The Riftbreaker News

You still have a chance to survive in The Riftbreaker when your HQ explodes, but you will have a lot of cleaning up to do.

Now that you know how we prepare particle effects in our games, let’s move on to some practical applications of those. Single explosions, bullets, blood splats or wood splinters flying around look fun, but our possibilities do not end there. We very often combine multiple effects into sequences. Thanks to this technique it is possible to achieve massive, spectacular cascades of fire, sparks, and debris that look as if they were taken from a Hollywood action film. It’s quite an interesting process, which requires some creativity and destructive imagination, so let’s take a look!

Multiple buildings changing their state at once is often a sight to behold.

Most objects that you see in EXOR Studios’ games can be either damaged or completely destroyed during regular gameplay. Some of those objects are small and relatively insignificant - a tree, for example. It can either stand perfectly healthy or be destroyed. Entities with the health point system are a little different. Apart from the “100% OK” state (max health) and the “dead” state (0 health) we also have a ‘damaged” state - anywhere between 1% and 99% health (approximately, of course ;)). The bigger an entity is, the more HP it is likely to have - and if it has a lot of HP, we might give it destruction levels.

Friendly fire is not a thing in The Riftbreaker, but we used it to show you different destruction levels for the Armory in a controlled environment.

Destruction levels are damage thresholds that we use to trigger certain effects. For example, the Headquarters in The Riftbreaker look different when they are at 100%, 75% or 10% health, with more smoke and fire breaking out as the building becomes damaged. This system is not exclusive to buildings and applies to creatures as well - they get wounded and bloody as the damage increases. The purpose of the destruction level system is to give players feedback. We want you to know that your attacks are hurting the creature you’re hunting. We want you to know that the creatures hunting you can hurt you too.

The core blowing up in X-Morph: Defense is not a positive thing, but the visuals at least make up for the game loss.

There are usually several destruction levels for a destructible entity. When the health drops below a threshold specified by one of the destruction levels, a group of effects is triggered. Physical parts are spawned, each with individual properties, such as weight, dimensions, buoyancy, friction upon hitting the ground - you name it. The parts are given the texture of the object they were spawned from in order to maintain consistency. What is also important - the parts do not just appear out of nowhere - they are pushed out by a force at the center of the object that randomly changes the direction and power (maintaining a vector aiming away from the object). This way you can’t predict what the debris will do once it starts flying.

A particle effect can be attached to any of the yellow spheres.

When the destruction level is reached, the material on the object changes as well. Cracks, impact holes and other damage starts to show. To reach the level of visual polish we aim for it’s necessary to add particle effects. They are attached to specific points on the model and we try to set them up as realistically as possible. If there is a structural vulnerability, a pipe, or some exposed wires - we set it on fire. Each model requires manual setup when it comes to attaching effects.

We started playing around with explosion sequences in X-Morph: Defense.

An important aspect of this feature is that we can control when a particle effect starts its ‘playback’. This allows us to prepare sequences of explosions. For example, when the Headquarters in The Riftbreaker reaches 0 HP, a sequence of multiple explosions will start. They happen all over the place, varying in intensity, culminating in the complete destruction of the building in a big bang.

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Kaboom.

When a Steam user left a review on the X-Morph: Defense Store Page saying that the game looked as if it was directed by Michael Bay, it dawned on us - there are lots of explosions in our games. We never gave that much thought, to be honest, but taking a look back it has always been true for all our projects. We love blowing things up and we think we’re quite good at it, so we would like to tell you what goes into creating realistic-looking explosions (and other effects) for EXOR Studios games, including The Riftbreaker.

A sample scene from Zombie Driver HD. There are lots of particles in this one - blood, sparks, explosions… The game wouldn’t be the same without these effects.

The explosions you see in our games are realized through the extensive use of the particle effects system. The particles are prepared by our artist in a specialized tool and then imported into the game. They consist of quadrilaterals (two-dimensional shapes, often referred to as ‘quads’) with a texture and set transparency. The artist can give each of the quads different properties, changing their overall appearance and how they behave in relation to other quads within the same effect, but it is the texture that is the base of it all. In much simpler terms - we set flat images in motion, make them see-through and add some eye candy.

A view from the editor we use - Particle Universe. The tree goes on and on, and each node is a different variable!

You need to have a general idea of what you want to achieve and pick the right textures for the job. There are many types you can choose from. They vary between each other in how they interact with other textures in terms of light and transparency. We mainly use emissives (textures that appear as if they were light sources and can be blended with textures that are underneath them) and refracts (special textures that distort the surrounding area, like in the case of hot air, or a shockwave). When we are not working on explosions, we also make use of alpha blend textures. They do not fake being light sources, but simply mix with other textures in their vicinity. The whole process of creating a particle effect begins with choosing the right texture for the context.

By choosing correct textures you can get a whole range of effects.

Every effect consists of sub effects. They are lower-level structures that allow you to group quads together and apply some properties to them - more on those properties later, but in general - you can individually move the sub effects and make them behave in a certain way. Of course, it is extremely important to position the sub effects right. You don’t want a large cloud of black smoke to cover up all the fire, sparks and debris from the remaining ones. In general, you need to start creating an effect with a clear end goal in mind. Reference videos and images are very useful at this point.

The effects look different in editor and in game, so it’s necessary to test everything live. By the way - this explosion consists of 1042 quads!

Another important piece of the puzzle is the emitter. Every sub effect contains one. It can be seen as the ‘starting point’ of the particle. It controls the spatial properties of the effect. The quads are spawned from the emitter, and the artist specifies all their properties. The particles can be rendered at any given angle, or they can be set to always face the camera. They can be moved in any direction and at any speed, giving the creator complete control over the end result. That’s already a lot of steps, and we’re not done yet.

Boss dying in X-Morph: Defense - let the images speak for themselves.

What you can add on top of the quads rendered by the emitter are the so-called affectors. An affector is a function that can change the quad you’ve already rendered, for example by changing its transparency or color over time. Take a cloud of smoke as an example. The affector will change it in a couple of ways over its lifetime. First, it will be quite small and opaque, growing larger over time and becoming more transparent, just like smoke in real life. Thanks to the affectors we can control when and how quickly it happens and which direction should the quad move.

The Riftbreaker will feature lots of particles, and since we are always learning new things, you can expect them to be even more flashy!

Combining all these things together is a difficult, but incredibly exciting task. It takes years of practice and hours of watching real-life examples of the effects you want to simulate to reach proficiency. We’re pretty sure our particle artist is on several watchlists by now, because of all the videos of explosions, fires and controlled demolitions he has googled over time. Still - worth it!

Next time we will tell you about sequences of explosions - something even more spectacular :) Stay tuned and join the Discord! www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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Hello!

Last time we jumped into the world of designing buildings and their animations. We told you what principles we follow in order to achieve a clear and consistent visual style. Today we would like to follow up by talking about the creatures of Galatea 37 and Mr. Riggs himself. While creatures and buildings are completely different categories of game objects, you will see that there is a lot of overlap when it comes to designing them. We will also tell you a little bit about how we animate our creatures and make them behave in an organic, believable way.

Most Canoptrix simply mind their own business if you don't provoke them. They even try to move away from Mr. Riggs.

Let’s start with the creature design. In The Riftbreaker you visit a distant planet, so naturally, we want the creatures to feel strange and alien. The ones that you can currently see in the game (during our streams, for example, Tue & Thu, 3 PM CET) are ‘sci-fi classics’. Their size and features are meant to give you a general idea of what they’re capable of. The Canoptrix are small, wolf-like creatures that travel, hunt and attack in packs. Their strength lies in numbers. Arachnoids live in large colonies and are quite aggressive. Hammeroceroses are tough and usually calm. The creature’s appearance can tell you a lot about the general characteristics, but what about their behaviors?

Out in the wild, even the nasty Arachnoids seem pretty relaxed. Some dig in the ground looking for food, others just lie down in the sun.

That’s when animations and states come into play. The creatures you meet during your adventure can appear in different states. They can be idle, which means that they will simply go about their day, looking for food, scratching their heads or mingling with other members of the pack. If you annoy or threaten the innocent beasts, they will either start chasing you or try to intimidate you. Finally, when they are in ‘attack mode’ the monsters will do whatever it takes to destroy you. That means they will chase and attack you whenever possible. All creatures have custom animations designed for all states and interaction possibilities.

Poor beast, it didn't even see what was coming. Notice all the different animations and how they blend into each other.

We mentioned Mr. Riggs at the beginning, so how does he fit into the discussion about monsters? The thing that is common for all ‘living’ things in The Riftbreaker is animation blending. This cryptic term simply means that the game doesn’t have to wait until one animation is over to apply another one to the in-game unit. Instead, The Schmetterling Engine will find the points where the two animations can be connected and mixed into one fluent set of moves. This way we achieve a realistic moveset without the need to record hundreds of ‘between’ states.

Here we can see Mr. Riggs quickly switching between various moves almost seamlessly. This also allows us to combine moves, such as slash and dash.

Would you like to learn more about how we approach animating and designing creatures in The Riftbreaker? Let us know in the comments! Don’t forget to join our Discord server at www.discord.gg/exorstudios - if you have any burning questions you can get the answers there the quickest.

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Hello!

It’s time for another look behind the curtains of the design of The Riftbreaker. The action of the game is set hundreds of years into the future, which means that human technology has advanced exponentially. Rift travel, quantum computing and quick 3D printing of buildings are just the tip of an iceberg of technologies Ashley will make use of on her mission on Galatea 37. Anyone thrown into the world of the future would feel out of place, so it is our job to make the tech look somewhat familiar using the tools we have. Today we’ll show you how we do it using modeling and animations.

Solar Panels procect themselves when the conditions aren't right for them.

First of all, as long as it is possible, we try to design our buildings to clearly show their purpose at first glance. The best examples of this practice are Wind Turbines and Solar Panels. While designing these buildings we took the common concepts for how they look like in our times and added some futuristic twists. In the world of the Rifbreaker, the turbines are vertical fans that turn as much of the airflow as they can into electrical energy, thanks to their lightweight, nanofiber mesh that the fan blade is made of. The same philosophy applies to our Solar Panels. They resemble the actual panels you might see around in the real world. What makes them stand out is their ability to follow the Sun’s movement and fold down when the conditions aren’t right for energy collection.

We try to design buildings in such a way that their purpose is known at a glance, either through the design itself or through additional effects.

Things are a little bit different when it comes to buildings like Carbonium and Steel Factories. Normally, we imagine steel and coal production as a multi-person, large-scale operation. In our case, both buildings are automatically operated and considerably smaller than what we are used to. In order to make sure that the players know that they’re looking at we turned to custom animations. Even small elements, such as a drill smashing carbonium chunks into pieces, or blobs of liquid metal flowing along the sides of the factory go a long way when it comes to representing that the building actually does

Even if you don't know exactly what a building does, the effects and animations should let you at least make an educated guess.

We follow the same philosophy even when it comes to more futuristic, advanced buildings that you don’t see every day. The Gas Filtering Plant takes much of its design from water treatment facilities. Communications Hub refracts the light around it while operational to symbolize downloading data. All the little details give The Riftbreaker its characteristic visual style, that’s both pleasant to the eye and easy to follow. If you want to check it out in action, join our live streams!

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In The Riftbreaker the players will have the chance to complete side missions chosen randomly from a pool of events created by us. One such example was the Canoptrix Nest encounter we spoke about earlier this week. This time we will show you the other event we implemented already. It is the first mini-boss fight we have. Be mindful that it is quite primitive in its current state and will definitely change before we release the game.

Some time into a Survival run Mr. Riggs will inform Ashley that an unknown large alien creature has appeared nearby. This is accompanied by much higher activity from Arachnoid Sentinels, large, acid-spitting arthropods (click here to learn more). These creatures can be quite devastating to the base because of their long-range attack that allows them to stay outside the range of Sentinel Towers.

A scaled-up Arachnoid Sentinel model currently holds place for the boss, which is currently in the making.

In order to save the base and resources, Ashley must find the large creature and eliminate it. The creature itself is an enormous Arachnoid, but it is unclear whether that is an effect of mutation or if it serves the role of a brood mother. It’s exceptionally aggressive behavior does not make research any easier. The only real possibility of ever learning more about this creature is to take it down and research the samples later.

The entire concept art for the boss.

Fighting the creature itself is not very difficult, nor should it be. It is obviously tougher and packs a bigger punch than its smaller counterparts, but if you keep your distance you should be fine. The real source of pressure are the swarms of smaller Arachnoids that will keep coming at your base until you defeat the boss. If it happens to spawn during the attack wave, you might find yourself in a lot of trouble. Once defeated. the unusually large Arachnoid will drop a ton of valuable loot and the attacks on your base will cease. That will give you time to repair the damage done to your base and craft some new shiny toys with the collected materials.

Fighting this thing is tough on its own. Add some extra creatures to the mix and you’re in a world of trouble.

The Riftbreaker will feature a varied pool of side events to randomly trigger during your Survival missions. We hope this will keep you on your toes over the course of gameplay and encourage you to go out and explore the rich world of Galatea 37.

A face only a mother could love.

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