In this small update, we've made a few QOL changes:
Main Menu cleanup: we've cleaned up our community links to remove menu clutter
The in-game quick control guide may is now a toggle feature
We have also imbued game level "Mophium", with a vapor wave theme!
-The Cygnus Dev Team
Steam Racing Fest: Cygnus Racing League Dev Live Stream
Hello there Cygnus Community!
We are so excited to be participating in our first ever Steam event! The Steam Racing Fest is a celebration of all things that go fast, and CRL definitely fits the bill! In honor of our participation in such a unique event, we are going to host a Dev Live Stream on Wednesday May 25th, at 5 PM PST. In our live stream we will talk about the current state of the game, talk about the event we are dropping next month, and what the future holds for both CRL and Cygnus Studios as a whole! We hope that you’ll stop on by, and play some races along with us on our dedicated servers!
Game Version 1.4
Greetings Cygnus Community!
Game Version 1.4a has arrived!
In this game version, we've brought in the following features and changes:
Gameplay:
Ship Speeds and Turn Rates were reduced to allow for more accessible driving
Auto-aim/targeting is now a feature to allow for more accessible combat; manual targeting provides a damage bonus, ensuring that there is still reward for picking manual aiming
Tracks: most have been enlarged to enable more accessible driving and maneuvering
Ship Abilities: every ship now possesses a unique in-game activatable ability
Tractor Beam Ability: redesigned to reflect the ability's actual effect; whereas previously, the ability would simply freeze the target in place
NEW Ship Upgrades/Items
LaserCannon has been implemented as an equippable item
Minigun is a new item
Repair is a new item
NEW Gameplay Mechanics
Boost Gates: these structures provide a speed boost on interaction
Powerup Pedestals: pickups that grant a bonus (health, speed, etc.)
Visual FX: ships now leave behind destroyed remains on destruction
Planet Hablarius: redesigned for a more unique gameplay experience
-The Cygnus Dev Team
May Roadmap
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!
Game V1.3, Major Update
Greetings Cygnus Community!
Game V1.3 is now out! It includes a host of bugfixes, new content, and Q.O.L. updates.
Having received abundant feedback and undergone internal testing, this major update aims to address difficulty with driving and combat, keeping those mechanics balanced, yet more accessible for new and veteran players alike.
- The Cygnus Dev Team
CRL V1.3 Update
Greetings Cygnus Community!
Cygnus Racing League has been out in the gaming-verse for a little over 3 weeks now, and you all have provided some incredible feedback. The advice, support, and help that you have given us has shaped CRL’s first major update that arrives tomorrow, 4/30! After multiple internal and external playtests, we took some major steps to improving and refining current gameplay mechanics, as well adding many QOL features to help create a much more streamlined and accessible game experience. Here are the features of the new update!
NEW CONTENT:
Special Abilities have arrived!
Lavish Esquire: (Powerdash) Consumes 30 energy for a quick burst of speed forward, 10 Second Cooldown
Fate 5000: (Tempt Fate) Uses random ability from current list of abilities available, Cooldown dependent on ability used
ForcePoint Legion: (He’s good to me dead) For each kill Legion generates a bounty crate worth 5 points, max of 20 crates (Placeholder disruptor beam until implemented soon!)
Lavish Count: (Tractor beam) Fires beam that pulls a ship towards you and holds ship for 3 seconds, 15 second cooldown
NexusLift Goliath: (Contraband Smuggler) Converts contraband cargo into 25% heals to health, 15 second cooldown
NexusLift Mammoth: (Fortify) Reroutes ship energy to form 100 hitpoint barrier for 10 seconds, 20 second cooldown
New Items!
Machine Gun: Short (35 meters manual, 25 meters auto-aim), Automatic, High Damage Weapon (70 hp/s manual, 40 hp/s auto-aim)
Laser Cannon: Medium/Long Range (80 meters manual, 50 meters auto-aim), single-fire 1 second cooldown for 1 second burst, Medium Damage (60 hp/s manual, 35 hp/s auto-aim)
Repair: item that allows repair to full health, 60 second cooldown
New gameplay mechanics!
Players can now drive reverse and complete laps
QUALITY OF LIFE ADDITIONS:
Single Player has been overhauled so that changes are now parallel with Multiplayer additions, update, and gameplay
8 of the 10 tracks (exceptions for Netsorelia and Tranth {Redesign in progress}) have been widened up to double track size to help players stay on track
Toggle aim was added, with players given the option of auto-aim or manual aim modes to assist players who were struggling with combat. Manual aim modes will create more damage, while auto-aim will do less damage but assist with aim to keep balance with skilled players
Visual indicators were added to show players checkpoints for lap completion, lap markers, special abilities in use, and a trophy overlay for the top 3 positions (gold trophy indicator for 1st place, silver trophy for 2nd place, and bronze for 3rd place)
Exploit for lap completions has been altered with physics barriers and extra lap checkpoints being added to deter players from extreme track corner cutting
HUD additions for items menu, weapon switching, aim mode, and special ability selection
We sought to tackle the issues that were most prevalent in the community with this update. Many of you felt the combat system in its current state was too difficult. Paired with the difficulty of staying on track, the game was inaccessible for many new players. With this feedback in mind, we did our best to redesign difficult corners, increase the track widths, and added combat features to make ease of gameplay far more accessible for a wider range of skill levels. Alongside these changes we brought many new additions to the game, and will be bringing even more in the coming weeks such as new tracks, on track items, upgrades, boost gates, and new ships. We are so grateful for the feedback we have been given so far, and we hope that with more feedback and help from our community that we can continue to refine, polish, and create content that all of our players can enjoy to the fullest! We hope you all are as excited as we are to play these new features, and we look forward to seeing you all out on track!
April Update Roadmap
Greetings Cygnus Community!
Cygnus Racing League has finally arrived! After just a week of release we have nearly 3,000 licenses claimed, which means our community has grown tremendously. We look forward to getting to meet all of our new community members over the coming weeks and months! In this dev blog post, we wanted to cover some of the feedback we received over the last week, discuss the roadmap for the rest of the month, and talk about our new weekly streams happening on Discord.
We want to start off by thanking everyone for their feedback they have provided over the past week. Without you we would have not been aware of what needs to be improved and what was working! We got a lot of feedback on the flying difficulties people were experiencing. A lot of our feedback was based around the difficulty of staying on track. We are working on further solutions but in the meantime turn rates were increased across the board, along with corner cutting measures being added in to help players who were getting punished for being adventurous. We are also looking at increasing track width to provide a more forgiving track environment. These changes, along with some track redesigns should help players a lot, but as always we are open to suggestions!
Along with these hotfixes, we are also working on some big project goals for the month. The Dev Team mapped out the rest of the month, with big highlights being further assistance with corner cutting/shortcuts, new items, ship abilities, and Steam SDK integration.
In order to make corner cutting more balanced than it is in its current state, we are turning shortcuts into a risk/reward experience. Physics barriers, as well as game mechanics will be added to stop shortcuts from getting too out of hand. We want to encourage shortcuts, but at the cost of risk of falling off to deter players from consistently cutting across the tracks.
New items are on the way! Two new items we can confirm will be the return of the self-repair and minigun! Self-repair will allow you to bring your health back up to full with a one minute cooldown in between uses. The classic minigun will also return, providing some close fire DPS that will melt enemies at short range!
Ship abilities will be making their debut this month with unique abilities for each ship providing even more chaos to the races!
Lavish Royal: Reign of the Monarchy, providing a boost to all stats,
Fate 5000: Roll the dice, random active ability every time you use it.
Lavish Count: Vaporwave mode, Visuals change to a grid mode, speed and damage increased by 10% for 5 seconds.
ForcePoint Legion: ARC Reactor, beam that disables ships instantly.
NexusLift Goliath: Contraband Smuggler, can convert freight into instant heal.
Galactic Logistics Mammoth: Juggernaut mode, double health for 5-10 seconds.
Steam SDK Integration is on the way!
Dedicated servers: Users will now be able to host their own dedicated servers.
Server list: Server browsing list for both online and LAN games.
Friend Hot Join: Will allow hot join option into Steam Friend server.
Future Additions: Steam Workshop Modding support, and achievements will be coming in following months!
Finally we are hosting our weekly streams on our Discord server, “Cygnus Racing League Chat”. Not only can you interact with other community members here, but every Saturday at 4 PM PST, you can play alongside the dev team in our Cygnus Weekly Stream chat. Here players can provide feedback, ask questions, and help shape the future of CRL. We are so excited to interact with you all on Saturdays! Use the link below to go to our Discord Channel!
Our release has been an amazing experience for the entire team, and it is because of you all! Your support and help has made the release experience an absolute dream, and we want to thank every single one of you for your kindness, encouragement, and effort! We are so excited to develop this game alongside you all over the coming months, and see what Cygnus Racing League is going to be!
Minor Update for Apr 12th
Hi Cygnus Community!
In this update, we've fixed a minor bug involving "grace periods" for driving off the track. Grace period durations should now be consistent and proper.
Additionally, after additional feedback, we have adjusted turning rates for Light & Medium class ships, to further balance and make them more competitive on the track.
-The Cygnus Dev Team
Minor Gameplay Tune Update
Hi Cygnus Community!
In this update, we've adjusted vehicle turn rates, based on initial player feedback and review. This should be reflected in more balanced gameplay in terms of vehicle movement.
- The Cygnus Dev Team
Minor update for Apr 8th
Hi Cygnus Community!
In this minor update, automated error/bug logging is now a feature. You may choose to upload your logs to our online service, which would aid in our effort to more efficiently address any issues encountered in the game; alternatively, you may refuse to and instead opt into other routes to contact us about any issues or inconveniences.
