The Riftbreaker News

Hey there!

Exactly one week ago we asked you to participate in the first of many voting events that will shape the future of The Riftbreaker. We presented a couple of Ashley’s outfits and the summaries of the stories they are connected with. Here is the picture again:



The option D won the contest by a wide margin. It is a light recon armor, a very advanced protective suit that grants the user protection and support during dangerous Riftbreaking missions. It looks sick as well, and you seem to appreciate both the style and function! :)

As we promised, we are going to describe the armor in greater detail through a story that will reveal a little more about Ashley’s past. It should appear by the end of the month, but take that with a grain of salt - we’ve got a lot going on right now. ;)

Everyone who voted also automatically entered a giveaway. One of our Discord users - Skylord - won an EXOR swag bag, filled to the brim with our gadgets and a signed copy of X-Morph: Defense Limited Edition for the PS4. Do not worry if you missed it, though! There’s going to be a lot more in the future!



This event is the first that we will carry out as a part of our ‘Community-Driven Design’ philosophy. We want you to feel that you have a real impact on how the game turns out. We are making it for you, after all! You can expect to have many chances to decide the future of The Riftbreaker.

Our Discord server is the best place to leave all the feedback and suggestions for us. Reading messages from the community and discussing ideas is a great source of inspiration and knowledge. We would love to have you there! Visit www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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We said many times that we want the development of The Riftbreaker to be community-driven. We want to make choices together with you, let you shape the game and make this project something unique and engaging. Today, we ask for your help with making one of the choices.

Ashley Nowak is the main character of The Riftbreaker. Although we don't see her in-game outside her Mecha-Suit, she still is the most important character and will appear on most of the artwork we make. We decided to have a little bit of fun and design a couple of clothing styles for her to wear as a default. Each of those tells a little story of its own. Your votes will determine which story you'd like us to describe in greater detail, revealing more about Ashley's past.



A - an infiltration suit, designed to make moving as effortless as possible. She used this one while doing recon on illegal mining operations during her years in the Academy.
B - a casual outfit, a little adventurous, inspired by pilots and thrillseekers of the 80s cinema. The jacket used to belong to her grandmother and reminds her of home.
C - a scientist suit, a callback to Ashley's scientific training and background. This outfit survived its fair share of accidents and explosions, yet still holds together.
D - light recon armor, providing protection and life support on dangerous missions but without overburdening the user.
E - full heavy assault armor, for the times when Mr. Riggs' protection was not enough. Every Riftbreaker cadet has to complete a 10 mile run in one of these.

If you would like to take part in the voting, join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. You will find the vote in the #vote channel of The Riftbreaker section once you've joined. Everyone who participates will get the chance to win a bag of EXOR Studios goodies. We ship worldwide, so everyone can join.

If you take part in the vote you get the chance to win an EXOR Studios swag bag including A SIGNED COPY OF X-MORPH: DEFENSE COLLECTOR'S EDITION for the PS4, and other cool gadgets! We ship worldwide, so everybody can join. The voting starts today, July 10th, and ends in exactly one week.



We will pick the winner among all the participants. If the option of your choice does not win the vote, you can still get lucky and win the prize.

Good luck!

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Hello!

Just a quick update this Saturday, as we’re really busy with preparing the Zombie Driver launch on the Nintendo Switch and some other things for the upcoming trade shows. Hope you can forgive us :)

As you know, we want the world of The Riftbreaker to be as varied as possible. It is quite a difficult task, because each biome will need its own set of props, fauna, flora, unique weather conditions and other elements that fall under the ‘look and feel’ category.

Last time we showed you the general process of creating props. They all start as simple, hand-drawn illustrations. Some of them never make it into the game, others do, but in a completely different form than originally anticipated. Today we would like to present to you some more pieces of concept art. Some are already in the game, others wait for their turn.



This is of course just a small fraction of the things our graphics designers are working on. We can’t wait for the results. Would you like to see them too? Join our Discord - www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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It is not so easy to design an alien-looking set of decorations. The years of observing the nature here on Earth have left all of us with pretty solid images in our heads. We all know what features we should expect from a tree, a flower, a mushroom. Luckily, the nature has a few tricks up its sleeves. A little imagination combined with some more exotic references can lead up to pretty interesting results. Let’s take a look at some space mushrooms!

There are several approaches you can take here. The first is to take some ordinarily looking Earth mushrooms and give them a fresh paint job.



These already look more interesting than an ordinary deathcap, but adding some more vibrant colors, together with bioluminance can work wonders here!



Another way of going about creating such a model is looking for references in places the most of us do not usually get to visit everyday. This way you can adapt an Earthly species into a completely otherworldly prop.



This winding mushroom is essentially a mix of 3 different species found in various places on Earth. We do not have a 3D model for this one just yet, but you can already see how many variations you can get from just one concept.

It is, of course, possible to let your imagination loose and design something completely out of the ordinary. In that case, our graphics designers usually draw a concept art first in relation to Mr. Riggs. This way we can get the sense of scale of the prop. Once it’s done, a simple 3D model is prepared, this time to show us what it may look like in game. After receiving feedback and implementing changes (if necessary), the designer creates textures for the model, so that it can finally become a part of Galatea 37 ecosystem. Here’s a couple of examples of this process:

We start with a hand-drawn concept.

Then, each size from that concept is modeled and presented in scale.

With each stage the mushroom starts to differ from what we see on Earth...

...up to the point where you wouldn't say it's a mushroom at all!

This is another fun concept.

We can hide the bulbous bottom part underground. Who knows, perhaps you'll be able to rip them out?

The tentacles expand even further.

Here we are - a mixture of a cactus and an octopus in a mushroom form. I'm not even going to try and name that thing.

Once the model is ready, the level designers are free to use them in whatever context they like. Additionally, they can easily change the scale and orientation of the models, which changes the look and feel by a lot!

Which concept do you like the best? What other alien-looking species of plants, animals or mushrooms do you think we should incorporate in The Riftbreaker? Let us know here and on our Discord server - www.discord.gg/exorstudios.

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Hello!

Welcome to the fourth and last installment in our series about the defensive towers in the Riftbreaker. In the previous parts, we uncovered some of the mysteries behind the basic operations of all towers, as well as specifics regarding the sentinel towers and the artillery tower. In this part, we are going to cover two wildly different structures, representing what we call charged up firing and continuous weapons.

The mode of operation of charged up weapons can be divided into two phases - charge and discharge. The Railgun Tower in The Riftbreaker is a perfect example of this. It fires an energy bolt once in a while that is followed by a lengthy cooldown period. This might seem disadvantageous at first, but the Railgun’s ability to pierce through multiple targets compensates for that. A look at the code will reveal more interesting things, check it out:

The Railgun Tower as seen in the EXOR Model Editor

TurretDesc
{
    target "ground_unit"
    speed "300"
    find_type "farthest"
    aim_volume "SphericalAimVolume"
        
            range_min "0"
            range_max "50"
            aiming_range "60"
        

    aiming_cooldown "1"
    aiming_target_time "2"
    aiming_idle_angle "20"
    pitch "be_barrel"
    yaw "be_turret"
    check_target_visibility "1"
}

    WeaponDesc
    
        weapon_definition "InstantWeaponDef"
        
            fire_rate "5"
            
            FirePattern
            
                burst_column_spacing "0"
                burst_rate "0"
                burst_rows "1"
                burst_column_angle "0"
                burst_columns "1"
            
            
            ammo_storage        "energy"
            ammo_cost_per_fire        "100"
        

        ammo_definition "InstantAmmoDef"
        
            blueprint                 "buildings/defense/tower_railgun_projectile"
            range         "50"
            max_hits     "32"
            
            width         "3"
            height         "3"

            on_enemy_hit_effect     "effects/weapon_hit/tower_projectile_hit"
            on_world_hit_effect     "effects/weapon_hit/tower_projectile_hit"
        
            collision_3d             "destructible|ground_unit|shield"
            collision_block         "world|world_blocker"

            DamagePattern
            
                Damage
                
                    value     "500"
                    type     "railgun"
                
}

Pew, pew!

The first thing that is different from the other towers we’ve shown you is the aiming mechanism. In order to snipe as many enemies at once, the railgun chooses the farthest enemy as its primary target. We can tweak the size of the energy burst to ensure that targets on the sides will get hit as well. The only caveat is that we had to limit the maximum number of units that can be affected by the railgun to 32 because of performance reasons, but the massive amount of damage dealt by the tower should offset this drawback.

Each shot fired by the railgun tower consumes a ton of energy. It is a steep cost, and in large numbers, they can generate massive power spikes. However, thanks to the burst operation mode and the lengthy cooldown between shots it is possible for your power plants to refill the deficits in your energy storage, at least to some degree. Balancing the fire rate, fire cost and damage is going to be one of our priorities in case of the towers operating under these principles.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have continuous weapons. They operate on a completely different principle, turning on as soon as an enemy comes in range and staying on until there are no more targets in the area. An example of such a tower is the flamethrower tower. The principle here is quite simple - the tower incinerates the area in front of it, sweeping from side to side until there is nothing left. The fire does not deal a lot of damage outright, but it is spread over time, meaning that it will not instantly kill all enemies, but over time it will be devastating to large groups of smaller targets.

The Flamethrower Tower

Spatial simulating of flame behavior is quite difficult, and the sweeping motion of the turret does not make it any easier. Our solution to this problem is to create three boxes of different sizes in front of the tower. The further the box is from the muzzle, the bigger it is. The visual effect is limited to the bounds of the box. Right now, the flames pass through the objects on their way. In the future, we will add a force feedback mechanism that will stop the flames when they meet a solid, physical object on their way.

With debug options enabled you can see what the aiming process looks like in real time.

The flamethrower towers use fuel as their ammunition. The turret fires continuously, which means it will consume some ammo every second. To avoid running out of ammunition you must build refineries that will turn non-renewable energy sources, such as biomass, into flammable fuel.

That is all we have for the defensive towers series at the moment. We hope that this series of articles shed some light on how we create defensive systems. All of the towers we presented will require a lot of tweaking, but we hope that with your help we can make The Riftbreaker a game you want to play. Join our Discord! www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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