush hour downtown, a wet road at the harbor, sandstorms, ice, falling lava rocks, bonus coins on the coast, falling trees and low gravity above the clouds. Every run starts downtown and shuffles the rest, and night falls from the fifth district on.
The 847,000-point problem
Tricks used to score every flip and spin separately, with a combo that went up to ×3.5. One test run scored 847,000 points in 1,065 meters, almost entirely from spamming the same trick. That's not a high score, that's a bug.
The fix was to score each jump as one stunt: repeating a trick in the same jump halves its value each time, mixing different tricks adds 25%, and the combo tops out at ×2. Old best scores made under the old rules were cleared, so the leaderboard is fair. Now style still pays, but distance and surviving matter again.
Skills that feel like skills
Four skills were reworked to hit harder:
- Force field used to soak up one crash. Now it's a five-second battering ram, and cars you hit fly up and explode.
- EMP lifts every nearby car into the air so you drive underneath.
- Smoke turns you into a ghost that passes through anything, and shakes off the police.
- Decoy sends a hologram to distract the cops and clears your lane ahead.
Every skill now ends with a second and a half of invincibility (the car blinks), so a skill running out never drops you straight into a crash.
Small things for real players
- Picked names. Leaderboard nicknames went from typed to picked from word lists, like TurboFalcon42. Nobody has to see anything rude, and younger players never put a real name online.
- A real tutorial. It used to run on your first game. Now it's its own mode behind a Tutorial button: a slow road where you can't crash, and nothing is saved.
- Delete my data on the Leaderboard screen, so anyone can wipe their player from the server in one tap.
Launch
The iPhone and iPad app launched on the App Store in November 2026 as Cyber Surfer: Neon Run, alongside the browser version here.
You can follow every change in the changelog, and read about the technical side in one codebase, three releases.