The Riftbreaker News

We often emphasize that EXOR Studios is an indie developer and The Riftbreaker - is an indie game. Indie is short for ‘independent.’ As a company, we are self-funded; all our ventures are financed by our previous games, and we do our own publishing. Such a business model comes with many advantages and just as many, if not more, drawbacks. Today, we are going to tell you why we decided to go this route, despite the many risks, and what it means to be an indie developer in the gaming industry. We will also give you examples of how these aspects relate to EXOR Studios’ past and current projects.

Switching to the self-emplyed indie lifestyle was a giant leap of faith. In the end it was worth it, but we earned a couple of grey hairs along the way.

[h3]CREATIVE FREEDOM[/h3]

One of the things that led the founders to create EXOR Studios was the full creative freedom that being an indie developer offered. The founding seven members of EXOR moved on from modding and into the game development industry by joining a larger company that did ‘work for hire’. They often developed ports of well-known games from bigger platforms for mobile devices. While that experience was very valuable, they had to follow strict guidelines and were not in creative control of their work. The year 2007 was also on the brink of the industry shift, in the form of digital games distribution. Skipping box printing and retail distribution allowed developers more opportunities to get their games out into the hands of players worldwide.

The entry barrier into the industry was significantly lowered, and small studios like EXOR, or even individual developers, could try their hand at releasing a video game. This allowed them to publish smaller-scope but still ambitious projects that would most likely get rejected by most publishers. It gave those developers a chance to try out their ideas in the wild, gain valuable experience, and build their portfolio. It also meant that they could finally make games they truly wanted to make. No more work for hire, spinoffs, or tie-ins. The freedom to make the games you want to play is the biggest advantage of being an indie developer.

You need a lot of time to test your game properly. Luckily, when you're independent, you can decide a lot of deadlines for yourself. If you miss with you shot, though, everything can explode, just like the base in the gif above.

[h3]DEADLINES ARE SELF-IMPOSED[/h3]

Lately, there have been many games that released… undercooked. They could have used a couple of months of final playtests, polish, and bugfixing. Unfortunately, developers often have to release games in an incomplete state because they need to meet deadlines. In case of AAA titles, a release date is sacred - the entire marketing machine is built around the game’s release date and moving it is almost impossible. A lot of people rely on you doing your job in time, which builds pressure. Being an indie developer gives you the ability to set those deadlines for yourself. You know your abilities and limitations, so you can make an educated guess on how much time you need to bring the project to a close. It’s likely you will hit delays and roadblocks, but without a parent company breathing down your neck.

Players kept asking us for the release date of The Riftbreaker for about a year after we released the Prologue version. “Come on, guys, the game is ready. What are you waiting for?” We knew that the game wasn’t good enough yet. We decided to put off the announcement of the release date until we had a beta. We then took that version and polished it until it was worthy to be released to the general public. It paid off in the end. We believe it’s going to work like that for co-op as well.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/780310/view/3734104644163035438?l=english
We've got an entire article on the tools we use to make games, check it out if you're interested!

[h3]DO YOUR WORK HOWEVER YOU LIKE[/h3]

We’re all different and have varied preferences when it comes to pretty much everything. That includes game development tools, which can vary wildly from one another, even if they serve the same purpose. Artists have their preferences when it comes to 3D modeling software, and programmers have their favorite IDEs. While it’s possible that a developer could adapt to new tools quickly, nothing will beat the comfort of working with a piece of software that you have been using for years. Working as an indie developer, in most cases, you can choose what programs you want to use for the job. You can even decide which engine you want to use to create your game. In larger studios, it is much more likely that the toolset is going to be ‘forced’ on you, which can lead to a lengthy adaptation period, especially if the technology is proprietary.

Our artists have been working in various 3D software, but when the Blender revolution came around, we gladly made the switch. Blender’s personalization options, its expandability using various plugins, and its intuitive interface made the transition smooth. We never looked back. However, it was only four people. Imagine forcing 100 artists to do the same. We can almost guarantee it would take a lot of time and effort.

No story here. Just a gif to break the wall of text :)

[h3]DO YOUR OWN BUSINESS[/h3]

Being an indie dev doesn’t mean that you are cut off from the business world altogether. There is no escaping that. Still, you are granted a much bigger degree of freedom when it comes to making decisions for your game and company. You can decide which platforms your game is going to be released on, what kind of marketing campaign you want to run, and who you want to work with. You do not answer to shareholders or the publisher. However, this is a double-edged sword. The responsibility for all these decisions is yours and yours alone. If you fail, you may go out of business before you can even realize what is going on. On the other hand - if everything goes right, you will reap the rewards.

One such example from the history of The Riftbreaker was our Game Pass deal. In exchange for The Riftbreaker being available in Game Pass on day one, we received extra time we could spend on polishing the game and bringing it to the best shape it could be. Without securing those extra funds, the whole story might have unraveled in a different way.

What we mentioned above are not all benefits of working as an independent developer. In general, you could sum it all up in one word: freedom. This freedom, however, comes at significant costs. Let’s talk about some of these costs now.

Mr. Riggs wanted to get heard, too. Perhaps he should start a podcast?

[h3]IT’S DIFFICULT TO GET HEARD[/h3]

To say that the gaming market is saturated is an understatement. Dozens of games, big and small, are released every day. Players spend thousands of hours playing the giant titles that adorn the front pages of YouTube and Twitch. New AAA titles run marketing campaigns that reach beyond the internet and bombard potential players with information about newly released projects. Your game has to be really special to turn the heads of players around the world. The odds are stacked against you, but as successful indies have proven time and again - the challenge is not insurmountable. If your game is good, players will spread the word around.

Before the word about The Riftbreaker started making rounds around the web, we sent out hundreds, if not thousands, of emails, asking everyone and their dog to cover our game. Over 95% of those emails never even got a reply. Only after the demo version hit it big during the Steam Next Fest we started getting some coverage offers - some of them even coming from the people we tried to contact earlier. It’s a tough world out there.

You need to be able to adapt to difficulties and bad conditions, even if it means coding on a 19-inch CRT monitor.

[h3]NO ONE IS COMING TO HELP YOU[/h3]

Well, not literally, but without a large team behind you and resources from your publisher and/or stakeholders, you will face unexpected problems on your own. If there are technical problems, you might not even have a second tech person on the team to ask for help. You have to figure out legal matters and taxes all by yourself instead of having a dedicated team behind you. The same goes for marketing. If your PC breaks in the middle of the project, you’d better have a backup one ready for action because you are your own IT department. All kinds of things can go south while making a game, and you will be on your own, so be prepared for that.

At the beginning of 2020, we had to make the decision to allow people to work from home. Even though we had a VPN set up that theoretically allowed us all to work remotely, no one had tested it on such a scale and with that many people. The transition wasn’t without issues and took quite a lot of valuable development time.

Next goal: online co-op. We will get there, we promise you that. Our beta tests have proven very vauable so far.

[h3]HOPE YOU’RE HERE FOR THE LONG RUN[/h3]

Working on a smaller-scale project with a small, independent team does not mean there isn’t a lot of work. On the contrary - you will have much more work on your hands than in the case of a large team. In big studios, work is often divided into very specialized areas. One person is responsible for models of rocks. Another person does trees. Yet another person does gun models. There are separate job positions for AI, graphics, gameplay, and cinematics programmers. These kinds of lists can go on and on. In the case of independent developers, all these jobs often fall into the hands of one single person. One day, you might work on graphics, do some gameplay design in the next couple of days, and finish off the week by fixing a leaking kitchen sink. While undoubtedly exciting, jumping from one job to another is not the most efficient way of working and will likely make development slower than you would like.

Some of you probably learned about The Riftbreaker because one of the YouTubers you follow has covered the game at some point. We had to arrange most of such videos ourselves - we looked for relevant influencers, sent them review copies of the game, negotiated with those who wanted to do a paid video, and analyzed our actions to determine what worked and what didn’t. That took away time from other things we could be doing then. However, this work was necessary to get the word about the game out to people. It simply cost more than just money.

Our trophy cabinet. The road to each one of these memorabilia took a lot of work and taught us a great deal. We hope to learn even more along the way!

[h3]CONCLUSION[/h3]

Indie game development is not a career that you can easily get in and out of to get some experience. It has to be a passion project, born out of a lifelong desire to make games you want to make and not obey any conventional rules. If you’re not fully convinced that this is what you want to do, you might go mad. However, the freedom to make your vision come true, limited only by your own abilities, makes it all worth it.

If you have any questions about indie dev life, or game development in general, ask in the comment section. We’re always on the lookout for new topics to share some behind-the-scenes knowledge about The Riftbreaker, EXOR Studios, and the gaming industry. You can also contact us directly through Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios and during our streams every Tuesday and Thursday at 3 PM CET over on www.twitch.tv/exorstudios.

See you there!
EXOR Studios

We have always been huge proponents of modding and designed our games with modders in mind. The Riftbreaker’s data files are not obfuscated or encrypted, and our asset packs are simple zip files you can browse at will. We also gave you access to our custom-made Riftbreaker World Editor suite - the set of tools that we used to create The Riftbreaker’s campaign, databases, maps, and a lot of other things. Once in a while, a modder comes along and does something truly remarkable with these tools. Once again, that person is Molch, the author of the Arctic Map and Rift City mods. This time, Molch decided to recreate a typical European City as a map for The Riftbreaker. In fact, Molch has astounded us all with creativity, the level of detail, and some features that we didn’t even think were possible.



Mr. Riggs taking a peaceful stroll through the streets, bashing some cars along the way.

As mentioned earlier, Molch has already created one city map for The Riftbreaker. We described it at length in this article. This time, however, he went to the next level. The Riftbreaker does not contain great city-building assets by default. Most of the props and entities in the game are either plants, rocks, or futuristic sci-fi buildings. To get access to more buildings that fit a regular city map, he would either need to make them from scratch or port them from our previous games - Zombie Driver or X-Morph: Defense. Molch chose the second option. However, converting assets from our older games to work with The Riftbreaker is not a simple process. For our latest game we introduced Physics Based Rendering, or PBR for short. PBR aims to simulate the way that materials reflect light by giving them properties like roughness or metalness. Molch needed to rework all the materials to make the old props compatible with the new game. We have no idea how long it must have taken, but we’re sure it was a lengthy process.



You can destroy buildings chunk by chunk. Even though they won't collapse, it's still impressive!

Porting the assets from X-Morph: Defense and Zombie Driver had a fun little side effect - most of the props that we made for those games are destructible. When Molch ported these assets, he maintained that property, so everything you see around the city can be blown up if you have enough firepower! What is more - the buildings from X-Morph have had their interiors modeled as well, so when you blow holes through their walls, you can see the degree of your destruction by taking a detailed look at the ravaged remains of what used to be cozy apartments, shops, and offices. Another cute little detail is that our camera object culling system can show you what is inside those buildings when you get close to the wall with your Mech. Apart from all the buildings, trashcans, benches, and decorations, there are also plenty of cars around the city - some based on quite well-known models. You can destroy them, too, obviously!



Nobody can prevent you from going on a motor oil-fueled rampage!

With all these new models now available to him, Molch did a stellar job arranging them into a typical European city landscape. Wandering around the streets of the city, you are going to stumble upon typical elements of such a place. There is a town square with a small local market set up. There are little side streets with shops and other facilities. Parks and gardens add little bits of greenery every now and again, where people can enjoy recreational activities. There are even two football fields for the sports fans out there. The highway running through the city is blocked by an accident scene, and the local police force and paramedics are there to help the victims. It’s crazy how many little stories you can tell with just a couple of well-placed props. However, the city lacked something to make it more lively - humans.

Pedestrians invading the football pitch, players T-posing in an act of protest.

To be honest, we still have no idea how the madman did it, but there are actual people walking around the map! We don’t know where the models are from, what script they’re running, or whether they are a brand new idea from Molch. All we know is that we absolutely love this feature. Pedestrians walking around the city are up to scale - considering Mr. Riggs is 4.5 meters tall, the humans reach somewhere up to his upper legs. They do not seem out of place and give you a feeling of how truly gigantic Mr. Riggs is. While we do not have any evidence for our claims, it would seem that more pedestrians spawn during the day than during the night, which is a great touch as well. Oh, humans are ‘destructible’ as well; do what you like with that knowledge.

If you look closely, you will see the policemen interviewing one of the drivers!

Apart from looking great, the European City mod by Molch is a complete map that allows you to play Survival Mode without any issues. It currently uses the Crystal Caverns creature set and Survival mission rules. You will find a multitude of resource deposits scattered across the map, and the urban environment will create a fun challenge for your base-building skills. You will have to beware, though, as there are plenty of powerful creatures prowling the streets of the city (which doesn’t seem to phase the civilians too much). Bring your best gear when you go exploring, or be prepared for the walk of shame, trying to recover your lost weapons.

What a nice park! And the structure at the top looks strangely familiar. Download the map to see it for yourself!

We will do a playthrough of this map during our live stream today, so join us on www.twitch.tv/exorstudios at 3 PM CET (yes, right now) and watch Void get annihilated by familiar creatures in the unfamiliar landscape. If you want to make maps like that yourself, join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios and learn from other modders. Our community is growing stronger every day and both EXOR Staff and other modders will help you get started.



Mr. Riggs found the solution to the crowded car park problem.

See you soon!
EXOR Studios

We have yet another competition for you! This time we ask you to unleash your creativity and give Mr. Riggs a nice, fresh coat of paint.

Plenty of skins to choose from already, but we can always do better. On a side note - we will change the way skin selection works.

We know that players love skins for their in-game characters. It allows them to express their personality and add a degree of customization into the game. Even if you can’t change the color scheme of individual items without modding game files, pre-determined skins still offer an alternative choice. While working on The Riftbreaker some of the most fun things we did was coming up with new skins. Some were inspired by our favorite games (bonus points if you can spot them), while others were completely outlandish ideas we thought could be funny (Mr. Piggs and Caticord immediately spring to mind).

Gold skin is unlocked by completing the game's main campaign. It is one of our favorites. Simple, but effective!
[h3]Now we want to hear (and see) what you can come up with! The rules are quite simple:[/h3]

• Come up with a design for a new skin for Mr. Riggs. Look for inspiration in pop culture, your favorite games, series, or your own imagination. Simply design what seems fun to you!
  
• Needless to say, but we will say it anyway - your entry must be in good taste and do not break Steam Terms of Service. No gore, adult-rated material, or mocking anyone's ethnicity, religious or political beliefs.
  
• Create a visualization of your skin idea. Use Paint, Photoshop, or any other image editing software to modify any of the existing Riftbreaker artworks. Alternatively, you can sketch your design by hand and scan it. You don’t have to make a working in-game skin - just a simple image is fine, but bonus points if you do decide to make a working skin 🙂
  
• Do not change Mr. Riggs’ model geometry. You can change everything else. You want to have a giant screen in place of the cockpit visor? Okay! You want to turn the Mech into glass? Also cool! You can go absolutely wild, but the geometry of the mech must stay the same.
  

[h3]That’s all! Now, let’s talk about prizes.[/h3]

The authors of the three designs we like the most will receive:

[h2]

• Steam keys for all EXOR Studios games. You can use them yourself or gift to someone else.
  
• A care package full of EXOR studios gadgets, including a Mr. Riggs plushie.
  

[/h2]



[h3]Last but not least important - we are going to try to turn the top three designs into actual in-game skins. This will only happen if the authors give us explicit permission to use the design in-game and if it does not break any copyrights or trademarks, so go easy on logos.[/h3]

Upload the visualization of your design to any image-sharing site and submit your entry in this thread for everyone to see here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/780310/discussions/0/4040354734340685476/

The contest will run until January 10th, 2024. We will announce the winners by January 12th, 2024..

One of the earliest mods for our game - Holy Skin by SenorRagequit. Be the light that shines in the darkness!

[h3]The legal stuff:[/h3]

[expand]
You must be aged 18 or over at the time of entry in order to enter this competition. No purchase is necessary. You must enter the contest yourself. You must comply with the laws that apply to you in the location where you access the competition from. If any laws applicable to you restrict or prohibit you from entering the competition, you must comply with those legal restrictions or, if applicable, refrain from entering the competition. Prizes are not negotiable, exchangeable, or transferable and have no cash alternative. Physical prizes can only be delivered to locations covered by UPS. If a delivery destination is not covered by UPS, then it will not be sent out by EXOR.

The winner(s) will be selected by a panel of judges based on creativity, originality and the highest quality. The decision of the panel is final.

The Organiser does not claim any rights of ownership in your competition entry. By submitting your entry, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and irrevocable right to use, display, publish, transmit, copy, edit, alter, store, re-format, and sub-license the competition entry and any accompanying materials for our marketing or other commercial purposes.
[/expand]

We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

EXOR Studios

The game development industry is a fast-paced environment. It combines the elements of software engineering, art, and entertainment. All three of those fields are constantly on the lookout for innovation and new creative solutions. As a result, the game industry changes rapidly, and keeping up with all the latest developments is almost impossible. Still, we do our best to keep up with the news and are constantly looking for new tech to put in our games to improve your experience. In this article, we will show you what we do to stay up to date with our ever-changing industry.

The media in this article will serve as examples of techniques we decided to add on the basis of what we learned over time - either by playing or listening to what others have to say. Remember when rocks obscured the vision of your mech during gameplay?

The most obvious and the most important thing is playing new games. EXOR Studios is a team of fifteen people with wildly different tastes. There are no two people in our office who are exactly alike when it comes to gaming habits. Some of us have 8000 hours in Counter-Strike, while others prefer spending 200 hours grinding 100% in Starfield. Most of us have a dedicated gaming rig at home but only have the time to game on the Steam Deck. Some people jump on an opportunity to play the latest AAA titles as early as possible, while others wait for a few patches to come out first. The point is that our experiences vary wildly, allowing us to learn about new gaming trends from various sources.

We sought a solution in other hack'n'slash games. After all - Diablo and similar have been dealing with it for ages. The answer to our problems was a camera object culler that 'cuts out a hole' in props that you can see through. Most action RPGs use a similar technique!

While we obviously enjoy playing games, we try to learn as much as we can while playing. Naturally, we tend to focus on our area of expertise within the studio. Designers analyze the ins and outs of economy, combat, and other game systems. Programmers try to notice possible optimizations and techniques used by other developers that could work for EXOR games. Artists stop and analyze props, the composition of the scenes and try to understand what makes animations tick. By observing the work of others, we can learn what works and what doesn’t. We try to understand why developers make their choices and how they affect the overall experience.

When creating the destructible rocks of the Crystal Caverns biome, we took inspiration from the tried and tested voxel-based games that allow you to dig in the ground freely, like Minecraft. We divided the destructible walls into chunks. Then, we iterated on the size of those chunks and the speed of digging to allow a smooth experience. What you see above is a very early version.

Recently, we have been looking into changing the loot distribution algorithm in The Riftbreaker. We spent countless hours playing various parts of Diablo, Path of Exile, and Grim Dawn, among many other hack’n’slash games, to figure out what we could do better. We analyzed how often a player gets a chance to loot something valuable. We compared the crafting-oriented systems with trading-oriented systems, as well as those where no trading or crafting is present.

After hours of playtests and design meetings that totally did not involve any shouting and contravening examples from various games, we arrived at this version of rock-digging. Much better!

We’ve drawn a couple of conclusions from these observations. First - we need to give you as many chances to find something good as possible. For that reason, we’ve designed additional, smaller loot containers to work in tandem with our Bioanomalies. This will encourage you to explore the world since you will get plenty of rewards for doing so. Second - we probably shouldn’t worry about real-world logic as much as we do. If a rat can drop a Mighty Greatsword of Slaying +14 in some games, why shouldn’t you be able to find an awesome weapon in a bioanomaly? You will see the results of our work when we launch World Expansion III - we believe you will like it.

At times we work on cutting-edge techniques that do not have many examples to follow. When we introduced ray-traced shadows in 2020 there weren't many other titles on the market with this feature. Luckily, ray-tracing is not a new technique and we could learn from good, old analog books.

Sometimes, observation alone is not enough. Luckily, a lot of talented developers share their knowledge on the internet in the form of articles on various websites, their own blogs, or YouTube videos. While many sites aggregate such pieces, such as gamedeveloper.com or various subreddits, it is not always easy to find something interesting to you. That is why we often have to take a shot in the dark and simply google phrases such as “loot system in game X” or “raytracing implementation in Y.” You would be surprised how often it is possible to find a complex analysis of such topics on some obscure sites that see two visits per year. We treasure them!

Using what we learned, we not only developed ray-traced shadows, but also highly detailed, pixel-perfect raytraced ambient occlusion. It utilizes the same acceleration structure we prepare for RT shadows, so the additional rendering cost is negligible.

One recent example is our Volumetric Lighting implementation. While researching the topic, we supplied our own observations and past knowledge with publications found online. The first one was an amazingly comprehensive presentation by Bartłomiej Wroński from Siggraph 2014 entitled “Volumetric Fog: Unified compute shader based solution to atmospheric scattering.” Another useful presentation came from Sebastien Hillaire: “Physically Based and Unified Volumetric Rendering in Frostbite.”

Volumetric Lighting is exactly what we needed to 'glue' the world together. It allows us to simulate the way the light interacts with aerosols, giving the scene a much more natural look.

The authors of these presentations detailed how they achieved realistic Volumetric Lighting in the AAA projects they worked on. Thanks to the data and observations from these documents, we avoided many pitfalls and achieved great results. For example, we learned what kind of resolution we should aim for when creating the light scattering map, and that the quality increase is negligible above a certain point. We also learned efficient ways of getting rid of the aliasing artifacts using jitter - a solution that’s very simple but not easy to come across!

The new lighting method opened up a whole new world for us when it comes to map construction.

Doing your own research will only take you so far - not all knowledge can be shared as an article or a video essay. However, you can fill in the gaps during developer conferences. They are (usually) multi-day events during which people from various studios give talks about their games, the technology they use, or even the organization of work within their company. Listening to talks from both veterans and newcomers to the industry can be very inspiring and allows you to draw conclusions you can later implement in your own work.

One of the new, subtle improvements we're introducing for the new biome is the behavior of liquids and the simulations of waves on their surfaces. It's still work in progress, but you can see a nice wake behind Mr. Riggs that displaces the algae on the surface of this small lake.

Still, the most important part of attending industry events is networking. You can meet your old friends and trash-talk them for not having dynamic shadows in their game (cheers, Robert!). You can also make new friends and learn that they are facing the exact same issues as you - crucial software crashing, illogical technical requirements, trouble with implementing network play (wink, wink), etc. Getting to know these people gives you a chance to learn something you haven’t discovered yet and perhaps brainstorm a solution to your problems together. Such relations are truly invaluable.

Our new system takes into account individual vertices coming into contact with water, which means that each of Fungor's tentacles creates its own ripple and wake as it moves around.

If you are a developer or would like to start your career in game development, here’s the TL;DR:

• Talk to other people in the industry, learn what they do, and keep an open mind. You don’t have to go to conferences to do that - Reddit, Discord servers, and various forums can help you with that.
  
• Read technical articles and watch technical breakdowns of your favorite games. Not what you like, and challenge yourself to try new things in your work.
  
• Play—a lot. Nothing beats a hands-on experience with games, both old and new. Try to understand why they did things the way they did.
  

The waves are not physically simulated but still do a good job in creating an impression of movement on the surface. Here, there are dozens of Stickrid legs interacting with the surface and causing ripples and waves to appear.

It’s impossible to always be the first to know all the novelties in the game development world. However, you can always try to learn as much as possible about what seems interesting to you and hone your skills. It will pay off in the long run. You can always talk to us and ask questions about gamedev on our Discord - www.discord.gg/exorstudios - we’re always happy to share what we have learned so far on our 15+ years-long journey.

EXOR Studios

PS. We started streaming our tests of the multiplayer mode together with our viewers! Join us on www.twitch.tv/exorstudios every Tuesday and Thursday at 3 PM CET to watch developers being beaten at their own game!

The end of the year is just around the corner, and so are the annual Steam Awards. This event highlights the most significant achievements in the gaming industry every year. While most categories focus on crowning the best new gameplay, storytelling, and technology marvels, one is slightly different. The Labor of Love category is dedicated to older games that have been released in years prior and are still receiving improvements and expansions to this day.

[h2]It would be a great honor for us if you nominated The Riftbreaker as your candidate in the Labor of Love category in Steam Awards 2023.[/h2]

The Riftbreaker has received a great deal of changes and improvements over the course of the year. The seven major updates we introduced allowed you to:

• Explore the Crystal Caverns biome and discover over 30 new species of fauna and flora in World Expansion II, using the new cave excavation mechanics.
  
• Save the world once more, battling the demons of your past in Into the Dark story DLC.
  
• Enjoy the new level of graphics in the game with the introduction of Volumetric Lighting.
  
• Revisit the biomes in the original story campaign after the addition of the new, atmospheric map tiles. More than 20 new tiles have been added to the map generation algorithm for the Tropical Zone, Radioactive Desert, Acidic Plains, and the Volcanic Region biomes.
  
• Give your bases a makeover with the introduction of the new decorative structures from the Summer Update. You can find 148 brand-new structures in total, and completely change the look of your base.
  
• See performance improvements thanks to the optimizations of our game engine’s resource management systems and new rendering techniques. The Introduction of Tiled Deferred Shading alone got you an average 10% GPU performance boost
  
• Got to experience community-suggested quality-of-life improvements, such as the new, compact building menu.
  

[h3]And that is not the end of the road for The Riftbreaker either. [/h3]

World Expansion III is in development, bringing you access to another Galatean biome, setting new challenges in the story campaign, and expanding the technology tree even further.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2506610/The_Riftbreaker_World_Expansion_III/

We’re reworking the very foundations of the game to bring you the long-promised co-op mode. We report our progress in the periodic Status Report articles, which you can find here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/780310/view/3381659291157676103
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/780310/view/3701435238673426124?l=english
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/780310/view/3657536564724315072?l=english
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/780310/view/3657539010840327508
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/780310/view/3752120943822713623

The development of the Co-Op mode for The Riftbreaker is one of the most complex quests we have ever undertaken, but our progress is tangible. We have even started a closed beta test with our community members to test the networking aspect of the game. The test is limited to old-school PVP gameplay at the moment, the data it provides us is invaluable for the project as a whole. If you would like to participate in our test (which will evolve into a fully-fledged Co-Op test over time), you can do so by signing up here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/780310/view/3803913612004075220?l=english

Our plans do not end there, as we aim to reinvigorate the endgame with the option to generate additional missions. You will be able to explore the planet and grow your bases even further. We will also add the economy management screen and rework the mod system. You can see what we’re planning on our roadmap:



If you think The Riftbreaker deserves to be called a ‘Labor of Love’, please nominate us for this year’s Steam Awards. It would be a great honor for us and a crowning achievement of what is soon to be six years of very hard work.

Thank you,
EXOR Studios