The Riftbreaker News

Setting up the lighting for the scene plays a major role in constructing the proper atmosphere for the level. It determines how the shadows work, how the light bounces off various surfaces and a ton of other small details that make up the majority of the game’s look and feel. Today we would like to tell you what kind of tools are available to us in The Riftbreaker when it comes to lighting effects. We will also tell you what settings we can change and what it takes to make the most of our game.

There are many ways to set up the directional light, but some of them are slightly... off. The color picker works instantly and we can fix our mistakes on the fly.

We illuminate the game scene using one powerful light source - directional light. Since the action in The Riftbreaker takes place on the surface of the planet Galatea 37, the light usually tries to simulate the behavior of the Sun. ‘Simulate’ is the key word here, because the directional light is always on (with the exception of the night, obviously). The parameters of the light make all the difference here. We can create and save separate presets for the sunrise, the day, the sunset and the night. Blending them with each other over time gives us the day and night cycle, that we discussed earlier.

Thanks to fog we can easily change the mood of the scene.

There are several parameters of the directional light that we can change. The most obvious one is the color. We can pick any color available in the RGB palette in order to change the mood of the scene. The light at dusk has to be different than at midday and this is the setting that makes it possible. We can also adjust the look of the scene by changing the parameters of the fog. Fog allows us to better simulate the effects of light dispersal and how it affects the objects on the scene. We can change the fog’s color, density and the distance at which it becomes visible.

We own the sun.

Over the course of the day, the source of directional light travels across the sky, changing its position as if Galatea 37 really revolved around a star. However, in real life, the sun appears to be in various parts of the sky, depending on your geographic position. If we set up just one orbit for all the maps to use, we would get the same results all the time. That is why we have introduced a set of sliders that change the simulated latitude and longitude of the map’s location. Instead of moving the planet around the star, we do it the other way around. In your face, Copernicus!

See how much of a difference the skybox light makes.

Following the trend of trying to copy the way nature works, we also added a skybox that affects the ambient lighting on the scene. A single directional source of light would essentially leave everything on the unlit side in complete darkness, just like a spotlight in a dark room. The skybox simulates how the atmosphere disperses the light and adds some delicate lighting to the whole scene. The nature of that light will depend on the skybox texture itself and 2 parameters that we control - how much light is emitted, and how much is reflected by the props.

Adding dynamic lights makes the night sceneries much more lively.

On top of our main light source, we can also add smaller, dynamic lights to the scene. They come in two flavors - point lights (they emit light in all directions like a lightbulb - our Base Lamp is an example of one) and spotlights, which are cone-shaped. They are highly customizable. We can change their color, intensity and add custom affectors (conditions that change their behavior, such as light fading in under a fire source, simulating the growth of flames). Spotlights can also add shadows, but it comes with a high performance cost, so we decided to use it only on Mr. Riggs’ spotlights.

That’s the lighting in The Riftbreaker in a nutshell. Naturally, setting everything up just right requires a lot of trial and error, but when you do something you love it’s not that big of a deal. The end effect makes up for all the hours of work! We hope you enjoyed this article. Leave a comment on what you would like to read about in the future. You can do it either here or on our Discord - www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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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

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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!

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