Zombie Driver HD News

Hello everyone!

We never expected this day would ever come. Today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of the first standalone EXOR Studios title, Zombie Driver.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-wNhKdML38

We left our jobs and founded EXOR in 2007 to realize our dream of making games on our own, independently. Even though the early months were quite rocky we kept going and bet everything on Zombie Driver. Originally released on the 4th of December 2009, it greatly surpassed our expectations. It grew a loyal fanbase, secured our future as a game development studio and paved the way for our future projects.



Zombie Driver received a healthy dose of DLCs, updates, and reeditions, including the HD version in 2012 and the Immortal Edition this year. Over its lifetime the game:

• sold almost 1.000.000 copies worldwide.
  
• was released in physical form in 58 countries.
  
• was ported to many platforms - PC, WinRT, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Playstation 3, Nintendo Switch, Nvidia Shield, Ouya.
  
• made EXOR Studios recognizable and made us irreplaceable friends all over the world.
  

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Zombie Driver, for the next 24 hours the game is free on Steam. You can add it to your library free of charge. X-Morph: Defense is getting a 75% discount, too. We are also very close to publishing Zombie Driver on the Playstation 4, so keep an eye out for that.



We hope you had or will have as much fun playing Zombie Driver as we had making it. In the meantime, we are continuing our work on the next project, The Riftbreaker. It is a completely different game - a combination of base-building, survival and hack’n’slash, but the engine it uses evolved from what we used in Zombie Driver. You can’t stop the undead!



Thank you for all these years of support! We hope that 10 years from now we will have even more reasons to celebrate with you!

EXOR Studios

You still have a chance to survive in The Riftbreaker when your HQ explodes, but you will have a lot of cleaning up to do.

Now that you know how we prepare particle effects in our games, let’s move on to some practical applications of those. Single explosions, bullets, blood splats or wood splinters flying around look fun, but our possibilities do not end there. We very often combine multiple effects into sequences. Thanks to this technique it is possible to achieve massive, spectacular cascades of fire, sparks, and debris that look as if they were taken from a Hollywood action film. It’s quite an interesting process, which requires some creativity and destructive imagination, so let’s take a look!

Multiple buildings changing their state at once is often a sight to behold.

Most objects that you see in EXOR Studios’ games can be either damaged or completely destroyed during regular gameplay. Some of those objects are small and relatively insignificant - a tree, for example. It can either stand perfectly healthy or be destroyed. Entities with the health point system are a little different. Apart from the “100% OK” state (max health) and the “dead” state (0 health) we also have a ‘damaged” state - anywhere between 1% and 99% health (approximately, of course ;)). The bigger an entity is, the more HP it is likely to have - and if it has a lot of HP, we might give it destruction levels.

Friendly fire is not a thing in The Riftbreaker, but we used it to show you different destruction levels for the Armory in a controlled environment.

Destruction levels are damage thresholds that we use to trigger certain effects. For example, the Headquarters in The Riftbreaker look different when they are at 100%, 75% or 10% health, with more smoke and fire breaking out as the building becomes damaged. This system is not exclusive to buildings and applies to creatures as well - they get wounded and bloody as the damage increases. The purpose of the destruction level system is to give players feedback. We want you to know that your attacks are hurting the creature you’re hunting. We want you to know that the creatures hunting you can hurt you too.

The core blowing up in X-Morph: Defense is not a positive thing, but the visuals at least make up for the game loss.

There are usually several destruction levels for a destructible entity. When the health drops below a threshold specified by one of the destruction levels, a group of effects is triggered. Physical parts are spawned, each with individual properties, such as weight, dimensions, buoyancy, friction upon hitting the ground - you name it. The parts are given the texture of the object they were spawned from in order to maintain consistency. What is also important - the parts do not just appear out of nowhere - they are pushed out by a force at the center of the object that randomly changes the direction and power (maintaining a vector aiming away from the object). This way you can’t predict what the debris will do once it starts flying.

A particle effect can be attached to any of the yellow spheres.

When the destruction level is reached, the material on the object changes as well. Cracks, impact holes and other damage starts to show. To reach the level of visual polish we aim for it’s necessary to add particle effects. They are attached to specific points on the model and we try to set them up as realistically as possible. If there is a structural vulnerability, a pipe, or some exposed wires - we set it on fire. Each model requires manual setup when it comes to attaching effects.

We started playing around with explosion sequences in X-Morph: Defense.

An important aspect of this feature is that we can control when a particle effect starts its ‘playback’. This allows us to prepare sequences of explosions. For example, when the Headquarters in The Riftbreaker reaches 0 HP, a sequence of multiple explosions will start. They happen all over the place, varying in intensity, culminating in the complete destruction of the building in a big bang.

We hope you enjoyed our little articles. If you did, join us on Discord: www.discord.gg/exorstudios

Other social media:
www.facebook.com/exorstudios
www.twitter.com/exorstudios
www.mixer.com/exor_studios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios

Kaboom.

When a Steam user left a review on the X-Morph: Defense Store Page saying that the game looked as if it was directed by Michael Bay, it dawned on us - there are lots of explosions in our games. We never gave that much thought, to be honest, but taking a look back it has always been true for all our projects. We love blowing things up and we think we’re quite good at it, so we would like to tell you what goes into creating realistic-looking explosions (and other effects) for EXOR Studios games, including The Riftbreaker.

A sample scene from Zombie Driver HD. There are lots of particles in this one - blood, sparks, explosions… The game wouldn’t be the same without these effects.

The explosions you see in our games are realized through the extensive use of the particle effects system. The particles are prepared by our artist in a specialized tool and then imported into the game. They consist of quadrilaterals (two-dimensional shapes, often referred to as ‘quads’) with a texture and set transparency. The artist can give each of the quads different properties, changing their overall appearance and how they behave in relation to other quads within the same effect, but it is the texture that is the base of it all. In much simpler terms - we set flat images in motion, make them see-through and add some eye candy.

A view from the editor we use - Particle Universe. The tree goes on and on, and each node is a different variable!

You need to have a general idea of what you want to achieve and pick the right textures for the job. There are many types you can choose from. They vary between each other in how they interact with other textures in terms of light and transparency. We mainly use emissives (textures that appear as if they were light sources and can be blended with textures that are underneath them) and refracts (special textures that distort the surrounding area, like in the case of hot air, or a shockwave). When we are not working on explosions, we also make use of alpha blend textures. They do not fake being light sources, but simply mix with other textures in their vicinity. The whole process of creating a particle effect begins with choosing the right texture for the context.

By choosing correct textures you can get a whole range of effects.

Every effect consists of sub effects. They are lower-level structures that allow you to group quads together and apply some properties to them - more on those properties later, but in general - you can individually move the sub effects and make them behave in a certain way. Of course, it is extremely important to position the sub effects right. You don’t want a large cloud of black smoke to cover up all the fire, sparks and debris from the remaining ones. In general, you need to start creating an effect with a clear end goal in mind. Reference videos and images are very useful at this point.

The effects look different in editor and in game, so it’s necessary to test everything live. By the way - this explosion consists of 1042 quads!

Another important piece of the puzzle is the emitter. Every sub effect contains one. It can be seen as the ‘starting point’ of the particle. It controls the spatial properties of the effect. The quads are spawned from the emitter, and the artist specifies all their properties. The particles can be rendered at any given angle, or they can be set to always face the camera. They can be moved in any direction and at any speed, giving the creator complete control over the end result. That’s already a lot of steps, and we’re not done yet.

Boss dying in X-Morph: Defense - let the images speak for themselves.

What you can add on top of the quads rendered by the emitter are the so-called affectors. An affector is a function that can change the quad you’ve already rendered, for example by changing its transparency or color over time. Take a cloud of smoke as an example. The affector will change it in a couple of ways over its lifetime. First, it will be quite small and opaque, growing larger over time and becoming more transparent, just like smoke in real life. Thanks to the affectors we can control when and how quickly it happens and which direction should the quad move.

The Riftbreaker will feature lots of particles, and since we are always learning new things, you can expect them to be even more flashy!

Combining all these things together is a difficult, but incredibly exciting task. It takes years of practice and hours of watching real-life examples of the effects you want to simulate to reach proficiency. We’re pretty sure our particle artist is on several watchlists by now, because of all the videos of explosions, fires and controlled demolitions he has googled over time. Still - worth it!

Next time we will tell you about sequences of explosions - something even more spectacular :) Stay tuned and join the Discord! www.discord.gg/exorstudios

Our social media:
www.facebook.com/exorstudios
www.twitter.com/exorstudios
www.mixer.com/exor_studios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios

The biggest gaming holiday in Europe (perhaps in the world) has arrived! It is time for Gamescom 2019. We are present there as well. You can find us in hall 10.1, booth A031. We recommend using the official Gamescom app to make the navigation a little easier.



During this year’s event, we are showcasing our latest project - The Riftbreaker. Visit our booth and play our custom-made event demo - a special, standalone mission designed to take you through the basics of gameplay. There is a little bit of everything there - base-building, fighting, exploration, and if you prefer to just admire the views - that is possible, too.

When you’re at our booth, you can also get some sweet EXOR Studios swag. We have loads of goodies to give away, including pins, energy drinks, pens, and X-Morph: Defense game codes. The only thing you need to do is to come over and spin the wheel of fortune. Don’t worry - we won’t run out ;)

Lastly, you can take a picture with a giant, 2.5m sculpture of Mr. Riggs! Come and see it for yourself!



Hall 10.1, booth A031. We’re going to be there during the whole show. Come and say hi, especially if you’re a member of our Discord server. If you aren’t, join now! www.discord.gg/exorstudios We’re going to be chatting there during the event and sharing some sweet, behind-the-scenes footage. We will also be giving closed beta access to early builds of The Riftbreaker through our Discord.

Lastly, we are also going to be streaming The Riftbreaker development builds right here on our Steam page. Look out for further announcements :)

See you there!

Other social media:
www.facebook.com/exorstudios
www.twitter.com/exorstudios
www.mixer.com/exor_studios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios

Hello everyone!

We are holding an AMA on the r/Games subreddit right now. The general topic of the thread is going to be our game engine, The Schmetterling. We have been working on it continuously since the days of Zombie Driver and we think it is a pretty interesting topic in the days of big-name, free-to-use game engines.

The AMA is available under this URL:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/cps839/hello_we_are_exor_studios_we_have_been_making/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

Since this is an AMA - ‘Ask Me Anything’ - you can ask us about anything you like. The questions do not have to be related to The Schmetterling Engine. You can ask about any aspect of indie dev life, our games, plans for the future and other things that might interest you. All questions are welcome!

If you can’t make it this time, join our Discord server. It’s an almost 24/7 AMA ;)
Find us at www.discord.gg/exorstudios!