Monday Update - April 20, 2026
Yo! This week is all about optimization and performance. We had a great playtest of the new Fast Time racing mode last week, and it went really well, but it also helped us identify some performance issues that we need to tackle. We know some of you have been struggling to run the game smoothly, and that's our top priority right now. We're planning to push a new build this week on Wednesday, focusing on optimization (and a lot of other nice new features/trails).
Check out the video at the top of this post for a little preview of some things to come in the update later this week.
Here's what we are focusing on this week.
Hodge
Leading the charge on performance optimization. He found that one of our terrain settings was cranked way too high, eating up VRAM on lower-end devices. He's got a fix in that should help a lot.
Working on adding imposters for trees at a distance and dialing in shadow distance to squeeze out more frames.
We discovered that the Gondola and Bike Shop assets were unoptimized and costing up to 40 fps. We're disabling them for now until we can get the poly counts sorted out.
Aiming to have the optimization build ready by Tuesday or Wednesday.
Joe
Finishing up the last 2 trails in Zone 1 and completing the zone challenges. Once that's done, Zone 1 is wrapped up (except for art).
Implemented a bunch of new drone settings and quality of life improvements this past week. FPV pilots told us the first version felt too floaty, so I exposed a ton of values in the settings so you can dial in the feel yourself.
Added a camera pitch setting similar to MX bikes.
Added a mini map.
Cedric
Wrapping up Zone 2.5 this week — the rough, backwoodsy trails. The map currently has 31 trails and we're targeting 50-60 total.
Fixing the Zone 2 drone jammer trail for the next update. We heard your feedback — it was too puzzly with too many gaps. We're reworking it into a cleaner, harder skinny ride.
Possibly starting work on a new replica course!
Damien
Nearly done with the procedural root tool. It supports random directional roots, configurable amounts, and spline-based routing so Cedric can shape them exactly how he wants on the trails. He's finishing it up today and will demo it to Cedric this week.
Adding Better Lit Shader to the project.
Maggie
Continuing environment artwork.
Finalizing our material library.
A bunch of art planning now that the art department is growing! We have a new art intern starting next month. Maggie is the head of the art department, so she's been doing a lot of onboarding and prep work for that.
Julian
Keeping up the daily social media grind — posting content, engaging on Discord and Patreon, and doing outreach.
We're almost at 8,000 wishlists on Steam! We picked up nearly 150 over the weekend alone. Patreon is climbing back up too with 73 new members this month so far. Thanks to everyone who has joined!
That's it for this week! I'm looking forward to getting this optimization update out so the game is more playable for all of you.
Here's a picture of Jake running through the poppies in El Paso, Texas, back in March 2020.