The Riftbreaker News

We have been a little quiet lately, so we decided to write up this situation report and let you know about the ongoing developments and our plans for the following weeks.

First of all, we are still waiting on a couple of features and fixes we want to include with the upcoming Quality of Life patch. Thanks to your brilliant comments and ideas, the mass repair/upgrade/deconstruction tools that we showed you before have received some additional functionality. We have added tooltips with resource information and changed the colors of the tools selection rectangles to reflect which tool is active at the moment. Apart from that, we have also added the option to enable or disable multiple buildings at once and build floors on a larger area than before. All those things, along with an improved .build max level’ system will arrive before the first World Expansion patch. As always, we will test these changes first on the Experimental branch first. We’ll let you know when it drops.

This is what selling multiple buildings will look like...

...and this is the repair tool. We changed the colors and added tooltips.

That brings us to our second topic - the expansion itself. As you know, it will allow you to visit an entirely new region of Galatea 37. Its unique fauna, flora, and natural resources will allow you to develop new and exciting technologies. However, by now you probably know that Galatea 37 doesn’t like giving up its treasures that easily. We won’t tell you what dangers you will face there - at least not yet. But we can let you have a little sneak peek at what the biome will look like, one cute friendly face included. Current ETA: end of May/beginning of June.

One word to describe this biome: sharp.

We also have some news for our fans in the USA. Although we originally did not plan on attending PAX East we have received an opportunity to join the Polish Games booth, thanks to the courtesy of the Indie Games Polska Foundation. That means we (at least two of us) are going to be in Boston, MA for the entire duration of PAX East, showing the game off and (hopefully) talking to a lot of our players! Hit us up if you’re planning to be there!

Gamescom 2019. Mr. Riggs won't be joining us this time, but you should still come and see us!

The last piece of news is about co-op. We don’t have anything to show just yet, but we want to reassure you that we’re working on it. We’re laying down a lot of technical groundwork to get the game running in network mode. That requires rewriting a lot of code to do the same thing, but this time with multiplayer in mind. That is why we don’t have anything to show you just yet. We’re planning a beta test, too, so join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios so as not to miss the news about it.

See you soon, this time with more content and more good news!
EXOR Studios

Hello Riftbreakers!

Being close to our community has always been our focus while developing The Riftbreaker. We have run multiple Betas, surveys, competitions and read all the feedback you have been giving us since the announcement of the game back in 2019. We feel that we have developed a very special bond with you over these years. Our connection has made this game truly special. To celebrate our shared passion for The Riftbreaker we have prepared a special surprise for you.

To make you feel like you’re in the studio together with us, we made the decision to replace all voiceover lines recorded by the voice actors with the lines recorded by our community manager, voidreaver. Here’s a teaser of what that’s going to be like:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

By doing so we hope to make you feel like you are a part of our team. Most of the time, game developers hide behind their studio name or appear only in the credits. We want to break that wall down. Our aim is to show you that The Riftbreaker is a game made by real people, not an abstract entity called EXOR; that it’s a game developed by you and us both.

We know it is a controversial decision. We have really enjoyed our time working with Francesca and Ryan, the actors voicing our main characters. We are very grateful for their time and effort, especially for working from home during the difficult period of 2020 and 2021. We believe it would be wrong to take work away from them, so they will still record new lines for Ashley and Mr. Riggs for future content expansions. However, instead of putting them in the main game release, we will just use them as guidelines for void to record his own takes.

Ever since we made this decision void has been really excited about this new opportunity and he is determined to do the best job he can. He even intends to record all the voice lines in the game in all of our supported languages. Void has already started a couple of intense language courses to convincingly portray our characters in languages other than Polish and English. The learning process might take some time and we will not be able to release all versions simultaneously. However, we expect to have all the voiceovers ready by the end of 2032.

This change is not optional. Void is a really sensitive person and it would hurt him a lot if any of you decided not to use his version of The Riftbreaker voiceover. We also kindly ask you to refrain from posting any critical comments regarding his acting skills. If you need to let us know about something, please do so privately. We will relay the news to void in a controlled environment to avoid any accidents.

Enjoy the update!
EXOR Studios

This minor update introduces an updated version of steam_api64.dll to prevent a startup crash for users running an outdated version of the Steam Client.

Today we would like to share a little bit of a ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at some of our work. This article will tell you what it takes to release a patch for The Riftbreaker. We will give you a step-by-step explanation of all the processes, tests, and verification each of the new builds undergoes. We hope that it will provide you with some valuable insight into how we operate, what kinds of issues we pay special attention to and why patching the Riftbreaker does not happen on a daily basis. It’s a long journey from our hard drives to your gaming devices, so let’s dive into it!

You can't talk about patching without mentioning bugs, so this article is filled with gifs of some weird bugs that happened during development. Here's Mr. Riggs discovering his hidden flight ability, for example.

If you have been following our Discord server for some time, you might have noticed the daily developer changelogs that we publish there. They contain information about all our team's changes to the game over the past 24 hours. Currently, we have three major things we are working on: the World Expansion, the Co-Op mode, and maintenance of the live version of the game. With that many things happening at once, it is natural that we will not want all the changes to make their way to the public version of the game. When it is time to release a patch, we choose the changes we want to include and create an experimental version with those changes only.

Here a Gnerot just decided that they want to slowly dive head-first into lava.

The first step to releasing a new update for The Riftbreaker is always identifying what we want to include in the update. These can be new features, changes to existing systems, fixes, and optimizations. We spend a significant amount of time scouting the Steam Discussions, our feedback and tech support channels on Discord, and our social media to learn about any problems. Sometimes we ask for additional information or a copy of your save files. That helps us find what causes bugs and allows us to prevent them in the future. When our programmers fix those issues, the developer version of the game on our repository gets updated.

A classic 'one zero too many' while setting up effects.

It is now time for an extensive round of testing. We usually focus most on the areas that have seen the most changes. For example, if we have been messing with the liquids system, we will do our best to break it and identify potential issues. Apart from that, we also check if all the game elements are working correctly during a ‘sanity check.’ It is a round of testing covering all the game areas where we found issues before. We make sure that all options work the way they should, all game modes are playable, and we haven’t missed anything important.

We heard you like resources, so here's a resource vein inside a resource vein.

Another area of focus is the save system. To ensure that all the changes that we make will not break the compatibility of your saves, we run automated tests on the experimental version. We have 122 save samples made in the 1.0 version of The Riftbreaker - the very first one that was burned to console discs on the 8th of September 202,1 more than a month before the game was released to the public on October 14th, 2021. Moreover, we prepare a set of save samples from each major game version released later. That quickly adds up to hundreds of tests. Our script loads each saved game individually, then re-saves the same save in the new version of the game and tries to load the updated version of the save file. If there are no issues, the script moves on to the next sample. Rinse and repeat hundreds of times. This automated process takes about 5-6 hours to complete. In the meantime, we do our best to break the save system on our own. We create giant bases, name our save files in a weird way, delete campaigns while playing them, shut the game down while saving - you name it.

No amount of testing will ever beat giving the game to real users. Once we are reasonably confident that the update we are working on should not cause any issues, we post it to the experimental branch so that the community can prove us wrong. Since our players play the game on different machines than ours, and in various ways, they often find bugs that would have otherwise eluded us. We fix those bugs, update the experimental branch and check if there aren’t any new problems as a result of the fixes. After we stop receiving bug reports, we move on to the next step - creating a ‘stable’ version.

This GIF is NOT sped up. They just drank too much coffee.

The major difference between our stable and experimental builds is error logging. The experimental build saves quite a lot of data about potential errors. Our programmers use that additional information for debugging. Unfortunately, that costs a lot of performance. For the “stable” build, we create a separate version of the game’s executables that do not keep track of the debug data. Removing logs might seem like a relatively minor change, but it is more than enough to warrant one final round of testing. We run through our checklist again, and if everything seems okay, we publish the patch.

A classic flickering shadows bug.

When it comes to publishing updates on PC platforms, we can make them public anytime we want. We are in complete control of that process. The matter gets a bit more complicated when it comes to consoles (and PC Game Pass). All changes that we make to the game need to be revised by the console vendors’ internal certification teams. They check if the updated version of the game is still in compliance with all the legal and technical standards. This process takes a couple of extra days, which is why you often see a slight delay between a patch arriving on PC versus consoles.

These Zorants decided they were not interested in fighting anymore. They just left.

‘If you spend so much time testing our builds, why are there still bugs in the game?’ you might ask. Well, The Riftbreaker is a very expansive and open-ended game. You can play any way you like and create strategies we have not even thought about while developing the game. With thousands of players trying out new things every day, some of them will inevitably run into errors we had no idea about. This is why the data from our crash reporter is so valuable to us - it allows us to figure out where we made a mistake and fix it in the next patch.

We hope you learned something interesting about our update process, and it has become a bit clearer why game patches don’t usually happen overnight. Let us know about any other aspects of game development you would like to read about. Perhaps one of these articles will inspire you to try a career in game dev?

See you next time!
EXOR Studios

We would like to give you a little sneak peek of one of the quality of life changes we have been working on lately. It is, in fact, one of the most requested changes since the launch of the game. We’re talking about the mass repair, upgrade, and building deconstruction tools. While they may not sound very exciting, we had to solve some interesting issues while working on them, which we will tell you about in this article.

Let’s start with the reason why many players requested these features in the first place. When The Riftbreaker first launched, negative weather effects, such as hailstorms or acid rain, were global, not regionalized. All buildings were damaged because of those events, which was especially painful for players who wanted their bases in pristine condition. Obviously, you could build Repair Facilities around your base, but setting them up takes time and resources. Manual repairs were always instant, but their point-and-click nature has led to negative experiences.

We have the technology.

We realized that we should give our players the ability to repair buildings in a larger area. The idea is pretty simple - select the repair tool, use the mouse scroll to choose the desired size, click once, and have all your buildings repaired in no time. However, since manual repairs were instant, you could easily keep repairing structures under attack, making them virtually indestructible. We needed to make changes to the repair mechanic as a whole. These are the changes we decided to make to facilitate mass repair:

• Manual building repair will no longer be instant. Mr. Riggs will send drones to repair the damaged buildings in the selected area. The drones will repair those structures in a short amount of time.
  
• The maximum repair time is 10 seconds. The drones will repair buildings at a constant rate, 10% of maximum health per second. If a building is at 50% health, it will take the drone 5 seconds to bring it back to 100% condition. This rate is the same for all buildings, whether it’s a wall or a Fusion Power Plant.
  
• If a building gets damaged during the repair process, the process is stopped. This is necessary to make ‘cheesing’ attack waves impossible.
  
• Maximum repair cost stays unchanged - it’s 20% of the original building cost.

These assumptions allow us to keep the mass repair process relatively cheap and quick while avoiding various potential issues.

The game will automatically detect all the damaged structures in the area selected with the repair tool and mark them with a green highlight. Once you give the order to start repairs, the system will try to repair as many structures as you can afford.

Keep an eye on your economy - mass upgrades can be costly!

We decided to give the upgrade and deconstruction utilities the same treatment to keep parity between tools. Once the update goes live, you will be able to use your mouse wheel to increase the area of the selector for these tools. The upgrade tool will highlight all the structures that can be improved and try to make that happen for as many buildings in that area as possible. Obviously, you can still select and upgrade buildings one by one if you’d rather have complete control over the process. The deconstruction tool will simply sell all structures on the highlighted area - be careful what you choose!

Choosing to sell all your defenses instead of repairing them might be a suboptimal move.

The updated versions of these tools are still in development. There are still some aspects that require tweaking and some bugs to iron out. We also want to add a tooltip that will inform you precisely about the costs of the operation you are about to carry out. Plenty of work ahead of us, but there are even more highly-requested quality of life changes coming to you in the near future, including the ‘build max level’ upgrade. We will keep you updated on our progress. The best way to get all the latest news is to join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. You can also tune in to our streams - Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3 PM CET at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios.

See you soon!