Cranked Monday Update - August 31, 2026

Yo! Hope you had a good weekend. We hit a couple of big milestones this week, so thank you.

If you're new here, we have a Team Sync every Monday where we talk through our plans for the week. These are the notes from our meeting.

General Updates

• We crossed 20,000 wishlists on Steam and 10,000 followers on Instagram. Genuinely, thank you. This stuff matters more than you know.

• We're officially in Steam Next Fest. The festival goes live October 19, with press getting early access on October 8, and our demo will be Zone 1.

• We're doing some final testing and fixing of the new UI update before we release it to our paid Patreon members. We plan to release the next update sometime this week. Hopefully Tuesday, but we don't want to rush it.

• For the next few weeks, the whole focus is polishing the player experience and squashing bugs for the demo, rather than piling on new features. We have to submit demo builds to Steam for review by September 21, which is 3 weeks from now.

Here's what we're focusing on this week

Michael

• Tuning the rider's movement in the air on 360s based on your feedback.

• Keeping e-bikes off the mod maps so the e-bike leaderboards stay fair. Hopefully get the ebike specific LBs working on mod maps, too.

Maggie

• Finishing the area outside the Rad Dog shop and the rest of the social space.

• Fixing up some things with customization like adding the missing thumbnail previews and fixing the rider masks (so you don't see clothes blocking your view when in the first-person camera).

Joe

• Going through the new UI and fixing what's left.

• Reworking the tutorial after some playtesting turned up rough spots for new players.

• Building out challenges for Zones 1 and 2.

Julian

• Working on an edit that shows off the new UI.

• Making a promo video for our NRG Bikefest collab.

Cedric

• R&D on a new map which will lead us into the second official map for Cranked. He's testing a smaller map size, which will allow for increased terrain resolution (more detail on things like ruts, braking bumps, etc.), better performance, and faster map delivery. So far we love how this new approach is working!

That's the plan for this week. Most of our energy right now is going into making the demo really solid for Next Fest in October.

Lucy says hi. She sleeps on the job a lot, but otherwise she's a 10/10.