All resources are randomized. You could find sludge, mud or water in the same spot on different playthroughs!

Hi!

Last time we told you how our algorithm that creates a random map from the pieces we created beforehand. However, the map is not the only element that undergoes randomization at the start of a run. Another thing that is important to make you feel like you are exploring the unknown are the resources you’re able to find in the wild. Today we’re going to tell you what goes into that and what problems we have to overcome in order to make the mechanic fun and challenging at the same time.


Looking for resource deposits will often mean fighting numerous alien creatures.

When we create the map pieces (as a reminder, we call them tiles) we have the possibility of adding resource spawn points to them. They are areas where the resources of any kind may spawn. Mind you, we do not tell the game that it should spawn any given type of resource there, or even if it should spawn any deposit at all. It is just an indicator of the place where the algorithm can place carbonium, iron, sludge, mud or any other type of resource that the player can use.


You can always find something useful in the wild. Both creatures and inanimate objects drop loot when destroyed.

The resource system is free to distribute the minerals and liquids between the spawn points, but we had to introduce some rules. All resource types are given minimum and maximum values. The algorithm has to distribute them in such an amount that it meets the lower limit but does not exceed the upper one. The limits are in place because we do not want the player to be given a map without any carbonium, for example. There are also rules on how big a single deposit can be so that the machine doesn’t put the whole map’s worth of iron all in one deposit.


There are only a few basic resources you have to keep track of, but there's plenty more for you to explore later in the game.

That brings us to the point of limiting randomness with arbitrary rules. Random distribution is fun, but only up to a certain point. If the player is not able to locate a proper spot to set up a base within a reasonable amount of time, the fun turns into frustration. We do not want that, so the player is guaranteed to find necessary resources within a certain radius of their spawn point. There is no guarantee that the player will go in the right direction to find it, but the solution works most of the time. We will probably continue tweaking it until the release (and after), to minimize the risk of having no resources to start building the base.


Build an impenetrable base and show those creatures who's boss.

We hope that the randomized elements in The Riftbreaker will lead to a fresh experience every time you launch a new survival run. If you join our Discord, you might get the chance to test these features with us - www.discord.gg/exorstudios

See you on Discord and on the streams! (Tue & Thu, 3 PM CET)

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

Resources? Check. Sufficient space? Check. Angry aliens? Check! We're setting up camp here!

Hello everyone!

We often emphasize that gameplay in The Riftbreaker is randomized. No two playthroughs are ever the same thanks to our intelligent systems that mix everything up before the player is set loose on the map. This week we will try to explain to you how the maps are generated and what changes between them on a run-to-run basis.


Building scenery pieces is very important - it creates memorable places like this one.

The survival maps in The Riftbreaker consist of several tiles. Tiles are smaller, square pieces of terrain prepared by us. The random algorithm chooses several tiles from a biome set - each biome has its own collection to choose from and biomes do not mix with each other. The algorithm then creates a map of the desired size e.g. 5 tiles wide and 5 tiles high, giving you the play area of 25 tiles (this is the size of current survival mode maps, we plan to expand the maps to larger sizes in the future). The tiles can also be rotated - the system knows which sides fit together and which ones don’t. These possibilities already give you a lot of combinations.


Sometimes you have to build your base in the middle of a space swamp...

In the current state, you can often recognize the patterns of certain tiles, lessening the impression of the world being truly autogenerated. We have a couple of remedies for that. First of all, we can create entirely new tiles and add them to the mix, making each one less probable to be chosen by the system. The second solution is to add some variance within the tiles themselves. Our programmers are currently working on a system to do exactly that, but in order not to spoil the surprise, that’s all we have to say for now.


The campaign mode will require you to jump to different locations, and all of them are going to be randomized as well.

An exciting thing about map randomization is the fact that each map has its own ‘seed’ - a set of characters that holds the encoded information about the specifics of the map. It gives us the option to enable seed sharing. You could share the exact scenario you’ve just played with your friends. Or, we could set up daily challenges so that you can compete with other players on leaderboards! There are a lot of possibilities that we can explore here.


A sneak peek into the new biome we're working on - the desert.

That’s it for today, we hope that this short piece will give you some insight about the randomization in The Riftbreaker. The next one we publish will tackle the idea of randomized resources, so stay tuned!

Join our Discord server - www.discord.gg/exorstudios - and see you on the stream! (Tue & Thu, 3 PM CET)

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

Hello everyone!

We never expected this day would ever come. Today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of the first standalone EXOR Studios title, Zombie Driver.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-wNhKdML38

We left our jobs and founded EXOR in 2007 to realize our dream of making games on our own, independently. Even though the early months were quite rocky we kept going and bet everything on Zombie Driver. Originally released on the 4th of December 2009, it greatly surpassed our expectations. It grew a loyal fanbase, secured our future as a game development studio and paved the way for our future projects.



Zombie Driver received a healthy dose of DLCs, updates, and reeditions, including the HD version in 2012 and the Immortal Edition this year. Over its lifetime the game:

• sold almost 1.000.000 copies worldwide.
  
• was released in physical form in 58 countries.
  
• was ported to many platforms - PC, WinRT, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Playstation 3, Nintendo Switch, Nvidia Shield, Ouya.
  
• made EXOR Studios recognizable and made us irreplaceable friends all over the world.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Zombie Driver, for the next 24 hours the game is free on Steam. You can add it to your library free of charge. X-Morph: Defense is getting a 75% discount, too. We are also very close to publishing Zombie Driver on the Playstation 4, so keep an eye out for that.



We hope you had or will have as much fun playing Zombie Driver as we had making it. In the meantime, we are continuing our work on the next project, The Riftbreaker. It is a completely different game - a combination of base-building, survival and hack’n’slash, but the engine it uses evolved from what we used in Zombie Driver. You can’t stop the undead!



Thank you for all these years of support! We hope that 10 years from now we will have even more reasons to celebrate with you!

EXOR Studios

Hi everyone!

The end of the year draws near. That means Game of the Year contests pop up right, left and center! We are taking part in one and would love to ask you for your help in securing a spot in it!

Vote for The Riftbreaker in the 2019 Indie of the Year Awards



IndieDB has a special place in our hearts since the days of Zombie Driver. It served as a hub for all our media activities before the rise of social media. It would mean a lot to us if you decided to give The Riftbreaker your vote in this competition.

Thank you!

The tech tree in The Riftbreaker is expanding all the time. We make adjustments to existing technologies, change the research patterns and add completely new items to the list. Today we are going to continue showing off the newest additions to Ashley’s tech arsenal in the energy department. The two we are about to show you are very different from each other and provide some exciting new ways to utilize what the planet offers you.



The first one is the Carbonium Power Plant. It can only be placed directly on a Carbonium deposit. Thanks to its massive grinder it easily breaks up carbonium ore into usable chunks and uses them as a fuel source. It might seem wasteful because Carbonium is necessary to construct almost all buildings in a Riftbreaker’s base. However, you need to remember that the largest part of the early base setup is centered around establishing a power grid that can later sustain the other buildings. You can save the Carbonium you’d otherwise use to build Solar Panels and Wind Turbines and use it as fuel. However, the Carbonium field will eventually run dry. You have to make a choice - short-term gain or sustainability.



The other building we would like to show you today is the Geothermal Power Plant. It utilizes the natural processes happening under the surface of the planet. Just like on Earth, there are underground rivers and lakes on Galatea 37. In some spots, the heat emanating from within the planet raises the water temperature so much that it starts boiling and turns to steam, increasing pressure. If the pressure breaks a certain threshold, the surface will rupture and a steam vent will appear. The Geothermal Power Plant is built directly on steam vents and uses hot steam to power the turbine within the plant, generating electricity. It is an eco-friendly solution but requires you to find a steam vent first.

We hope that we will be able to show you some of these buildings in action soon. Join our streams every Tuesday (Mixer) and Thursday (Twitch) to catch some Riftbreaker action. We have also shared the pre-alpha build with select streamers - they usually share info about their streams 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

Being a Riftbreaker has its benefits, but there are also problems one must face every day. The base is a very complex system, all elements of which rely on each other. All buildings have their energy needs. Without sufficient resources, you won’t be able to build power plants. Without power plants, production will stop and defense will be hindered. It is very important to strike a balance between resource production and consumption. We believe that the buildings that we want to show you today and later this week will help with that. The buildings we are talking about are two similar, but brand-new power plants - both are using biomass as their fuel.



While traversing the rich world of Galatea 37, Ashley will collect countless pieces of plant and animal biomass. They can be utilized for the production of ammunition and equipment, but usually, you end up with a pile of both rotting in your inventory. With the new Plant Biomass Power Plant (it burns dead leaves if you’re wondering) and Animal Biomass Power Plant, you have a new way of using those resources. The former is going to be available right from the start, giving you the option to boost your power production when you need it most. The latter will require research, but the fuel for it will keep on coming as the game progresses.

While the new power plants may not be the most exciting buildings at first glance, we are sure they will change the way the game is played. Check out our streams to find out how much!

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

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.

We hope you enjoyed our little articles. If you did, join us on 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

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

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

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.

See you on the stream! (Tue & Thu, 3 PM CET)

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

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!

Tuesdays - 3 PM CET - www.mixer.com/exor_studios
Thursday - 3 PM CET - www.twitch.tv/exorstudios

Other social media:
www.facebook.com/exorstudios
www.twitter.com/exorstudios
www.discord.gg/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios