Project Cygni

Project Cygni was Threshold Games' flagship product, and we were aiming very high for our first release. Our ultimate goal for the project was to re-design the traditional gameplay loops of a 4X Strategy game away from a focus on "competitive colonialism" as the prevalent gameplay strategy. We had identified that there was a lot of love in the 4X community for Alpha Centauri as well as a desire to see a spiritual successor, and we used that game as our core inspiration for the project.

Instead of presenting a hard focus on expanding the player's ownership of the map and eliminating all other opponents, Cygni instead focused the player on maintaining high quality of life scores within their society while simultaneously negotiating with multiple external forces: your allies, the planet's pre-existing ecosystem, and your enemies - a group of hyper-Capitalistic Fascists known as The Exponentialists. It was important to our team that the game correctly represented real world problems within its fantasy story and we made the decision to keep our game's representation of science and ecology as grounded as possible to uphold the Solarpunk genre we were working with.

As the leader of one of 3 playable coalitions of humans, the player interacted with the map by constructing buildings, structures which spanned multiple hexes unlike city districts in other 4X games, and individual units to explore the map. This gave Cygni a unique feel that meshed aspects of city building games with the turn-based decision making of 4X Strategy titles.

Cygni also forsook the traditional technological level up gameplay of Ages in favor of narrative Acts, which required the player to reach specific goals in their society before a specific time period passed. If the player was successful the story would tilt in their favor, but if the player was unsuccessful in their goals, the story would begin to increase in difficulty and narrative tension. The turn-based nature of the game was important to setting up our narrative pacing as well as the availability of specific gameplay elements, such as specific resources only appearing in the game during specific seasons or years.

Cygni's map was constructed by a unique, proprietary tool codenamed "TriangleLand" as it made use of Unreal Engine 5's Nanite technology to rapidly construct truly procedural landscapes via "biome blending." The game generated randomized scientific data within preset ranges at the start of a new story, including humidity, temperature, hex height, and hex position, to identify areas of the map as specific gameplay biomes. After assigning biomes, TriangleLand then blended the landscape's Nanite tiles together to create one contiguous landscape that automatically created natural changes between environments or altitudes. Maps were generated via seed codes that could be shared amongst the development staff and, later, players, if they wanted to play on the same world setup.

Below are images from our pitch booklet, which was created in the style of a tabletop RPG sourcebook. This formatting was also not an accident, as our company was also creating a tabletop RPG project in the same setting at the same time as a companion game, so our pitch booklet served as an initial public test of our future formatting.