The Riftbreaker News

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.

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

Bonus points if you can find Roger!

A couple of weeks ago we asked our Discord community what they would like to read about in our devlog. We were given a lot of great ideas and topics. Some of them, such as balancing the game elements, need to wait until we are finished with the game, but the rest of them we can start covering right away. They will be featured here over the next couple of weeks. If you have any additional ideas for articles, let us know! It turns out, quite a few people are interested in how the studio works, how our responsibilities are divided and what our typical week looks like. Well, in our line of work, no two weeks are ever the same and the nature of the things we do changes on a day-to-day basis, but we will do our best regardless.

Ready to battle!

EXOR Studios currently has 14 in-house employees. We operate from our cozy office in the center of Szczecin in north-west Poland. We have 4 spacious rooms at our disposal, plus a kitchen and two bathrooms. Setting the space up to accommodate such a number of people can be a bit tricky, but we did what we could in order to maximize comfort and productivity. The graphics designers have their own room, and so do the programmers. We also have a conference room, which doubles as a dining room. The last available space houses the design/management staff. Such an arrangement gives each of the rooms a clear purpose and lets the specialists communicate with each other without the need of leaving their workspace.

MVP, Employee of the Month, the Year and the Century

There are 4 graphics designers in our team. Their job consists of preparing all the assets that you see in our games - the character and prop models, the menus, and animations. The nature of their work is varied and changes according to the current needs of the project. The graphics designers can work on 2D concept art sketches, sculpt 3D models, create textures, as well as prepare promotional materials for the game. The lead designer overlooks the team’s progress, giving them feedback and assisting in case of problems. The tools they use are Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Zbrush and Blender.

Our conference room, shortly after we moved in.

Next up are the programmers. They are elusive creatures, but you can easily catch one by turning a monitor or a coffee machine on. Especially the coffee machine. They are the wizards that maintain the Schmetterling engine, program gameplay features and make game designers’ wishes come true. All of them are well-versed in multiple programming languages but use mainly C++ and Lua scripting. Programming is a very broad subject that can be quite difficult to understand for a layperson. That’s why we have a lead programmer, who distributes the tasks among people according to their specialty.

Insert programmers here.

The lead programmer himself does open-heart surgery on the game engine. Next, we have the tools specialist, who prepares all the game editors that the designers use later, although he’s great at programming gameplay features as well. Then, we have the navigation/AI expert - the person responsible for the dynamic pathfinding in X-Morph: Defense and the behavior of swarms in The Riftbreaker. Then there are two guys who fix all the bugs we make, program new game features, create shaders and help the designers. The last programmer works on GUI and heavy backend stuff. He gets the tasks that nobody else could do and always starts feature description with ‘it works, but…’.

The command center being set up.

The last room is occupied by designers/managerial staff. The people here are responsible for keeping the studio running on all fronts. They deal with the business side of things, take care of all the paperwork and keep the hardware operational. When they are not busy dealing with all the boring, grown-up stuff they also design the game itself. Before anything makes it to the screen it has to be conceptualized first, and it happens right here. When any other member of the team needs consultation on a task they are working on they can come here and work out the details. I (the community manager) also work in this room. This is where our streams happen (that’s also why it gets quite loud here at times).

No time for hardware upgrades, gotta code!

There you go - our roles and office layout. In the next part of the article, we will describe our workflow and what our typical day of work looks like. As always, you are more than welcome to ask questions on our Discord - www.discord.gg/exorstudios

See you next time!

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