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Riftstorm News

RIFTSTORM Demo Opens for Public!

[p] [/p][p]Hey everyone,[/p][p]This is it! Steam Next Fest is officially live, and with it — the first public demo of RIFTSTORM is now available for download.[/p][p][/p][p]This is your first chance to jump into a world of secret operatives, powerful organizations, and ancient myths. Become a Weaver, take on mythic threats, and experience the fast-paced looter-shooter roguelite chaos we’ve been building over the past few years.[/p][p][/p][h3]The demo includes:[/h3]
  • [p]🧑‍🚀 4 Fully-Unlocked Weavers (Level 30)[/p]
  • [p]⚔️ 4 Curated Missions, including:[/p]
    • [p]Two standard combat dungeons, designed to gear you up[/p]
    • [p]Operation 1411: A survival-extraction challenge built to test your skills (and your hardware) in a tower-defense-styled marathon of chaos.[/p]
    • [p]Operation Marble Obelisk: A final showdown to put the weapons you looted from 1411 to use[/p]
  • [p]🛠️ A simplified, demo-specific loadout + Periapt system[/p]
  • [p]🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Full solo and co-op support
    [/p]
[hr][/hr][h3]To our playtesters — thank you.[/h3][p]Your feedback helped shape the combat flow, mission structure, and build systems featured in this slice of the game. We’ve still got a ways to go, but we wouldn’t be here without you.[/p][p][/p][h3]To all our new players — welcome.[/h3][p]This is a curated glimpse into a world shaped by the secretive Mythic Protocol, where rifts, relics, and other secrets lurk — but thankfully, you’ve got guns. Lots of guns.[/p][p][/p][p]What you’re playing is just a taste of what’s to come — a focused slice crafted around tight combat, replayability, and short-session intensity. We can’t wait to hear what you think.[/p][p][/p][p]💬 We’ll be around all week during Next Fest, so don’t hesitate to share your thoughts, memes, bugs, or build breakdowns. We’re listening — and honestly, we’re probably in-game too.[/p][hr][/hr][h2]Check our game at the Southeast Asian Game Showcase[/h2][p]RIFTSTORM is featured on the Southeast Asian Game Showcase Steam page as part of the Summer Game Fest event.

Check out our game in the "Upcoming Games" tab alongside other games made in Southeast Asia![/p][p]https://store.steampowered.com/sale/southeastasiangamesshowcase[/p][p][/p][h2]How should we engage you better?[/h2][p]We’re so excited to welcome you again to RIFTSTORM and experience the rifts and mythics. It would be great if you can give us a wishlist to support us.[/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]You can also join us on Discord to get in touch with the dev team and ask questions![/p]

RIFTSTORM is headed to Steam Next Fest



Hey everyone,


We’re thrilled to announce that RIFTSTORM will officially be joining Steam Next Fest this June!

This will be the first time we’re opening the game fully to the public — and we couldn’t be more excited (and just a little nervous) to finally let you all dive into the world we’ve been building. The demo offers a small but intense slice of the game, designed to showcase the core combat loop, co-op synergy, and build variety we’ve been obsessing over.

I also want to take a moment to thank the many thousands of players who’ve playtested the game with us over the past two years. From entity-count stress tests to endless tower climbs to mini-story campaigns — your time and feedback have helped shape the version of RIFTSTORM we’re about to share with the world. And wow, did we learn a lot.

We’ll go into more detail about the demo build during the event itself, but I want to give a special shoutout to those of you who accepted the challenge, time and time again. Thanks to you, we’ve built this demo around a smaller, curated mission pool that leads into two highly replayable scenarios: Operation 1411 and Operation Marble Obelisk.

We’ve still got a few systems and kinks to iron out over the next few days — but we hope you’re as excited as we are.

Stay tuned for more details, and thanks for sticking with us this far.

The RIFTSTORM Team

=================================
[h2]How should we engage you better?[/h2]
We’re so excited to welcome you again to RIFTSTORM and experience the rifts and mythics. It would be great if you can give us a wishlist to support us.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2282790/RIFTSTORM/
You can also join us on Discord to get in touch with the dev team and ask questions!

Devblog #9 | Internal Alpha Updates & Content Variety

[h2]Hey everyone, [/h2]
We wanted to share a quick development update for RIFTSTORM as we countdown to our next public release.

[h2]Internal Alpha Updates[/h2]
Internally, we’ve been working on a few big updates from the last public playtest including overhauling the UI for our core systems, slowly transitioning old environments to our new dungeon system (you can read about that here, and building out new weapons, characters and a new mythic species. We’ve compiled most of these updates into an internal playtest that we conducted just prior to the Eid festivities.

While we’re not quite satisfied with the quality of the updates to share the build publicly, our internal playtest did help us refine our focus for RIFTSTORM’s next big test drop.

[h3]Progress Update: UI/UX Rework[/h3]
As we continue to refine our primary interface, the name of the game is future-proofing and building for scale. With so many systems being added and thanks to the feedback we’ve received from our public and internal playtests, we’ve been working on updating the UI and UX in our core loops. From our Mission Center to our updated Dungeons, you can expect a more streamlined interface and user-flow that will allow us to additively expand on in the future.



[h3]Progress Update: Content Variety[/h3]
As of the latest test, our gameplay teams are finally satisfied with the core shooting and looting mechanics, allowing the team to move on to expanding the game as intended. Since February we’ve split the team into three parallel pipelines: weapons, mythics, and modes.



With 16 new weapons in the pipe (we may show less during the next playtest depending on polish state), our expanded armory and crafting system is shaping up to be pretty expansive. We really did try to show some of our cool content but this had to go through a “clearance” phase with Igor - sorry, we tried.



The big mythic headline will be the introduction of our new mythic species. M-0072. We had a whole spiel about its origins, our “unique” take on the species and our intent with it, but honestly we thought that redacted pictures will speak louder than words.



We’ll with a sneak peak at some of the new asset concepts we’ve made for the new incoming game modes - even with all the redactions, we think that the keen eyed among you can figure out what new modes might be coming in the future.

[h2]How should we engage you better?[/h2]
We’re so excited to welcome you again to RIFTSTORM and experience the rifts and mythics. It would be great if you can give us a wishlist to support us.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2282790/RIFTSTORM/

You can also join us on Discord to get in touch with the dev team and ask questions!

See you on the rift!
RIFTSTORM Team

Devblog #8 | Alpha Playtest Recap + Roguelite/Looter/ARPG

[h2]Hey everyone,[/h2]

A very belated Happy New Year, Lunar New Year, and welcome to our latest dev-blog update.

Last year, we were fortunate enough to conduct two playtests—each one larger in scope, scale, and community than the last. Our most recent playtest peaked at over 100,000 downloads, generating a veritable mountain of player data and feedback for our team to analyze.



To everyone who joined us last year, we cannot thank you enough for your time both in-game and for completing the surveys we distributed throughout the playtests.

To start this year off, we wanted to take a moment not only to share our progress but also to openly discuss one of the biggest points of debate brought up by the community: Is RIFTSTORM truly a roguelite, an ARPG, or a straight-up looter shooter? It’s a question we’ve wrestled with internally as we continue to refine and develop our gameplay goals for RIFTSTORM.

Feedback from players during the last two playtest periods raised concerns about the expectations for a roguelite game versus the version of RIFTSTORM they experienced. After internal discussions, we realized that we had set erroneous expectations by emphasizing the roguelite aspect on our store page and in our marketing. For many die-hard roguelite fans, the RIFTSTORM we presented didn’t quite scratch that itch—especially when compared directly with the biggest names in the genre.

To help visualize our intent relative to market expectations, the table below outlines the “core” gaming expectations for the Roguelike, Roguelite, ARPG, and Looter-Shooter genres and compares them with both the current (Playtest) version of RIFTSTORM and our intended RIFTSTORM 1.0.



- Green shows the parts that we intent and how they align with what genre
- Blue shows where we are doubling down with RIFTSTORM


Please note that we pared down our data points to present a more concise list based on a subjective matrix developed by our design team. Some ranges and data points may differ from your views, and we welcome further discussion.

In essence, RIFTSTORM is best described as an ARPG–Looter-Shooter hybrid that draws heavy inspiration from the roguelite genre—especially in its procedural power-ups, maps, and encounter designs—to create a more emergent gameplay experience. Our biggest challenge thus far has been balancing our procedural core shooter experience with our intentionally crafted, cerebral meta layer built around a robust looter loop.

The overwhelming results from Playtest #3 helped narrow our focus even further with the introduction of our basic resource and crafting systems. These systems, along with raw player data, provided our design teams with insight into the loot-driven motivations of the majority of our players. When contrasted with typical roguelite expectations, our meta-progression system now combines a more rewarding loot-based gameplay loop with detailed, mechanic-level character customizations. When measured against the potential power creep of our in-mission power-ups and encounters, we have ultimately decided to skew our balance in favor of rewarding loot over a typical roguelite experience.

For our team, this fundamental question raised by the community has helped better frame the long-term vision for Riftstorm, and we are immensely grateful to everyone who brought it up. At the risk of delving into a full design paper, we’ll leave the discussion here for now and invite you to share your thoughts in the comments or directly with us on Discord or Steam Discussion.

As for what comes next—we’re happy to share that our teams are gearing up for a major beta release sometime this year. At the moment, we’re still working on systemic tweaks and updates to the old build while gradually shifting our focus to the major gameplay systems that we have yet to showcase in previous playtests. In our content pipeline, new characters and a new mythic species are entering production, and if all goes well, one of these topics might be the focus of our next dev-blog.

Cheers,
The Riftstorm Team

Thanks for Playing - Alpha Playtest Has Ended

Hey everyone,

Woah, time flies... and now it’s time we closed our Alpha Demo and mark the end of another successful playtest. The past two weeks have been a wild ride. My team and I want to express our heartfelt thanks to everyone who participated in this playtest. Some of you stayed up all night playing RIFTSTORM, logged over 30k in the last two weeks and all of you collectively helped get our demo to the #1 Trending Free spot on Steam.

Playtests have always been an all-hands-on-deck situation for our team – with 24/7 support and monitoring to gather bug reports and feedback from all over the world. That said, it’s not all work and no play, everyone on the community and many in the dev team has had countless adventures and stories to share from playing with all of you. You guys made all the long hours' worth it.

In the coming weeks, we’ll gather all your reviews, ideas, and notes. And maybe, we’ll be back soon with another, even better playtest? 👀

All your feedback, thoughts, and critiques have gotten us from a small MVP build 2 years ago to where we are now. If you haven’t already, please take a moment to help shape the future of RIFTSTORM through this form: confiction.link/pt3feedback

We look forward to your continued journey with us🙌🏻



Warmly,
Fayi and The RIFTSTORM Team