The Riftbreaker News

Before any real work on the project such as the Riftbreaker can begin, you need to have at least some idea about what you want it to look like. Using only words to describe your concept is not enough. You leave room for misinterpretation and don’t set clear goals for the rest of the team. In order to avoid such occurrences, we spend a lot of time looking for references in other games and art pieces. Combining the elements that we like with our own ideas creates concept art that allows us to get down to work. We’re going to show you a couple of such pieces today.



This is one of the first concept art pieces for the game. We always knew that we wanted to make The Riftbreaker an isometric strategy/shooter with a giant robot as the playable character. However, we didn’t know what the environment should look like and what we can do to make Galatea 37 look and feel alien. This is what our artists came up with and it became the reference point for the space jungle biome. Now, let’s try to show it in isometric view.



Roy*, this doesn’t look alien to me. Can we dial up the alien-ness a little?



Muuuuuuuch better. We used the model of the Juggernaut Mecha from X-Morph: Defense as a placeholder for what would eventually become Mr. Riggs. Such experiments are important, as they show you what level of details you should be aiming for to make the environment come to life. With a reference like this, you can finally start preparing the assets and the tech for the rest of the project.



Naturally, there was a lot of concept art that was made before the production of the game began. Some pieces were scrapped entirely, while the others had useful elements that we decided to incorporate into the game. Here you can see one of the elements that didn’t make the cut - the portal (blue thingy in the middle). The fact that I had to add the parenthesis to explain what that thing is should tell you why. ;)



And the 'final' product - the result of months of design and iteration (it will probably change a lot before we release the game, though). You can still see some of the elements from the pictures above. The hours invested into preparation of concept really pay off in the long run.

That’s all for today. Hope you enjoyed this short dive into The Riftbreaker history. You can always learn more on our Discord - www.discord.gg/exorstudios.

See you next week!

*Name changed on purpose. We don’t have a Roy in our studio yet.

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www.mixer.com/exor_studios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios

www.twitch.tv/exorstudios

Another topic that the Discord community (which you should totally join - www.discord.gg/exorstudios) wanted to know about is concept art. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, concept art is what our artists produce as a base for their further work. It is created in order to visualize the artist’s ideas to the other members of the team. Then, the artist iterates on their first draft in order to achieve the quality we expect. Today we are going to show you a couple of these ‘first drafts’.



This was the first iteration of Mr. Riggs’ appearance. There were a couple of problems with this version - it looks very heavy and incapable of handling anything but flat terrain. The arm extensions - energy sword and drill - are excessively big and disproportionate to the rest of the body. Moreover, the drill doesn’t look like it could mine anything at all. All these issues have been corrected, and now Mr. Riggs looks much sleeker and agile. In the art, you can also see a drone that was supposed to accompany Mr. Riggs, but we ultimately decided to change the character of drones in the game.



Next up, we have our concept art for Ashley. Admittedly, this is not the first version - we spent a long time figuring out what kind of features we would like to give her. It is, actually, quite close to the final version that we used to create the 3D model. The cybernetic elements stand out a bit too much, and the uniform looks a bit too baggy. Another aspect that required correction was the color scheme of the uniform - we wanted it to fall in line with the main colors that we use in the game - orange, blue and green. All of these issues were fixed in the final render. Now, let’s put Mr. Riggs and Ashley together.



This is one of my favorites (it’s me, voidreaver, the guy who streams!) when it comes to concept art. We wanted to feature Ashley and Mr. Riggs on one piece to show that they are inseparable and both are the protagonists of the game. This scene feels powerful - the giant robot is towering over a mound of slain beasts, while the pilot relaxes after a job well done. The position of the sword seems a little awkward, but that could have been easily fixed. This piece was not chosen to be the key art for the game, however. It suggests that The Riftbreaker is all about fighting, while there is much more to it, but it will remain #1 in my heart forever.

Next time we are going to show you the concept art for some of the creatures and biomes found in the game. We’ll also tell you where the inspiration for those came from. Until then you can find us and ask questions on our Discord - www.discord.gg/exorstudios

https://www.mixer.com/exor_studios

We're a serious company, promise.

Now that you know what our studio looks like and what our responsibilities are, we are going to take a look at how our work is organized. Like every other job in the world, game development has some aspects that can come as a surprise for those who have never investigated what the process looks like. Don’t worry - we’re not going to bore you with unnecessary technicalities, we’re just scratching the surface today. Let’s talk about how our work is organized, what tools we use and what a typical week looks like.

Our team on the stage of PGA Awards.

EXOR Studios is a small company and we have a very friendly attitude towards each other. This allows us to be incredibly flexible when it comes to working hours. The majority of us come to work Monday to Friday and work 8 hours a day. The hours are flexible, though - you don’t have to come at 8 every day, and if you need to leave early that’s fine too. Our core hours are 11 AM - 4 PM. That’s when all of us are in the office - we can hold meetings at this time and consult each other on our tasks. Every Monday we also hold an office-wide meeting, where we share what we did during the previous week and set our priorities for the next one.

We all work on different things at the same time, according to our specialties and current needs of the project. Sometimes these are ‘safe’ changes, completely unrelated to other parts of the game, but others have the potential to cause the butterfly effect (The Schmetterling means butterfly, after all). One small change in code can break the entire game. If we all worked on the same copy of the program we wouldn’t make much progress at all. That is why we use a software versioning system.

This line is not just gibberish. It tells you what version of the game you're playing. You can tell that there have been 9107 versions of game content and the executables have been compiled 2607 times. And we're not in even in alpha yet!

The way it works is quite simple. The current, up-to-date version of the game is being kept safe on our server. We call it ‘head revision’. Each person downloads a copy of the program to their personal workstation. it becomes their ‘working copy’, where they can make all the changes they want - locally, without affecting the head revision. When the task is complete and the changes have been tested (more or less) we can ‘commit’ our changes - send the changes to the version on the server for everyone to download and use. The previous version is not gone - all the revisions of the project are backed up, so if we want to revert some changes, it is possible even years after the change was made. All our data is safely stored in 3 locations.

Underneath the mess of cables and dust, there is a highly automated system of world domination...

Changes to game code require the executable files to be compiled again. If all the programmers were required to compile all the changes they make to the game on their own machines it would take up a significant amount of time. That is why we have 3 powerful PCs running all the time, which serve as build agents. Their only tasks are compiling the code and running benchmarks. Why do we need 3? Sometimes (quite often, actually) we need to work on several things at once, and having multiple agents reduces the potential bottleneck. That allows us both to build new versions of our executables and run our automated benchmarks. Apart from giving us information on performance, the benchmarks also let us know if the game runs without issues.

Performance of the Riftbreaker over the course of the past year. We're making progress!

All of the things we mentioned today keep the studio operational and assure smooth running all the time. That is it for now. We hope you learned something useful, and if you’d like to know more - go ahead and ask us anything on our Discord - www.discord.gg/exorstudios.

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www.mixer.com/exor_studios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios