The Riftbreaker News

Hello Riftbreakers!

This week we would like to show you one of the major changes we introduced to The Riftbreaker in the past couple of weeks. Ever since we let you play the game in the form of the Prologue or the closed Alpha you have been giving us tons of feedback about the Research screen. We read all of your suggestions and spent hours thinking about how to make it right. The result is a complete overhaul of our research system. Those of you who joined our stream in the past month have already seen it in action (we stream every Tuesday and Thursday, 3 PM CEST, by the way). Now we’re taking a closer look at it.

You can click the image to view the full-resolution version. The visual design is mostly done, but the order of unlocks and everything else is not final and will change before the release.

The Communications Hub doesn't seem too important, but if you want to develop your base, you will have to protect and upgrade this building at all costs.

Our initial version of the research screen was a simple list of blueprints that Ashley can download using the Communications Hub. It was quite easy to navigate both using a gamepad and the mouse + keyboard combination, but it had its issues. It was not easy to see the relations between various research items. To combat this we have moved, as many of you suggested, from the ‘list’ style research screen to a more visual representation of technology development in the form of a tree. Now it is much easier to see which research items are related and what their requirements are.

The old style of our research tree was easy to navigate, but difficult to understand.

This style also makes it easier for us to clearly show you technology tiers. Most of the available research options are now connected directly to Headquarters upgrades, showing that the HQ is not just a building you respawn at after ‘accidentally’ aggroing half the planet’s population. The Headquarters level is the focus of your base development, as it gives you access to more advanced research opportunities. Completing them will give you a better chance of surviving tough missions in other regions of the planet by giving your infrastructure and equipment a much-needed boost.

There's nothing stopping you from rushing out some key technologies if you like. Example chosen for no particular reason.

Naturally, it is not necessary to research all of the technologies in any given tier. If any of the research options do not fit your playstyle you can skip them completely. In the previous version of the research system, it was a risky move since you had no way of knowing whether you are locking your path to a technology you would actually want to use. With the research tree redesign, it is now possible to study all the possibilities, plan ahead, and download only the blueprints that are relevant to you.



That’s quite enough information for now. Join us on Friday for the second part of this article, where we are going to tell you more about the research tabs, as well as alien research and… The Bestiary Screen! If you can’t wait until Friday, you can join us at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios tomorrow at 3PM CEST and see all the new developments live. Also don’t forget to join our Discord - www.discord.gg/exorstudios.

See you on Friday!

www.twitch.tv/exorstudios

Hello!

Spring is in full force here for us in Poland. It’s warm, sunny, the flowers are blooming, which also means that Easter is coming! Although this year’s celebration of this holiday is still taking place in the looming shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of our team are taking a couple of days off. We’re going to use this time to rest and clear our heads before taking on the final challenges of The Riftbreaker project.

To everyone reading this, whether you celebrate Easter or not, we wish you and everyone around you safety and good health.

This week we won’t be posting any articles and we won’t have a stream tomorrow. However, we have a couple of nice surprises waiting for you after we come back. We know for sure that at least one of them will get you excited for things to come!

Happy Easter!
EXOR Studios

www.twitch.tv/exorstudios

Hello everyone!

On Wednesday we showed you one of the creatures that are new to the game, but were ‘spoiled’ a little bit during our streams. Today we have a completely new one, never seen before and fresh from underneath the painter’s brush and the coder’s keyboard. The hero of this article is a nasty cross between Hedorah, a pile of mud, and The Groke from Moomins (if you have no idea what it is, you had a much happier childhood than I did). These things are called Hedroners. Get acquainted, you will see these guys a lot.

As usual, we kick things off with a size comparison between Hedroner variants and Mr. Riggs.

Hedroners are large and slow creatures. Their bodies have very few distinctive features - apart from the arms, claw-like hands and the giant, gruesome maw you can’t really tell which part is which. The creatures move around by sliding on the ground with considerable effort, which suggests that their bodies are really dense and massive. This fact comes into play a lot when trying to take a Hedroner down - regular bullets simply get lodged in its gelatinous body and seem to do very little in terms of stopping the beast.

They are so cute!

Hedroners spend most of their time around pools of liquids scattered across Galatea 37. In fact, most of the time you meet this creature in the wild, it will materialize straight up from the pool itself. Are they a really strange species, or perhaps the manifestation of the Galatean ecosystem fighting back against your exploits? You will have to gather samples and find out yourself, but it won’t be easy. If you manage to take a Hedroner down, It is highly probable that it will dissolve into a puddle of whatever they came out from.

Animations and state transitions are still 'work in progress'.

Our sludgy friends will fight you both with melee and ranged attacks. In close-quarters situations, they will flail their massive arms and try to slap you back to where you came from. When given the opportunity, Hedroners will utilize their strength to fling rocks at you and your base structures, making them dangerous even if you keep your distance. Moreover, Hedroners are not ‘bound’ to the resource pools they crawl out of. They will often attack your base along with other creatures during the regular attack waves. Ready your lasers and set them to ‘vaporize’.

Use Mr. Riggs' nimble movement skills to avoid attacks. Hedroners are not too big of a threat solo. They get much worse, when they come to your base!

You will get to see a lot of new creatures and features very soon, we can promise you that. Stay tuned, follow the news here and on Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. Also, make sure to join our streams at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios every Tuesday and Thursday at 3 PM CEST.