The Riftbreaker News

Designing quests for a video game is never easy. In a perfect world, all the tasks you give to the player would be unique and offer completely new experiences. Realistically, however, the designers don’t always have enough time or means to craft such experiences all the time. Sometimes this results in a lot of ‘generic’ missions being given to the player, such as ‘Bring X items to person Y’, or ‘Kill X monsters’. Such filler missions are sometimes necessary, but the mistake some designers make is settling for this type of mission as the bread and butter of their games.



To avoid pointless grind and repetition in The Riftbreaker, we decided to employ a slightly adapted SMART technique. It is a method for setting personal or professional goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-constrained. This technique helps people easily set well-constructed personal goals, such as ‘I’m going to learn 5 new Spanish words this week’. The same method can be also useful in game design. Today we are going to tell you how these principles guide us while preparing the Campaign Mode for The Riftbreaker. Let’s explore this concept, letter by letter.



S for Specific - The instructions for each mission that we give to the player have to be very clear and give them immediate knowledge of what they are expected to do. If we gave you an objective such as ‘Fortify your base’, you wouldn’t be entirely sure what to do and what counts as fortifying the base. The objective itself is not wrong but lacks information. We can fix it by saying, for example, ‘Fortify your base by building 8 Sentinel Towers.’ When we add this info, our expectations are clear, and so is the path to completing the mission.



M for Measurable - The benefit of completing the objective has to be easily measurable for the player. The Riftbreaker is not an old-school RPG game, where sometimes you are forced to collect 70 kilos of cabbage for a random peasant in order to get 100 XP. Every time you do something, you need to feel the purpose of it. Various metrics can be employed to measure the benefit of completing a quest. The rewards don’t always have to be grand to be measurable and noticeable enough. If you fortify your base before an attack comes, your precious buildings are less likely to be destroyed. If you clear out a nest of monsters, they won’t attack you as often.



A for Achievable - Giving the player a mission that is impossible to complete will lead to frustration, and that’s what we have to avoid. Some games have managed to use impossible quests and pulled off great plot twists by doing so (the first fight with Desann in Jedi Outcast - never forget), but it’s a one-trick pony. You can’t base your game on such missions. All objectives in The Riftbreaker will be possible to complete without jumping through impossible hurdles. If we tell you to build something, we will be sure to give you enough resources. If we tell you to kill something, it will be possible to do so.



R for Realistic - Sometimes, even though the mission follows the previous principles, its expectations can be set too high. A mission such as ‘Build 400 Wind Turbines’ (cheers, dualanalogs!) will most likely result in a quick Alt + F4, followed by pressing the ‘uninstall’ button - even if the player has enough resources to complete the objective. The pacing of missions must leave the player satisfied with their progress, and that is achieved by setting realistic goals.



T - for Time-constrained - This one is optional. Some missions benefit greatly by adding a timer into the mix. The sense of urgency when you have just 2 minutes to prepare for a massive attack is immense. However, that is not the only way you can introduce time constraints to your missions. The Riftbreaker features day and night cycle, which allows us to add dynamics to the wildlife. Some species of flora and fauna will only be discoverable at night, while others will come out when the sun comes up. We can give the player a mission to obtain a sample of a nocturnal creature for research. This naturally constrains the win condition to nighttime only.



The SMART method is just a guideline and it is overruled by the most important principle of them all - BREAK THE RULES! Slightly bending the expectations or twisting the rules can be a lot more fun. Game creators have the power to breathe life into new worlds. Why limit your creativity? We always try to lead the players into unexpected and interesting scenarios, and that’s what you can be sure you will find in The Riftbreaker.

Let us know in the comments what kind of missions you would like to see in the game - we’re always open to suggestions. Join our Discord to discuss everything related to EXOR Studios - 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

www.twitch.tv/exorstudios

Hello everyone!

We often get questions about our sources of inspiration for The Riftbreaker. If you want to know what games inspired us in terms of mechanics, graphics and design - today’s article is for you. We play a lot of games in our free time and our tastes vary from person to person, so there are a lot of titles that we could mention. With that being said, we are going to try to keep the list short, limiting ourselves to the most relevant titles. This should give you an insight into what games we like and, perhaps, what you should play next. ;)



One of the most important aspects of The Riftbreaker’s gameplay is base building. While it could be easy to draw parallels to Factorio, truth be told, that is only a part of the story. We have sunk countless hours in classic RTS games, where base-building and resource management have been the focal point. Total Annihilation, Command & Conquer and Supreme Commander all spring to mind here. Factorio got our attention quite late in the design phase. It showed us that making the base work similar to a living organism, with all the interconnected systems relying on each other facilitates creativity, and that’s what we wanted for The Riftbreaker. What can we say - we love strategy games, especially the ones that support various play styles.



When it comes to combat, there are loads of titles that influenced our game. We loved the mecha-combat against the alien hordes in Alienation, along with the loot and inventory system. Many of us are also fans of action RPG games, such as Diablo, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn and the Van Helsing series. The twin-stick shooter aspect of the game has been decided very early on, as it’s a very intuitive control scheme that works really well for single-character combat. It also supports both the keyboard + mouse combo and gamepads, which is very important for us. In order to make the game more sci-fi and less fantasy, we dropped the level and experience elements from those games, changing them to tech instead. That’s what gave birth to The Riftbreaker combat system.



As for the visual side of The Riftbreaker, all of the games above had their influence on what we wanted the game to look like. One game that we can add to that list is Starcraft. The way that buildings, units and the elements of the background interact with each other is great for the fast-paced, competitive aspect of the Blizzard RTS. However, its visual style is more cartoonish than what we are aiming for, so even though The Riftbreaker looks a little similar, it’s a different beast. We learned many things from Starcraft and you can see that in The Riftbreaker, but our influences are much broader, reaching beyond the world of gaming. Notable examples here are the Halo series, Peter Jackson’s Avatar, as well as nature itself.

This list is not comprehensive, of course. We play various games every day and you can find similarities everywhere. The most important thing is that we spend a lot of time giving The Riftbreaker an identity of its own. We aren’t afraid to look to other great games for inspiration, we try to evolve and innovate on the ideas that made those titles influential. We want the Riftbreaker to be a unique experience worth your attention and time, not just a blend of elements that worked elsewhere. We hope you’ll find out about it hands-on sooner rather than later!

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

Our past couple of streams from The Riftbreaker featured some modifications to the regular gameplay you might have seen earlier. Apart from customizable difficulty settings, we have also introduced some changes to the way the game plays out. We do that using our mission flow system - it is a set of logic instructions that the game carries out once certain conditions are met. In today’s article, we’re going to show you how it works.

Due to resolution constraints the first and last graph in this article are illegible, but the rest of the images can be read if you use the zoom option in your browser (Ctrl + Mouse Wheel Up in Chrome by default) it will be a lot easier. You can also download the images to view them in full resolution.

Complete view of the mission flow for our survival mission.

We set up the mission flow using a visual editor that represents all the operations in the form of color-coded blocks. Each block contains a set of instructions for the game. They can range from displaying an objective to spawning a massive attack wave. It all depends on the designer. All the events that happen in-game that are not controlled by the AI have to be scripted this way. One could say that it slightly resembles writing a simple computer program, although take that with a grain of salt - you won’t run Doom in The Riftbreaker. ;)



In order to make it a little easier to understand, we’re going to take our survival mission flow as an example. The blocks can be ordered in any way you want, but we like setting them up in such a way that you read them from left to right. We start with the Event Start block. It is our entry point and the start of the mission - the game starts following the instructions. Then, we display the controls screen and spawn the player in. After Mr. Riggs lands, three things happen in parallel. First - we hear the dialogue between Ashley and the AI. Second, the player is given a basic loadout of items and resources. Lastly - the game checks if it is in sandbox mode - if that is true, the player won’t get any objectives and no enemy waves will ever attack.



If the game difficulty is set to a different setting than sandbox, the game will follow the graph further and start giving the player objectives. Pictured above is one of the first objectives in the game - build a Carbonium Factory. As you can see, this graph is separate from the main mission flow. How is it possible that the game knows it should carry out this set of instructions? Well, each of the green ‘Event Graph’ blocks can have an underlying set of operations. Once the mission flow reaches such a block, the instructions within are carried out before progressing further. Here you can see that the game displays dialogues, gives the player an objective and waits for the Carbonium Factory to be built. Once it’s done, the graph reaches the ‘End Event’ block and the whole mission carries on.



Attack waves are also spawned using this method. In survival mode, it happens every couple of minutes. Once it is time for the game to annihilate your beautiful base it will read the data stored in a block just like the one pictured above. This block tells the game which direction it should spawn the enemies from (we don’t specify spawn points, that is up to the random algorithm), what kind of creatures should spawn and in what numbers. Naturally, it’s never just one wave.

Here’s what the entire final wave looks like:

There are about 6000 creatures packed up in those blocks!

Which translates into situations like this one:



Our editor allows us to prepare all kinds of events in the game. We can control the camera, the weather, add events that trigger once you reach a certain spot and much more. We will put them to good use in the Campaign Mode, which is closer and closer every day! It’s also worth noting that we are considering launching the game with access to our map and mission editor, so you will be able to utilize these tools as well. If you would like to learn more about The Riftbreaker join our Discord at 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

www.twitch.tv/exorstudios