Cygnus Racing League
Server Shutdown
We again wanted to thank you for the outpouring of support you have given us the last couple of days! This has been a difficult transition for us, as we seek to find what is next. As our company shuts down, we also wanted to notify you that our servers will be shutting down alongside it. This means that Cygnus Racing League will no longer be playable. Our servers will be shutting down on October 25th 2023, so please enjoy the game while it is still currently running.
End of Development
It is with a heavy heart that I announce that this will be the last community update. Cygnus Studios is closing up shop, due to some unforeseen circumstances. Although we were extremely excited to see where the latest version of Cygnus Racing League would go, we cannot move forward with the project. Cygnus Racing League will not continue development, and will eventually be removed from both the Apple App Store, and Steam. After going public three years ago, we never expected the love and support you all have shown us! The friends we have made both in the indie game development community, as well as with our fans has been a life changing experience. We are so grateful for every single one of you, and the memories that we made together will follow us forever. Both of our social media accounts will still continue to operate, but will no longer be associated with the company. Instead, we will continue to support the Indie dev community as much as possible! Who knows, maybe we will return to game development at some point in the future. Thank you again for all you have given us, and we hope that you continue to enjoy Cygnus Racing League for years to come.
Sincerely,
All of us at Cygnus Studios
Cygnus Racing League Alpha
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!
CRL Alpha: Combat System
We hope you all had a great, and safe holiday season! Unfortunately a member of our team came down with a nasty case of the flu, but overall the team took some time to rest up for a big push to release the Alpha version of CRL! Now that the holiday sweets and partying has faded from our systems, we can finally work on some exciting changes that will be coming in this release! In our last blog post, we discussed all of the major “under-the-hood” renovations we were making, as well as what was to come. Today we want to talk about one of the biggest changes we are excited to delve into, the new combat system!
After receiving the feedback from the initial release, we were made very aware of how underwhelming our combat system felt. Our original combat system was based on early 90s/arcade style shooters. We chose to focus on a basic point-and-shoot aiming system with simple visual effects, as we thought it would play well into the “retro” feel of the game. The expectations of our community were much different from the ones we had created, and many of you expressed disappointment in a core gameplay aspect. We took the time to really synthesize this feedback as combat is not only one of the key pillars of our game, but we feel it is a feature that really makes us unique among racing games. There are few games on the market that really focus on vehicle based combat, let alone in a racing environment.
While we focused on solving many of the performance problems that were plaguing the game, we spent a considerable amount of time on how we could revamp the combat system to be engaging, fun, and satisfying. As we implement these improvements over the next couple of weeks, we thought we would share some of those features coming soon! One of the first changes that we felt needed to be addressed was the feel and satisfaction of combat. In the current version of CRL, firing weapons results in a muzzle flash, laser beams, and almost no indication of shots hitting their intended targets. Visual effects are lacking throughout the entire system. With our new physics/particle system that will no longer be the case. Tracers have been added to our current particle system, so that players have visual indicators of their shots allowing players to track them. Shot impact on targets as well environments has also been added. Bullet holes, and laser scorching will now leave impacts on players and the environment. Debris and parts will fall off of ships while they take damage, and a kill will result in the wreckage remaining on track. These additions will make racing feel like a warzone, and add a sense of satisfaction knowing that users are adding to the chaos. We feel these features should help make the “feel” of combat more satisfying.
Along with changes to visual effects, the mechanics of combat have also changed. Ships will now come equipped with rotatable turrets that will interact with a player’s aim. This new feature, paired with the physics and movement changes, will allow the player to engage in combat 360 degrees around their ship. This should stop ships from tailgating from behind, and wailing away on users. Being able to traverse the environment in unique ways like boosting, jumping, and climbing/driving up objects, alongside with the new combat functions, should ultimately give players more options for how they want to engage in combat. Along with the change in how turrets function, we also have “reimagined” the flow of combat depending on the weapon of choice. Lasers will now function as more of a long range option, while miniguns will function as more of a short range weapon. Lasers will do maximum damage when at further distances, but charge time will make them a poor option against the close range minigun. With the new movement system, aiming system, and combat mechanics in place, we feel these additions will add in a much needed feeling of skill.
Visual effects and new mechanics are not the only changes that are to come. Audio also plays a large role in the “feel” of combat. As fans of FPS games, we know how powerful a weapon can feel based on the sound it makes. The arcade style, synthesizer based audio effects we currently have implemented do a great job of capturing that retro feel, but do a poor job of conveying the true firepower at your fingertips. Along with changes to the soundtrack, we will also be implementing new audio effects that should make weapons, explosions, and ships crackle with life. We want players to feel the rush as their minigun lays waste to their opponents all around, and feel the speed as their ship roars from hitting a boost gate.
This is going to be an entirely different experience from the current version of our game. An entirely new combat system, paired with all of the other changes that have been previously highlighted in our last blog post, should create a more enjoyable experience all around for our community. As always, your support, feedback, and ideas have shaped this game! We hope that these new additions will help to bring those dreams to reality, and that future work will only add to the experience. We are so excited for you all to play these additions soon, and we look forward to building the CRL into an experience that our community is proud of!
Cygnus Racing League: Alpha Release
It has been a very long five months since our last game update, as we have been revising the entire structure of our game. When Cygnus Racing League first arrived back in April, it arrived in pre-alpha form with much playtesting needed for us to move forward with the project. We let our community play and help shape the game into what they wanted to see. It was around June when we synthesized this information into a plan to push CRL into becoming a complete game. We heard the feedback from the community. You all wanted better optimization, a more interactive physics system, more engaging tracks, a more refined and entertaining combat system, as well as aesthetic and visual changes. All of this feedback meant that we needed to rebuild the game from the ground up, so that the game you all envisioned and wanted could be achieved.
Our programming team started where we felt it would be most important, on the optimization side of things. The engine went through an entire rebuild, and was optimized to include support for two different graphics APIs, DirectX 12 and Vulkan. I am excited to reveal that after distributing some playtests this last week to our testing community, we saw massive gains in FPS. We also saw consistent FPS across a variety of GPUs, with FPS counts on average of 100 FPS. We believe that the engine changes made should finally rid the game of performance issues, including the inability to run on certain GPUs. It is also believed that the black screen issue has also been addressed. We feel confident that the performance issues that we experienced earlier this year will no longer plague the player experience.
Alongside the changes to the engine, the team also created an entirely new physics system. The initial system was limited, and left many with the desire to have greater freedom of movement. The new system allows players to take full advantage of the physics based movement, from flying, to falling, to flipping, to hovering on buildings, or going upside down. To highlight these new physics changes, we saw fit to ditch traditional track design in favor of something that would allow players to take full advantage of all of the potential actions. Track design now includes ramps, platforming, and cylindrical based track design that allow players to stay magnetically attached, and move fully around a cylindrical shape. Our playtesting team loved the new movement system, and became immediately obsessed with pushing the boundaries of the track with the new boosting ability. Giving players the option to fly through the air, offers even more ways to create shortcuts and cut time deficits. We are excited to see how players will take advantage of this new system, and are still refining it for an even greater range of movement options.
On top of track redesigns, we also have changed the visual and audio aesthetics of the game as well. In what was supposed to be a one-time event, we received so much positive feedback in support of the Vaporwave aesthetic. We made the decision to make this a permanent change. Gone are the retro arcade vibes, and now is the time of neon, bright colors, and a bumping soundtrack. All of our tracks currently, and in the future will reflect this change as well. Players can now race around densely packed cities, with neon lights, ultra reflections, and a synthwave soundtrack, channeling the vibes of the 80s to the fullest extent. Our new highways, and subway system are wrapped in a neon grid, creating a greater sense of speed and color. These visual changes are a desire to capture a vibe that players will hopefully get lost in.
Currently, we are working on rebuilding the combat system. We want something that feels more interactive, skill based, and engaging. New visual effects, sounds, and actions should create a much better feeling combat system, in which players will have 360 degrees of aiming movement. We feel that this new system, paired with the new physics, should create a far more engaging, and skill based experience. Skillful players should be able to fly upside down, hit ships that are chasing from behind, and pick up the extra energy to boost across the finish line for the win.
Alongside all of these changes and improvements, we are bringing in a new lap based gamemode. Players have been clamoring for a more traditional based racing mode, and with extended and variable track designs, we feel that this is achievable. On top of a lap based mode, we are also working on a new 5v5, class based gamemode. This new mode will put players into teams of five, in which teamwork will be critical to success. We are also retaining CRL’s original points based gamemode, so that fans will be able to play a plethora of options!
As you can see, the team has undertaken quite the rebuilding process. We felt, as much as our community did, that a massive overhaul was needed to make this game what we all envisioned. Although it has taken a tremendous amount of time and energy, we are so excited to share with you this new experience. We will be continuing to refine, and add even more during the life cycle of this game, including new tracks, new ships, new weapons, new game modes, and even a custom track parkour creator. We are so excited to see where CRL will go in the coming weeks and months, and we cannot wait for you all to play the new game very soon. Once combat is in a place that we feel comfortable with, we will be releasing the new Alpha version of Cygnus Racing League! So stay tuned for more information, and we will see you all out on track soon!
Cygnus Racing League: Alpha Overhaul
We hope you are all doing well! We apologize for the delay in posting this latest development blog. We consolidated down the feedback we received both on performance and gameplay, and realized that our previous direction was not the correct one moving forward. We have spent the last two months working towards a new goal that we think will lead Cygnus Racing League in a better direction both in terms of performance and gameplay. In this dev blog, we will talk about the new engine we have switched to, how it will address the performance issues we are facing, and briefly look at the new content that is coming soon!
The programming team has made the difficult decision to port the game over to the newest version of our engine. Although the work is extremely time consuming and difficult, we feel that this will address the performance that many of you are experiencing. Far too many players have reported FPS drops and performance well under our standards, and some of you cannot even play the game as it will not start, or performance is beyond unplayable. We apologize for the game being in this state. We unfortunately are limited by the access to the hardware the team has, and were not able to test the Pre-Alpha build on other hardware. These limitations left our team with little to pull from in terms of optimization.
After receiving feedback from many within our community, we now understand that the issues we have encountered are due to graphics API incompatibility, lack of culling, and models being too dense. The new engine will feature multiple APIs to adapt to the performance of the hardware that is available to the user. This feature will be included within a new settings menu that will allow players greater control over their graphical settings. These changes, paired with an entirely revamped visual approach, should help to fix the issues that have been plaguing performance. Many of the areas within environments have been optimized for FPS with the culling of items that are not in the field of view. We have paired this with massive vertex reductions, better use of billboarding, and model swapping reducing the number of triangles within a scene massively. We hope these extensive improvements render FPS drops a thing of the past!
On top of all of the changes we are making on the backend of the game, the game has undergone an extensive rework. Many users were unhappy with the current movement system, visual effects and aesthetic, and the lack of content. The dev team has revamped the gameplay and game concepts substantially. The new physics system should help create a movement system that players feel far more in control of, allowing them to drive straight up buildings, soar through the air, and create new possibilities within the racing environment. This new movement system will be paired with a new team based gamemode. We will have details about this new gamemode coming soon. On top of all of these new improvements, we are also undergoing large-scale visual overhauls. Cygnus Racing League will be going vaporwave in its latest incarnation! Neon colors, bright lights, new music, and a new UI system will have players feel like they are soaring through a retro, sci-fi, combat racing experience like no other!
Our team is very excited to share all of these changes with you! We think that this direction change will ultimately solve many of the issues that are plaguing our Pre-Alpha experience, and we want to thank you all for the feedback and help you have provided. Our dream has been to build this game as the ultimate user experience, and your feedback, patience, and assistance have been invaluable for our team. We appreciate you all immensely, and we look forward to making Cygnus Racing League the game of our community’s dreams!
Cygnus Racing League: Vapor Racer Event Delay
We hope that you are all doing well, and that you are enjoying your time in CRL! Our team has been working extremely hard to bring Vapor Racer to the game, and we are so excited to share this exciting new chapter of CRL with you all! Unfortunately, the update will not be dropping on the original goal of July 1st. We are currently overhauling the physics for improved hovering, as well as porting the game over to the newest version of our engine. With these extremely time consuming changes going on, along with the environment redesign, new gamemode, and new soundtrack going in, the team needs some extra time in order to make this event as unique, engaging, and fun as possible! We feel that the new date of July 8th, is a more achievable goal so that we can roll out all of the features we want to try! We appreciate your patience and support, and we cannot wait to be racing and competing alongside you all next month during this new event!
Minor Patch for Game Version 1.4
This patch addresses a gameplay issue relating to FPS. On low fps, AI racers would move slowly; this has now been resolved.
Cygnus Racing League: Vapor Racer Event Details
We hope that you are doing well, and are enjoying Cygnus Racing League to the fullest. Our team has worked tirelessly since the beginning of the year to bring CRL to fruition, and continue to develop and refine the experience into the greatest racing spectacle the galaxy has ever seen. As the Steam Racing Fest has wrapped up, and another month of development draws to a close, we think now is a good time to talk about the next big event on the horizon, Vapor Racer. With summer upon us soon we thought we would crank up the heat in-game as well, bringing vaporwave vibes on track, a new flight system, new VFX, new music, track redesigns, new environments, new custom gameplay options, and an entirely new gamemode type!
CRL: Vapor Racer is an event that brings a massive aesthetic change to the current gameplay experience! Visual redesigns of the in-game environments will reflect the vaporwave style of the event. From the pink and teal hues of neon cities, to the orange and yellow mix of a sun set in the desert, Vapor Racer will bring beautifully recolored landscapes to light in a whole new way. Visual changes will not be the only aesthetic redesign. The current soundtrack will be replaced by a fast, intense, synth heavy vaporwave album to inspire racers to push even harder. New visual effects will capture the speed, intensity, and outrageousness of the races bringing vapor trails, more dramatic death animations, and updated lighting modules that will bring a whole new vibe to the racing experience. This new aesthetic change will radically overhaul the game style, and elevate gameplay to a new level.
Traditional style tracks as we know them, will be gone from the game. No longer will players have to worry about staying on track, or be frustrated by overly sensitive binary racing controls. Vapor Racer will see the replacement of flat tracks, with spaces designed instead for free flight. No longer will players just be hovering over a force field based track, but will be using their ships to their fullest potential! This free flight physics overhaul will be the focal point of the core gameplay experience, and will remain in-game well after the event is finished. “Tracks” will now be a mix of truly free flight and guided environments, offering players agency into how they want to approach races.
With these new radical additions and changes to our core gameplay experience, we felt it the right time to bring in a new gamemode, 5V5. In this new gamemode, players will be placed into two teams of five with the goal of completing objectives to score points and win the game. We will have more details on this new and exciting gamemode coming soon, but in the meantime we will also be bringing more custom multiplayer options to the current CRL racing mode. Players will have the option of picking a more traditional race setup, in which players compete to complete a specified number of laps to win a race, as opposed to collecting the most points. These additions and changes to gamemodes and gameplay, should offer a radically different experience to CRL, bringing us closer to our goal of making the ultimate racing spectacle in the galaxy.
Cygnus Racing League: Vapor Racer is our most ambitious content update to date. It will bring a radical overhaul of the racing experience that we think will be colorful, vibey, hectic, and fun. Over the last two months, we have taken the time to really listen to our playerbase, and their experience in-game. We have heard much of the same feedback in terms of features and gameplay aspects that people have liked and disliked. We feel that CRL: Vapor Racer reflects that desired growth, and our desire to create a racing experience unlike any other. We will be rolling out these additions and changes as we march to our event’s start date of July 1st, 2022. This will allow players to playtest these features, offering us immediate feedback into what is working for players, and what is not. As always, our focus is to design our games alongside our community, and create an experience that you feel like you have helped shape. We would like to thank everyone for their patience, feedback, and help you have provided the development team over the last 6 months. We feel that the game has grown massively in terms of gameplay, and we can’t wait to see how the game will continue to grow in the coming months. As always, please feel free to reach out to us on Steam or one of our social media channels, and stay tuned for more updates!
Console Window Hotfix
This hotfix removes an appropriately appearing console window
-The Cygnus Dev Team