Hello there Cygnus Community!
We hope you all are doing well, and that you are enjoying Cygnus Racing League. It has been a little over a month since release, and the feedback you all provided over that time was crucial in shaping the game.We made a lot of QOL of life changes to gameplay, to make it easier, more accessible, and fun to play, while simultaneously maintaining the competitive multiplayer spirit of the game. In this monthly roadmap post, we wanted to highlight what's ahead in the month of May!
With the overall gameplay reaching a point of being fairly polished, we have now turned our attention to new gameplay additions. With many QOL of life changes being added last month such as auto-aim, slowing down the overall speed of ships, and track widening, brought about a much broader focus on combat. Along with these changes came new items and ship special abilities to make combat more of a focused aspect of the races. This month we are bringing even more on track additions that will bring even more layers to ship combat. Speed gates will be added to most tracks, allowing racers to boost over long sections of the track, adding strategic options to how players will approach both racing and combat. Returning from our mobile game, on track special items will also be dropping in a new content update this week. Items such as health and energy pickups, as well as boost and superfire ability pickups will now spawn on certain parts of tracks, bringing in an exciting and game changing mechanic that should make the ontrack gameplay even more enjoyable!
On-track gameplay is not the only new addition this month. One of the tracks will also be undergoing an exciting shift! Tranth was a track we received the most feedback about. Many of you felt that this track was far too “rollercoaster” like, leading to frustrating gameplay and a lack of combat options. We heard this feedback, and decided to roll out our new track design method early. Tranth has been reimagined with the original environment kept intact! The track is now a 360 degree cylindrical design that players are incapable of falling off of. Racers will be able to fly “around” the surface of this track, offering an exciting change of pace from traditional track design. We are excited to test out this new track design this week, and the redesign will be released soon! Moving forward with future track releases will see a combination of traditional style and this new cylindrical designs, as well as combinations of the two! We will have more details on these new tracks in the near future!
In addition to all of the in-game improvements, we are also bringing CRL to a new graphics API, Vulkan. This new API will bring higher levels of stability, efficiency, and performance to the game. The change in graphics API will also help our AMD and Intel graphics cards users run more consistently. In addition to all of the performance gains, it will also allow us to start work on bringing our gameplay to older graphics cards meaning we can bring a wider audience to the CRL community!
As you can see by the progress we have made in the last month, we have set ambitious goals for the month of May as well. The team has set the completion of these goals before an upcoming Steam event. We will have more details on our participation in this event in the near future so stay tuned! We feel confident that these additions will make CRL an even better experience for our community, and your support and feedback will continue to shape the game that CRL is! We appreciate everyone for all of the help you have provided, and we are so excited to see the state of Cygnus Racing League in June! I would also like to give our Dev Team a quick shoutout. Our two programmers Zachary and Morris have been working round the clock to bring all of these additions in, and to make Cygnus Racing League the game of our community’s dreams!