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



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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We're proud to announce that our all-time classic - Zombie Driver Immortal Edition is coming to the Nintendo Switch on July 25th!

https://youtu.be/YLqfRemwcpw
It's been almost 10 years since the game's original release on the PC and the game has seen a lot of changes through the years. This latest edition has been ported to the Schmetterling engine which some of you might know from X-Morph: Defense. The new renderer is about 10x faster than the old one that we had in Zombie Driver (we've learned some things over these years). Thanks to this improvement the Nintendo Switch version of the game has the same gameplay features as the PC or Xbox One versions with even slightly improved graphics and runs really smooth even during very intense action.



All previously released DLC extensions have been incorporated into the Immortal Edition. The Apocalypse Pack, Tropical Race Rage, Burning Garden of Slaughter, and Brutal Car Skins have been included in the game as rewards for completing gameplay objectives.



If you'd like to ask us any questions in regards to the game you can always find us on our Discord:
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Hi!

Thanks for joining us once again in our series about the towers in The Riftbreaker. The previous two parts covered the general rules that apply to all the tower types, and the characteristics of the most basic defensive building in the game, the Sentinel Tower. We highly encourage you to check out those posts first, if you haven’t done so already. You can find them here and here. Today, we are going to show you the first of the advanced tier of defensive towers - the Artillery Tower.



The Artillery Tower is not available to the player at the beginning of the game. Getting access to this technology will require the player to carry out research first. We achieve two things thanks to this. The first one is streamlining the early game. There is no need for the player to choose from multiple towers at the beginning of the adventure, making the early game and the new player experience much more accessible (not to mention that advanced towers have a ton of requirements, more on that later). The second thing is the balance. We want the Artillery Tower to be considerably powerful and having access to it right away could be detrimental to the gameplay overall.

Greater power comes at the cost of greater need for resources. The Artillery has to be connected to power to remain operational but does not consume energy every time it shoots. Instead, it uses explosive ammunition, the same type that the player can utilize with Mr. Riggs’ rocket launcher. The amount of ammunition available is limited by your storage capabilities. It is also worth noting, that the more Artillery Towers you build, the more ammo they consume. A salvo of 15 shells at once might be splashy, but it will churn through your resources quickly. Moreover, ammunition is not easy to come by. You need weapon factories to do that and they, in turn, require a lot of energy and carbonium, so the cost of using the artillery is quite high.




Moving on to the more technical parts, here’s what the turret description looks like. If you read the previous part of the series, some of these elements will look familiar to you. What is different, though, is the way the projectiles fired by the tower behave. Instead of following a straight line, they fly in a parabolic pattern. In real life, the shell fired by artillery climbs very high before eventually hitting its target. In order to make thing a little bit more spectacular, we strengthen the force of gravity for the shell. This way, you can follow the whole flight pattern, from the moment of ignition to the final explosion.

Another trick that we use when it comes to our Artillery Towers is connected to the target visibility. We do not want the towers to waste your precious resources by firing at a target they can’t possibly hit, and that is what would happen if we used ray tracing in this case. Instead of that, the whole projected flight pattern of the artillery shell is divided into small pieces. Then, we check each piece of that line for possible collisions. The tower will fire only if the whole path is clear. This also allows the artillery to fire over terrain obstacles.



The last property that makes the Artillery Tower a really devastating weapon is its range. Just like in real life, our towers can shoot farther than you can see. At first, there is little advantage to it, since the fog of war will not allow you to decimate the enemy forces from a safe distance. However, the Artillery Towers can help you if you are exploring the world of Galatea 37 on your own and happen to find a group of monsters within the artillery range. Building radar stations is another way to increase the effectiveness of the artillery.

We hope you enjoyed this article and that you learned a thing or two. Make sure to join us on our Discord server to learn more about The Riftbreaker before it launches. We are waiting for your feedback and ideas. www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/pl/heftyobedientguineafowl

Hi!

Welcome to another installment of the series about defensive towers in The Riftbreaker. Last time we covered the basics of their behavior which are common for every turret type. However, there are unique, individual characteristics for each type that make them into what you will see in the game.




First, let’s take a look at the Sentinel Tower. It is the most basic defensive tool that you are going to use in the game. You can build them without researching anything, as they are available right from the start. They are relatively cheap and do not require any special kind of ammunition, as they simply fire energy projectiles which consume the same energy as any other building. If you build too many of them, however, your power grid might have trouble keeping up with the spikes in electricity consumption, so bear that in mind.


The energy bolts fired by the turret are treated by the game as projectiles. They are only one of the possible types of ammunition in the game. The way projectiles work in The Riftbreaker is based on raytracing. As the tower tries to acquire a target, it projects a single ray at it and checks whether there are any terrain obstacles along the way. If there are, it will not fire in order not to waste energy.


Lack of ammo doesn't stop these from helping you in battle.

If the target is valid and the ray trace is not obstructed by anything, the tower will start shooting, one energy bolt at a time. That’s easy enough if the enemy is standing still, but if they are moving, we need to employ some other techniques. An algorithm takes care of it. Taking into account the speed of the enemy unit and the speed of the projectile it calculates the projected place where the two paths will cross. The tower will aim at that spot, trying to intercept the enemy with its bullets.


With all these systems in place, we have a tower that can move its turret, acquire targets and shoot at them. To make the weapon complete we have to add some extra effects. First of all - the recoil mechanism. In order to add the kickback to the shot, we specify which element of the model is going to get pushed back. Then, we specify how far back and in what time the barrel of the gun should travel. Getting it right requires a lot of tweaking, but it is vital to the feeling the player is going to get while seeing the tower in action.


The last thing that we need are some cool lighting effects, you know we love those! As the tower shoots, it triggers what we call an emissive affector. The emissive material is, broadly speaking, a special kind of texture that emits its own light, regardless of other light sources that are present on the scene. The trick here is that we want the towers to light up only while shooting, and the affector takes care of that. It tells the game which parts it should illuminate and how quickly it should do it. It is controlled by the parameters you can see above. Finally, we can call this tower complete and ready for action!

Thanks for reading this piece. If you enjoy stuff like this, make sure to join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. We love connecting with our players, so come and chat! It’s also the place where you will be able to sign up for the closed beta when the time comes. See you next time!

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Hey there!

We’re back from E3 and continuing our work on The Riftbreaker with full force. Every day the game looks and plays better. We can’t wait to show off what we’re working on.



If you’re aware of our previous project, X-Morph: Defense, you already know that we love tower defense games. A little bit of that love found its way into The Riftbreaker. We decided to give you the chance to choose from several types of defensive towers in order to protect your base. There are some well-known designs like artillery or flame towers as well as railgun towers or shock towers. There are many systems and solutions behind these seemingly simple structures. Over the course of the next few articles, we will try to show you exactly how they work.

Resource requirements

Each tower type has its own setup cost and the more advanced towers may even require rare elements like uranium or thorium to be built. In order for the defensive towers to operate, the player needs to supply them with resources. All the towers require a connection to the power grid and use up a little electricity as an upkeep cost. Some turrets use the energy to shoot, generating massive spikes in power consumption, while others use other kinds of ammunition. You will talk more about ammunition in future articles.


A well-developed base with a large number of defensive towers and multiple AI hubs (that's the building with green lights).

One thing that all towers have in common is the requirement for AI processing power. The decisions and operations of automated buildings in The Riftbreaker are controlled by AI hubs. These buildings are essentially supercomputers carrying out all the necessary calculations and dispatching instructions to other structures around the base. Just as any highly efficient computer these buildings require a lot of energy to operate. Fortunately, a single AI hub can house multiple AI cores, and you can build them at a safe location away from the battlefield. Nevertheless, the more towers you want to build, the more AI hubs you will need to set up, and provide them with sufficient energy.

Visual design

Every basic defense tower in The Riftbreaker consists of two parts - the base and the turret. While turret shapes are unique, the base is exactly the same for each tower. That is a decision we made in order to allow players to fit any type of tower they would like to use into the wall structure, regardless of their placement. Since the basic building wall segment takes a 1x1 grid segment, basic defense towers also use a 1x1 grid segment. A consistent visual style makes it intuitive for players to pick up new tools and know exactly what to do with them right from the get-go. There will also be more advanced towers that occupy a larger space e.g. 2x2 or maybe even 3x3, however, we are still in the process of designing their functionality so we will get back to them at a later time.



We have a special system in place to control the turret movement and behavior. The model’s designer creates a skeleton for each tower and specifies which elements of the weapon will be responsible for changing its orientation. We call those elements pitch, yaw and recoil bones. The pitch bone controls how much the turret can tilt up and down, while the yaw bone controls the side-to-side movement. The recoil bone, as the name implies, is responsible for controlling a guns blowback when it fires. With those in place, we can employ inverse kinematics (to put it simply, we tell the robot where to go, while it calculates how to do it by itself) to point the barrel in the right direction.


The highlighted parts start glowing while shooting.

The artist that is creating a tower’s design can also define its visual behavior while it is shooting. We do this by employing a custom light emission map that tells the engine which parts of the tower should be highlighted when the tower shoots. We can also individually control the color, “glow factor” and the time of the light emission.

Behavior design

The last thing we will touch on today is how the towers behave when they’re plugged in and operational. They can be either in the “searching” or in the “aiming” state. While searching, the turret will relentlessly sway from side to side trying to acquire a target. Once a target enters the tower’s sensor range the tower switches to the “aiming” state. Once activated, the tower’s barrel will follow the target until it enters it’s shooting range.



What is important to note here is that the sensors have a bigger range than the shooting range of the tower itself. It means that the tower will pick up the target even when it is impossible to shoot at it. It happens in order to waste no time for rotating the tower towards the target. Thanks to this mechanism the tower can start shooting as soon as a target enters its shooting range.

These are some of the basic principles of how defense towers operate in The Riftbreaker. If you’d like to give us feedback on these, or if you have some cool ideas, join our Discord and let us know! www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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Welcome to the second part of the story of the AI system in The Riftbreaker. Without much ado, we will pick up right where we left off, and if you haven’t read the previous part, you can do so here.

Everything we showed you up to this point was quite small in scale. That does not satisfy us. We want you to get that Starship Troopers feeling when you play The Riftbreaker - thousands of enemies attacking at a time. We set up this scenario to check how the creatures of various types will behave when they are spawned in their own spots all over the map. Red cubes represent flow fields that are pushing them away, which is very quick way to solve collision problems. They all have a common goal - destroy the human base. The groups will inevitably meet each other along the way - let’s see what happens.



Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/mildgrimykingfisher

Even though the units are limited by the terrain obstacles in the forms of cliffs and pits, the groups manage to blend together and do not block each other’s way to the objective. When they reach a severe bottleneck, they still wiggle around, trying to position themselves to the best of their abilities. That is what will eventually make alien hordes become both terrifying an beautiful - simulating a group of living organisms, rather than robots, each waiting for their turn to cross the passage.

Parallel to the development of the AI, other things happen in the studio. The first models of buildings take shape, the design of the world starts to take shape, more and more advanced elements are added. We can finally conduct tests on some real-life (real-game?) examples. We have set up a basic outpost with a couple of buildings (most of them do not even have textures yet). We also programmed the behavior and attacks for each of the enemies, and basic particle effects were added to symbolize their attacks. Bye, bye, colorful debug cubes! We let a couple of units of each type wreak havoc on the base. Can you guess which enemy types from The Riftbreaker each of them symbolizes?



Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/farflungslightarabianhorse

Even so that everything was working pretty well. There was one thing missing. How to get to the fancy level of Starcraft-like unit movement? Everything moves so smooth and fast in that game, with no movement delay. Well, we tried many things. Praying, watching TV, reading comic books. And guess what, that didn't help us a lot :( But one day our programmer found a solution when he was playing with his young son. They put small balls in a bucket and shook them. Every time, the balls were filling all the empty gaps in the bucket. What magic force was doing that? The answer was - THE GRAVITY. By combining a unique force of gravity for each creature with its very simple soft body simulation, we finally received something similar to Starcraft. With proper looks and animations added, this resembles a game all of a sudden!



Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/maleuncommonaegeancat

We mentioned earlier that it is important for us to make the creatures behave in a believable manner. The last thing we would want our players to see is a bunch of rabid space dogs standing in the field and doing nothing, simply because they currently cannot find a way to reach their target. That is not rabid enough for us. Instead, the creatures group around the target, filling the gaps and behaving like they are controlled by a hive mind. There is only one target, you must reach it by any means necessary. This looks like a living cell, to be honest!



Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/vigilantfoolishkiskadee

Finally, it is time to roll out the heavy artillery. The year of developing complex systems and algorithms, thousands of lines of code, countless cups of coffee later, we let thousands of units loose. No more words, let the images speak for themselves.



Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/occasionalsofthedgehog

Did we manage to capture that Starship Troopers feeling? What other aspects of game development would you like to read about? Let us know in the comments and on our Discord server! www.discord.gg/exorstudios We have a lot of new and exciting things coming your way and we can’t wait to show them off!

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The Riftbreaker is an action-packed game. You are never truly safe while exploring the alien planet you found yourself on. Even when you’re hiding behind the walls of your base, trying to wait out the night there are thousands of enemies hungry for your skin. Spawning hordes of alien creatures is not a problem, but making them behave in a convincing way is. We would like to show you what steps the developer must take in order to make their game world feel alive.

Even if your goal is to have thousands of enemies attack the player at once, the road begins with just a couple of them. Presented above is one of the first prototypes for The Riftbreaker. There is basically nothing there and even the scale of objects is wrong, but it is enough to conduct the first experiments. Placeholder cubes symbolize the enemies and you can see they are trying to locate and reach the player. In that time we were trying to use our old creature collision detection system which we used in Zombie Driver. Each enemy had 3 ray traces in front of their collision body to avoid other entities and world parts.



HI-res: https://gfycat.com/spiritedlimpgrouper

Well, even if it seemed to work quite well, the algorithm was a bit outdated. It was simply not good enough. We wanted our creatures to be fast and furious and not clumsy. We removed all the ray traces and started using separation and cohesion forces. That gave us nicer movement, which was the first step to our future work. In that time we were playing with math and physics and were testing all our ideas. In this example, a couple of dozens of enemies are chasing the player around, while they slalom among the walls. The enemies funnel through the narrow passages and spread out again once they reach open space. Neat, everything seems to be working fine, but that is just the beginning.





HI-res: https://gfycat.com/grayvelvetybernesemountaindog

Any game would get boring pretty quickly if there was only one type of enemy unit in it. Even in Pac-Man each of the ghosts behaved in a unique way. (Seriously! https://dev.to/code2bits/pac-man-patterns--ghost-movement-strategy-pattern-1k1a) Galatea 37 is home to multiple species, and all of them are different from each other.

There is one important rule. If a system works with one thing, it must work with many things as well. We needed to test how our math equations will manage with creatures differing in size and speed. Will they stick to each other? Will they able to avoid all the world objects? So many questions needed to be answered at that time. And the only way to that is to put every idea and solution into life. Behold! We present you the ultimate Canoptrix, Arachnoid and Kafferroceros rush!





HI-res: https://gfycat.com/fabulousmediocrefoxterrier

Now is the time for the first test of combat abilities. At this point, we got a little tired of watching colorful cubes running around grey space, so we replaced orange ones with Zombie Driver Dog model. In this clip, you can see the dogs trying to attack the player, however, there are some defensive towers in the way. The attacks carried out by the monsters and the towers are symbolized by the red and green cubes you can see flying around. This is not only a test of pathfinding, but also attack priorities. We can order the enemies to attack either the player, the energy structures, the defenses or other buildings first. The player is the priority here, but if there is something in the way, it will get destroyed as well.





HI-res: https://gfycat.com/flawlesscreamygibbon

Tune in on Saturday for the next part of this story. You will learn how we found the solution to our problems and what we did to achieve the effect we aimed for. Until then, you’re all welcome to speculate on it on our Discord - www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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Since X-Morph: Defense we have done a lot of work to add multiple new features to our game engine, The Schmetterling. In fact, the toolset has changed so much we decided to dub it The Schmetterling 2.0. New rendering, shading and lighting systems allow us to make the world of The Riftbreaker feel much more alive than anything you’ve seen us do in the past.

You can see a fine example of this in the video above. A plants look can change based on multiple outside factors - the time of day, being touched by something or based on weather conditions. We control these features using small script components called “affectors”. As the name implies they affect a certain parameter based on the input that they receive. In the instance of a fluorescent plant we affect the plant’s shader’s glow parameter based on player proximity. We can set that condition to be essentially anything, so sky is the limit in this case.

What that means is we can make plants react to Mr. Riggs and the animals by hiding underground, illuminating, extending spikes, or exploding altogether. The best part is that we can accomplish this with high efficiency, so we can modify entire fields of grass not just a single object on the scene, and we can do that with relatively little effort.

What other interesting features of Galatea’s plant life would you like us to modify? Or maybe we should try this trick on some animals? Why don’t you join our Discord server! We discuss the ins and outs of the game all the time and love your input! Simply follow this link: www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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In The Riftbreaker, your task is to explore an alien planet in the far reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy. That means you will most likely not encounter life forms commonly found on Earth. Even though there are many similarities between Galatea 37 and our homeworld (which is why this planet has been chosen as a suitable place to colonize), evolution has taken a different path there.

That goes not only for animals, but the plants as well. They come in many shapes and sizes that you wouldn’t expect them to. Ranging from enormous trees with crystalline structures glowing on top of them, to weird, bubbly growths appearing on rocks and cliffs. Each biome you explore will reveal new kinds of plants, and while some of them might look familiar, they are nothing close to what you find on Earth.

Ashley will be able to collect samples of vegetation along the way. Doing research on those can provide a lot of knowledge about this new world. Who knows, perhaps there will be some useful substances to be found there as well? Your technology can benefit immensely from observing the nature and copying it, so only time will tell.

The flora of Galatea 37 also changes based on the time of day and environmental conditions. At night some plants start glowing bright with beautiful colours, others change shape. We’re pretty sure we saw some of them following Ashley’s’ movement. We hope they’re not aggressive...

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The players operate Mr. Riggs’ movement in classic twin-stick fashion. If you use a gamepad, the left and right stick will control walking in a given direction and turning the body, respectively. If you don’t use a gamepad, keyboard moves the character and the mouse aims. There are no artificial constraints to your movements, and you can run around pretty much anywhere you like. Moving in combat, however, is quite tricky. That is why we give you a tool to help get around more quickly and to further increase your freedom.

The Mecha-Suit is able to dash in any direction almost instantly. It is considered as a reusable skill, meaning the number of uses is unlimited, but there is a short cooldown for this ability. The dash can either help you get to a group of enemies quickly so that you can dispose of them with your melee weapons, or jump away to safety. Additionally, you can utilize your melee attacks in conjunction with the dash. Some of the smaller creatures will not be able to withstand such a devastating attack.

Some players do not like it when the controls are being taken away from them, even if it’s for the duration of a special move. In order to meet their expectations, you are still able to control Mr. Riggs to a slightly limited extent during the dash. If you carry out a melee attack during flight, you can not only slice and dice through your enemies, but also change your direction. This way you can still find your way around the battlefield, even in the toughest scenarios.

The main mode of getting around the map and your base quickly are the rift jumps, but sometimes the danger will come from an unexpected side. A quick set of dashes will help you get there and get the situation under control. It is another tool in Mr. Riggs’ arsenal that we expect should come in handy more often than you think. We can’t wait to let you try it out. Oh, and you can also see an early version of our loot system in action on the video. It’s still work in progress, so let’s just pretend it’s not there ;)

Until the next time,
EXOR Studios

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