Greetings Cygnus Community!

We hope you are all doing well, and that the spring/summer season is bringing some nice weather! The Cygnus dev team has been hiding away through the darkness of winter, doing much needed overhauling, rebuilding, and porting to our new engine. Now that the sun is shining and the summer solstice is upon us, it is time for us to come out of our caves and embrace a little bit of sunlight. It has been awhile since our last development blog, so we thought we would share some major news! As noted in our last blog post in January, we highlighted a lot of new features and changes we are bringing to CRL. In this post we wanted to announce our official Alpha release, major change in our game focus, as well as take a look at the progress of our previously announced items!

Now that most of the leg work is done in terms of getting the game into a playable state, we are excited to share that we will be releasing our playable Alpha in the coming weeks! While we don’t have a set date yet, we will be announcing one very soon! This small slice of what is to come will feature major changes to combat, physics, and overall aesthetic, along with the new game modes. We have more details of what will be included within the release soon, so stay tuned!

With a release in sight we have been testing many of the new features over the past couple of months. Unfortunately, we discovered that the grand scale racing mode has not synergized with the changes to the physics, combat, and map design. For example, many testers have found boosting to be an exciting and engaging new mechanic. With boosting being a powerful movement tool, it rendered much of the “racing” as moot. Players in testing have found ways to use boosting to trivialize most of the race paths we have created. By boosting through most track sections and over obstacles, the racing portion of the game has felt irrelevant. We have spent long hours trying to figure out how to better incorporate these features with the racing, without having to reduce the quality of the mechanics themselves. After much internal discussion, we decided that the aspects of the combat, physics, and new mechanics were far too engaging to water down their quality to meet the racing objectives. With that internal resolution, we have decided to remove the classic and lap based racing from CRL’s large scale game mode. We will instead focus our efforts into the new 5v5 team based racing mode. Replacing our large scale races, will be classic multiplayer combat game modes such as deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag. We know that this a massive shift from our initial gameplay experience, but we feel that this change will help make the game far more engaging. The creative freedom it has allowed the team to pursue in terms of in-game mechanics, has vastly improved the quality of the game. We feel very confident that our community will feel the same!

Now that the focus of the game has been narrowed down, we have been able to focus on bringing CRL to a whole new level! We recently ported the game over to the latest version of Cygnus engine, which will allow for a new level of visuals that we have only dreamed of. Dynamic lighting, shadows, variable roughness, new animations, and more dynamic visuals will help make the game look and feel much cleaner. Alongside the massive visual overhaul, will be greater performance gains that should help all players have a better overall experience. Culling, multi-threading, and many other development tricks should improve FPS across the board. These engine upgrades alongside the new approach to combat, physics, track design, gameplay mechanics, and gamemodes, has almost made Cygnus Racing League: Alpha an entirely new, and different game!

We are so excited to showcase more of the gameplay soon, especially the portal hopping…But all in due time! Thank you for your feedback and support over the past three years of development! We are so grateful for all of the help our community has provided, and we cannot wait to see the insanity you all create within our new sandbox!