The Riftbreaker is an isometric strategy game combined with elements of survival, exploration, and hack’n’slash. Powered by our own technology, The Schmetterling Engine 2.0, The Riftbreaker allows us to make use of the newest available developments in the gaming world, one of which is real-time raytracing. In this article, we will describe our implementation of raytracing in the game, as well as explain what kind of problems we faced and how we solved them.


Dynamically changing time of day, a variety of weather effects and multiple biomes to be explored make real-time raytracing a great choice for a game like The Riftbreaker.

The Riftbreaker’s world is fully dynamic and destructible. Practically all of the objects that are present in the environment can be modified by the player. Vegetation can be bent, burnt, and dissolved. Thousands of creatures can swarm the player and completely fill up the screen. This kind of gameplay premise calls for a specialized approach to rendering fully dynamic shadows.

Before we added raytracing features to The Schmetterling 2.0 engine we utilized real-time shadow mapping (no precomputed shadow maps) for generating shadows. This solution was the most optimal for us because of our fully dynamic scene geometry. We could not make use of any precomputed lightmaps, as they would not match the geometry of the scene. Therefore, before real-time raytracing was possible, dynamic shadow mapping was our only real choice. While shadow mapping has been a widely utilized method in the entire industry, it has a range of limitations. 


A short fragment of a boss fight. The boss creature has a shadow casting point light attached, adding a lot of visual fidelity to the scene.

The latest generations of GPUs are powerful enough to carry out raytracing calculations in real-time. The new hardware allowed us to finally introduce real-time raytraced shadows which provide superior results when compared to traditional shadow mapping techniques. 

The basic principle of raytracing shadows is that instead of looking at the scene from the point of view of the light source and looking for all the possible shadow casters, as it is done in shadow mapping, we could simply shoot rays at the light source. If the ray hits an obstacle, it means it is not directly lit. If the ray reaches the light source - there is no shadow to be added. In principle, it is a much simpler algorithm that produces great results and offers solutions to typical shadow-mapping problems. However, it is very demanding when it comes to GPU performance.


Each element of the dynamic scene geometry has the potential to cast a shadow. Our job was to make sure it’s all as accurate as possible while maintaining performance.

Adding a completely new rendering technique to a proprietary game engine is not an easy task. In our case, it has been made possible thanks to our cooperation with AMD. They have provided us with their own GPUOpen RT Shadows library. It contained the raycasting solution, along with a denoiser that allows us to clean up the results of a raytracing pass. However, before we could use the library, we had to develop a DirectX 12 renderer for our engine. The reason for that is the DirectX Raytracing API (also known as DXR), introduced with the DirectX 12 Ultimate standard. It is a new API that allows us to make use of new shaders and utilize the hardware raytracing capabilities of modern GPUs. 


The scale of encounters in The Riftbreaker range from small skirmishes to drawn-out battles against enemy hordes. Coming up with the right optimizations was key.

Another benefit of joining our forces with AMD is the open-source nature of their solutions. This enables us to introduce technologies that will be compatible with the latest gaming platforms on the market, including the next-generation consoles. It is also worth mentioning that platform compatibility has also influenced our choice of the rendering API. The two options we had to consider were Vulkan and DirectX 12. While Vulkan does offer raytracing, the API is not available on Xbox or PlayStation, also at the time of writing this article, still only Nvidia hardware supports it on the PC. By going with DirectX 12 we received native raytracing support on Xbox and Windows PC and we’re able to utilize hardware from all manufacturers.


As the weather conditions change, so does the shadow penumbra. In this example you can see the shadows becoming softer during rain and sharpening as the sunlight intensifies.

The benefits of implementing raytraced shadows can differ based on the implementation scenario. In The Riftbreaker’s case, the most important features include:
- “infinite” shadow resolution  - the quality of the rendered shadow doesn’t depend on the distance of an object from the camera like in traditional shadow mapping. Each pixel on the screen has individually computed shadowing, which results in much more precise and much more stable shadows without flickering artifacts.
- variable shadow penumbra - Raytraced shadows allow us to dynamically simulate situations like the transition from a clouded sky during rain to a sharply lit noon.
- relatively lower cost of calculating additional shadow casting lights - In our current raytraced shadows implementation we can calculate up to 4 shadow casting lights at the same time without a big performance hit. The cost of adding additional shadow casting lights in traditional shadow mapping is relatively much higher.


We presented the technological benefits of our cooperation with AMD in this recent The Riftbreaker RDNA 2 features presentation.

All of these benefits come at a significant performance cost. Even while using the latest GPUs that support hardware raytracing acceleration, the FPS values with all raytracing effects enabled can be halved when comparing the same scene without raytracing.

Adding raytraced shadows to a scene in The Riftbreaker is a complex process that results in a very detailed map of lit and unlit pixels. During the first raytracing pass, we need to reconstruct the world space positions of all pixels on the visible screen area and cast rays from those pixels towards all the light sources that affect them. We obtain that world space position from the depth buffer. If the ray reaches the light source, it means the surface is lit directly. If the ray is obstructed along the way we are dealing with a shaded surface. Additionally, in order to optimize the process, we discard all raycasts from surfaces with normal maps facing the direction opposite to the light source. The next pass determines the type of shader that is going to be applied at the intersection of the ray with the surface. The DXR API handles that, using a proper shader based on the result of a raytrace and checking it against our shader table.


An example of a typical gameplay scene with all raytraced effects enabled - soft shadows and ambient occlusion.

The Radeon RX 6000 Series cards that we used to develop our raytracing implementation are incredibly powerful, capable of casting millions of rays per second. However, in order to achieve an exact representation of what light would behave like in the real world, you need even more information. In the case of offline rendering, it usually means casting thousands of rays in all directions per each pixel. No present-day hardware is capable of carrying out these calculations in real-time, let alone doing it 60 times a second. It means we have to somehow create an accurate shadow map using incomplete data.


This is the resulting image of the raytracing pass before denoising. Note the fuzzy shadows, as well as the edges of sharp objects - nothing is really clear here.

Not having accurate data is problematic and could result in the degradation of the visual quality of a scene. While we would have most of the information necessary to render the objects and apply their properties, details such as contours, edges, and soft shadows would become blurry and blend into each other. The limited amount of rays that we can cast per frame results in a noisy shadow image. This is where the other GPU Open library comes into play - the AMD FidelityFX Denoiser. Denoising is a complex process made possible by extensive use of temporal techniques that analyze past frames and combine them into a new frame. The AMD denoiser allows us to quickly determine the average values of the available data and determine what kind of properties we should apply to any given pixel, resulting in a sharp image without any visible compromises. 


Here’s the same scene after the denoising step. Everything looks much better without the need for additional rays to be cast.


The denoiser utilizes a white noise pattern animated by the means of the golden ratio in the denoising pattern. This visualisation has been provided by Alan Wolfe and it has also been featured in his blog post on noise patterns: https://blog.demofox.org/2017/10/31/animating-noise-for-integration-over-time/ 

Naturally, the implementation of raytraced shadows was not as simple as enabling a couple of ready-to-use libraries. The Riftbreaker presents its own, unique challenges that required creating specific solutions. 

The first such issue was the massive amount of dynamic objects present in our game world. The premise of The Riftbreaker is that you are a scientist exploring an exoplanet inhabited by numerous alien species of flora and fauna. The player is often attacked by hordes of alien creatures with numbers going into thousands. Each of those creatures has to cast an individual shadow, which is problematic. Coupled with a dynamic vegetation system reacting to wind, shockwaves, and bending forces applied by other entities it was a real optimization issue. 


Thousands of entities interact with each other in real-time.

The main problem was caused by the way that the top-level acceleration structure for raytracing processes data. It is a structure that stores information about entities in the scene for further use during the raycasting pass. This structure can only take in data in the form of a pre-baked bottom-level acceleration structure that contains object vertex information. It is not an issue if we are talking about rocks or buildings, however, all units with skeletal, dynamically blended animation, as well as dynamic vegetation do not fit the assumption of ‘pre-baked’ data at all.


All entities ‘bake’ their current state every frame. Since most objects are animated, we need to have the exact information about their vertex all the time. Here you can see the slight differences in rotation between the buildings - if we didn’t take those into account, the results of the raytracing pass would be inaccurate.

In order to provide the acceleration structure with all the data it needs we had to take drastic measures. Every dynamic object on the scene is individually baked into a completely new, static model that can be processed during the raytracing pass. This process needs to be repeated every frame to maintain accuracy. What adds difficulty to this task is the fact that The Riftbreaker features a dynamic weather system. Because of that, a situation where the light source is at an angle that makes an entity cast shadow into a frame without it being directly visible is entirely possible. This means that during the baking process we need to take into account not only the entities on the visible part of the screen but also from outside of it. 


The image of an entire acceleration structure prepared for just one frame of rendering.

The process of preparing the acceleration structures is very computationally heavy for the CPU and could easily bottleneck the entire renderer. The Schmetterling Engine 2.0 reduces the CPU bottleneck thanks to heavy parallelization of all of the processes that are required to prepare a scene for raytracing. By sharing the operations between the CPU and the GPU we have been able to find the computational power necessary to carry out all of these operations every frame. In the case of our intense benchmarking scenario, which includes about six thousand creatures attacking the player’s base, we managed to reduce the rendering time from 60ms to 17ms thanks to parallelizing the CPU dependent tasks (using an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X CPU and a pre-release version of the Radeon 6800XT).


A snapshot of a single frame from The Riftbreaker. All the processes necessary for raytracing are marked with colored frames, with the legend in the bottom-right. Click the picture to view the full resolution version.

Another unique challenge our engineers had to solve while implementing raytracing techniques into The Riftbreaker was also connected to the vegetation system, albeit in a slightly different way. Textures used by foliage are mostly alpha-tested and it is not uncommon for a texture in our game to have large areas that are fully transparent. That does not make a difference to a ray, though. Once a ray that we cast encounters a transparent pixel on a texture, it returns a regular ‘hit’. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the pixel from which we are raycasting should be covered by shadow because if the texel that we’ve hit is transparent, then the ray should continue tracing its path towards the light source. We make extensive use of such textures, so it was necessary for us to find a solution to this and add support for alpha-testing in our AnyHit shader.


We make heavy use of the alpha channel to introduce jagged edges and complex shapes on our vegetation textures. Unfortunately, that introduced problems with raytracing hit recognition. 

Our approach was to essentially reintroduce the solution used in traditional rendering techniques. Upon hitting a surface, we retrieve the barycentric coordinates of a triangle at the point of intersection. These coordinates are not sufficient to determine which pixel of the texture was hit, but only the position of the intersection point within a triangle. However, at this point, we can determine which vertices we should take into consideration. Every vertex of a triangle has a set of UVW coordinates that were assigned to it by the graphics designer during the texturing process. By knowing which triangle we hit, what part of the texture should be covering it, and knowing the intersection coordinates within that triangle we can now carry out an alpha test.


Polygons lying underneath the vegetation textures are not transparent to rays. We had to give our rays a method to check if they hit the spot on the texture that was actually opaque.

Before all of the above happens, however, we need to provide our acceleration structure with information about textures and their positions. This is why we have prepared a shader table which is a data bank for the GPU. It lists the textures assigned to scene instances, as well as the values assigned to them in the index and vertex buffers. Thanks to the shader table we can quickly retrieve all the data about the model and texture that are necessary to carry out the next steps of the shading operation. It’s quite an interesting process.


Since The Riftbreaker is set on an uninhabited, alien world, there is a lot of wildlife to be seen (and alpha-tested).

If the result of this operation is ‘opaque’ we apply the shading data and the process is over for this particular ray. In the case of non-opaque hits, we carry out an alpha test. As mentioned before, when the ray intersects with the surface we can get the barycentric coordinates of the point in a triangle that it collided with. All we have is a location within a triangle that was hit. Next, we turn to the index buffer to let us know the indices of the vertices of the said triangle. From that, we can extract the UVW coordinates. With the data provided by the index buffer, we can now dive into the vertex buffer for the data on where these vertices fall on the texture. Only after all these steps do we get a result - a hit with an opaque or transparent surface. If the alpha value at the point of the intersection is lower than the transparency threshold, the ray continues traversing the scene.


All the effort finally pays off when we get an accurate result every frame. Click the image for a full-res version.

What we learned in this process is that alpha-tested materials are much more computationally expensive for raytraced shadows than for traditional shadow mapping and they are best avoided if possible. In our jungle scenario, the dispatch ray cost of a ray that hits an alpha-tested object is about 20% higher than, that of a ray that hits an opaque object.  We optimize our content by limiting the surface area of all transparent objects to reduce the number of ray hits on transparent surfaces. The Riftbreaker’s camera view is isometric, so the number of polygons visible at once is naturally limited and we can easily increase the polycount of most objects without affecting GPU performance. In some cases, it is actually more efficient for us to increase the polycount of an object if we can transform its material from alpha-tested to a fully opaque one. 

We feel that The Riftbreaker improved a lot thanks to the implementation of the techniques mentioned above. The world presented in the game is much more believable now, increasing player immersion. The details we add through raytracing are not always big, but they definitely improve the experience. Seeing a comet flying across the sky that shines a shadow-casting light on the dynamic objects on the ground is a great sight. On the other hand, cloudy days greet the player with soft shadows and a more toned-down color palette. We are confident that The Riftbreaker earned its place among all the productions intended for the next generation of gaming hardware.


The Riftbreaker, coming to PC and consoles in 2021.

In hindsight, implementing raytracing techniques into The Schmetterling Engine 2.0 was an incredibly valuable lesson for us. Working alongside talented engineers from AMD allowed us to share, compare, and verify our findings, as well as learn much about the cutting-edge rendering techniques and solutions. We believe that The Riftbreaker will greatly benefit from the addition of raytracing shadows, as well as other DirectX 12 techniques. We encourage you to come back in the coming weeks, as we are going to describe the process of implementing Raytraced Ambient Occlusion in The Riftbreaker.

P.S. You can try out all of this cool new tech on December 8th - we're updating our Prologue with all the sweet DirectX 12 features!

Hi there!

Galatea 37 is an entirely unknown planet when Ashley arrives there for her mission. Some rudimentary long-range scans were done before the start of the project, but they did not offer a lot of information on the creatures and plants. You are going to go in essentially blind, but it’s not entirely bad - it leaves you with a lot of things to research and explore. You’re going to need some special facilities to conduct your experiments and catalog your discoveries, and that’s where the Laboratory comes into play.


The Laboratory building in its full glory.

The Laboratory is one of the most important buildings in The Riftbreaker base. Even though it does not directly contribute to resource or equipment production or defending your base, it provides you with the means to improve your technology and adapt it to the conditions on the planet. If you watched some of our streams or gameplay videos you might have seen little pickups dropping from enemies, shaped like a DNA helix. These are called specimens. Collecting and studying these samples will lead to breakthroughs that will grant you a better understanding of Galatea 37 and the science behind it.


Sometimes the samples of alien DNA will come on their own right to your doorstep!

Obtaining the samples will be a challenge in its own right. You will have plenty of opportunities to harvest them from the most common plants and animals. It’s actually very likely you will have the samples you need without going out of your way to get them. It all changes when the rarest species become the main point of your research. In that case, you will need to prepare a plan on how to obtain the necessary specimens. There will be several ways to get your chances of getting one higher, either by peaceful or hostile ways.


You need to supply The Laboratory with fresh water. You can either find a pond or you can start filtering some other liquids using the Water Filtering Plant.

All the information that you collect will fill out the cards of your Bestiary. We haven’t decided on an official name for it just yet, but it will be just like an encyclopedia, featuring important pieces of information about each species that you decide to research. It will allow you to quickly learn what kind of loot drops can be expected from each and every one of them. Getting more specimens for each species will allow you to understand each species’ strengths and weaknesses and improve your chances in close encounters. Who knows, you might even learn some secrets!


Here, for example, we are using a single pool of sludge to produce Flammable Gas for the Gas Power Plant, as well as water for the Laboratory.

The Laboratory will also allow you to research protective equipment and technologies to shield you from the dangers of Galatea 37, such as acid rain or radiation. In order to reap these benefits, you should better prepare a lot of resources to power your Laboratory, including lots of rare minerals, electricity, and water. Finding a steady source of fresh water won’t be easy, and making sure it is not interrupted will be crucial to the progress of your research… And the progress of your campaign, of course!

The laboratory is just one of the more advanced and specialized buildings you will be able to utilize in the main campaign of The Riftbreaker. If you’d like to learn more about our plans for this game mode, visit our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios and chat with us! You can also talk to us live during our streams - they take place every Tuesday and Thursday at 3PM CET at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios. See you there!

Hello there!

Let’s step away from the craziness of big reveals, big changelogs and prolonged radio silence of the past month. Today we are back with a small, regular update, that you can now expect to see every week. Today we’re going to meet a new creature that inhabits the world of Galatea 37. However, this one does not try to eat us on sight, which is a nice change after all the nasties that we showed you until now. Let’s take a look at the Vesaurus.



The Vesaurus is the first aerial unit that we implemented in The Riftbreaker. It is a neutral creature that doesn’t mind the presence of Ashley and Mr. Riggs. Seeing it for the first time, you could easily make the mistake of thinking it is one of the birds that can be found on Earth. Their bodies are exactly the shape you would expect from a flying creature of this size. Their wingspan can be up to a couple of meters and they are decorated with beautiful, colored feathers. While there are certain similarities, this colorful creature is not just an oversized pigeon or a mutated parrot.



Like many creatures found on Galatea 37, the Vesaurus shows an affinity for mineral formations. They will often hover around the crystal formations, so often seen around the surface of the planet, and gather nutrients. In that regard, they are similar to hummingbirds but somehow the Vesauruses are able to remain airborne and stationary with only a couple of flaps of their massive wings, revealing massive differences in their body composition compared to their Earthly counterparts.

Our flying friends are yet another kind of neutral, ambient creatures that inhabit the world of Galatea 37. They make the world much more busy and full of life. Over time you will get used to their presence. In fact, the sight of Vesaurus gliding gracefully across the sky will become so familiar to you that you will start feeling uneasy when you haven’t seen one for a while, and for a good reason.



The Vesaurus are not predators. They do not have any defensive mechanisms, apart from the ability to fly, so you will never see them fighting with other species. You also won’t encounter them during attack waves. Much like birds before the storm, the Vesaurus sense the vibrations of the ground caused by the stampede of an alien horde, prompting them to hide among trees or in rock formations. Since only such places offer protection to them, you won’t encounter these creatures in areas lacking trees or high boulders.



Implementing the first flying creature into the game required the addition of many functions to our navigation system, but now that the groundwork is there, we have the opportunity to add more airborne units into the game. Perhaps next time they will be more hostile? Or maybe they are going to explode on sight, EXOR style? Only time will tell. In the meantime join www.discord.gg/exorstudios to share your ideas and to keep an eye on our daily changelog - it holds the keys to many secrets.

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It’s been a long time, but we are super happy to announce that the long-awaited update to the Alpha version of The Riftbreaker has finally arrived! This is a huge update, that brings massive changes to gameplay, graphics, performance optimizations and also a lot of small quality-of-life fixes. This is going to be a long post, so strap yourselves in and let’s do this!



The biggest and the most obvious change should be the addition of the new DirectX 12 renderer and the Ray-Tracing graphical options. All the sweet, soft shadows, precise ambient occlusion and variable rate shading are now at your fingertips. If you own a ray-tracing capable GPU, give these options a shot and let us know what you think. We’re also waiting for cool screenshots and videos!



When it comes to gameplay, a lot has been done over the course of the past couple of months. All the work we are doing to make the campaign happen has a major influence over the survival gameplay as well. New weapons and technologies have been added - you can wreak havoc with gravity grenades, set traps with cryogenic mines and use a whole new group of movement skills. These will enable a whole lot of new gameplay strategies.



Performance-wise, you should expect the game to run smoother. We’ve done a lot in terms of improving both CPU and GPU performance. We have also optimized our internal structures and cleaned up tons of unused legacy files. That improves both the loading times and in-game performance. While it’s still not final quality, you should notice a difference. We also have a new set of benchmarks to help you test your settings with a much more presentable results screen.



We have also made thousands of small changes to the engine that should improve your overall experience when it comes to stability and UI. One of the most requested features arrives with this patch, too - click-and-drag building for walls, energy connectors, and pipes. We hope you will find the changes handy. Don’t hesitate to give us more feedback, though - there are always things we can improve.



Because of the size and significance of the patch, the Alpha 4 Update will roll out first to the Experimental branch for The Riftbreaker Alpha testers. After we fix the initial wave of bugs and confirm stability, we will roll this update to the main branch, as well as the Prologue. If you’d like to join the Alpha testers, become an active member of our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios and chat with us during streams at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios. Letting us know what you think and brainstorming with us is the best way to guarantee your Alpha access. In fact, we have just sent out a new wave of access codes, so check your Discord DMs!

• DX12 is now the default render system. If your PC does not support DX12, the game will automatically detect it and fall back to the DX11 renderer.
  
• Added new graphics options: Ray-Traced Soft Shadows, Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion, FidelityFX Variable Shading. Each of these will get its own, in-depth article in the coming weeks. These options are available only on DirectX 12 and when using a Ray-Tracing capable GPU (regardless of the manufacturer).
  
• Shadow penumbra set in all time of day events and biomes.
  
• A dedicated benchmark for the GPU has been added, now with results readable by humans.
  
• Several new items and technologies added: Grenade, Gravity Grenade, Grenade Launcher, additional melee weapons (still WIP).
  
• We added support for changing Mr. Riggs' appearance. Right now, you can choose from a couple of predefined skins. We will make more in the future, we also count on your creativity and hope you'll get painting soon!
  
• We changed the creature spawning system for groups of creatures scattered around the world. Instead of determining which creature type should spawn in a given place, we only place a 'random creature spawn colume'. The game will decide what kind of creatures will spawn there in the process of map randomization. apart from the basic types, alphas and ultras can appear, too!
  
• We added support for several types of new creatures, mainly for campaign purposes.
  
• Localizations were added to all research items. If a string in a given language is missing, it will default to English.
  
• We added decorations to give you some additional options to improve your base aesthetics. However, the sheer number of the statues, flags, lights and potted plants we prepared proved our build menu to be insufficient. They will remain locked until we redesign the menu, but if you are really into it, we're sure you can unlock them quite easily.
  
• We redesigned our TeamComponent quite extensively. Before the redesign, entities belonged to one of the three categories - player, enemy, or neutral. Now, each entity type has its own team, allowing us to craft interactions between species. For example, Canoptrix might chase after Jurvines, but will not try to hunt down a Gnerot.
  
• We added a stagger state for the player. Mr. Riggs will become staggered if it uses a melee attack on an entity that is resistant to physical damage. This is still very much work in progress, animations and effects are far from final.
  
• Planetary Scanner screen was changed to feature an actual 3D model of Galatea 37. It also displays your actual geographical position on the surface of the planet and indicates where the bases in other biomes are located. This screen will be your mission hub.
  
• A new swarm system was developed to accommodate large numbers of very small creatures, for example drones spawned by Baxmoth. The system controls the swarm behavior and will ruin your day many times.
  
• New damage types were added, along with resistances. If an entity is immune to a given type of damage, you will see a highlight and a 'resisted' popup.
  
• New in-game event: Investigate the strange plant. A root of an unkown plant species will spawn in a random place on the map. The plant will spread uncontrollably until the player destroys the root. The growth deals damage to the player and blocks the building ability. Dialog and effects are still missing for this event.
  
• We added tooltips! Hovering the mouse cursor over an icon or any other menu item will now open a popup box with a description of the item.
  
• Several new environmental threats have been added: Sunburn, Radiation, Heat. Each of those has its own damage type and will accompany a different natural disaster.
  
• Invisibility cloaks for everyone! The Riftbreaker now features invisible enemies and Mr. Riggs can equip a masking device. Perhaps we could hide our bases, too? Pretty please?
  
• We have completely reworked all the weapon models. Our goal was to make them immediately recognizable, without the need to look at the inventory screen or the HUD. The new models come with varying skins for each rarity level. They're also animated!
  
• Oh, we also changed models for other equipment pieces - the Detector and mines of all flavors.
  
• The game will now inform you that you have discovered a new species of alien life by displaying a pop-up. Information about that species will be added to the Bestiary. This feature is meant only for the campaign mode and will probably not be present in survival mode.
  
• Missions now start with a fade from black. It gives a nice cinematic feeling (and hides the Matrix from you).
  
• We have tweaked effect attachment points for weapons, so that the muzzle flash actually comes from the muzzle.
  
• The settings menu screen has been slightly reworked to include a description box. Highlighting any option in the menu will display a short message describing what is affected by the highlighted option. This should help you choose the perfect settings for your setup.
  
• There's much more wildlife in the prologue mission now, including birds!
  
• Our super-cute drones are now even more cute, because they are animated!
  
• New options have been added to the settings screen, as well as the Launcher.
  
• Extended HQ upgrade level 1 attack timeout. Take a breath.
  
• All weapons now have an icon based on the actual physical model you can see in the game.
  
• CrashReporter: include configuration + version number in titlebar. Sometimes you send us screenshots of the crash reports. This will help us identify the version of the game you have problems with.
  
• Loot items are now pushed away from the dying creatures with more force.
  
• Teleporting is now blocked during minimap Interference. No escape from the ion storm.
  
• Added Benchmark Results Screen and localization for it. They're human readable now.
  
• Last but not the least important - ENERGY CONNECTORS AND WALLS ARE NOW BUILDABLE THROUGH CLICKING NAD DRAGGING. Praise Starbugs!

• The Prologue map has been changed a bit, but since the affected area was a secret, we won't tell you what we changed.
  
• Mixer integration removed from the Stream Integration options. Sweet dreams.
  
• All floors have to be researched now. The models have been changed not to display their sides - they produced a small but nasty visual effect.
  
• New mech model and textures - Mr. Riggs is richer in polygons and more hi-tech now.
  
• New Mech Destruction System. There is no need for creating destruction level maps for each skin - they will be automatically generated.
  
• Mods are now more robust and should no longer disappear from your weapons and towers.
  
• Decreased environmental damage in magma and desert biomes.
  
• Our creatures now use a completely new state machine, designed to be faster and much easier to use.
  
• If you minimize the game while loading, the icon on the Windows Taskbar will now flash once the loading is completed.
  
• The Time Manipulation skill is now much more useful - the player retains their speed, while the rest of the world is slowed down.
  
• Updated fonts - we added some missing symbols and modified illegible letters.
  
• We deleted the old effects from X-Morph: Defense. They were our blueprints for a long time, but we don't need them anymore. This saves up a bit of disk space.
  
• HQ on higher levels does not consume power. It was a trap that turned many promising bases into piles of ash.
  
• Wind turbines give more energy - changed from 6/s to 8/s.
  
• Fixed the wrong value in Health Regeneration module level 1. It now restores 1hp/s.
  
• Cultivated plants give more biomass to make the biomass cycle more cost-effective.
  
• More resources from harvesting crystals with a crystal collector.
  
• Piles of loot now scale according to the amount of resources they contain.
  
• New Resource Comet effect.
  
• Dust storm weather prototype added.
  
• All shielding research moved to laboratory. (download -> research)
  
• Palladium and titanium is not dropped from props. these rare resources must be discovered and mined first.
  
• Tweaked drop rates for loot from all props. Smaller props give less loot, while bigger ones drop quite a bit more.
  
• Changed desert base textures - removed quick sand from the base set and added new set 3 with quicksand
  
• NodeCullerDesc deleted from all small props and some medium props. You can now move freely through small props.
  
• Shielding and floor research are blocked at start.
  
• Shorter download in some categories.
  
• Big cleanup in effects for enemies - Canoptrix, Arachnoid, and Hammeroceros. We removed redundant entries and optimized many little things.
  
• Rebalanced enemy spawning difficulty ranges and species.
  
• Added LightSize to LightDesc.
  
• Added render system to hud revision/TC info.
  
• RenderingState: add `r_max_fps` - thanks to this variable you can now limit the maximum number of frames per second without turning on v-sync. No more whining condensers!
  
• Don't fret, people, Mr. Riggs can now equip a special item that will turn him invisible, too! You'll now be able to sneak up on Arachnoids and watch them in their natural habitat! Invisibility breaks on attack, or taking damage, though, so beware.
  
• Apart from the invisibility tech we've also added some new movement skills: a short-range teleport, a dodge roll and barbarian jump! You can equip those instead of the good, old, regular dash.
  
• The new movement skills can be upgraded to use elemental damage. Firewall dash? Got it. Toxic fume barbarian jump? Got that one, too.
  
• Decals, such as blood splats or scorch marks disappear gradually instead of just disappearing at an instant.
  
• The mouse cursor will now react to changes in the mouse sensitivity setting immediately.

Other things that we're working on for the campaign, but can't be seen in the Alpha build

• There is a lot of new units that we're working on! New models, animations and behavior logic is being added as we speak.
  
• One of the new units is Kermon, for example. You haven't seen it yet and you can't see it, because it's invisible most of the time. It's a nasty one.
  
• Gnerot's weird cousin, Krocoon, is also mostly done. We'll show it to you later. Can't burn all the coolest stuff in one changelog.
  
• Other creatures in progress are: Stregaros, Bomogan, Granan, Morirot, Lesigian, Necrodon, Nurglax and Shegret. You've seen some of them, most are still a secret, but you will hate them all by the time we're done.
  
• A Bestiary has been added. It's a separate menu screen that will act as an encyclopedia on all the species you discover. The more creatures you 'sample', the more knowledge you'll uncover!

• Some missing lights were added to buildings.
  
• All props now have the correct materials assigned to them and should behave as expected when destroyed.
  
• Fixed crash in OnUnequipItemRequest.
  
• Fix crash in building base while building floors.
  
• Fix crashes from crash raporter.
  
• Added hardcore description setup.
  
• Fixed icons on interacitve screen.
  
• Fixed localizations and offsets.
  
• Possible fix for pause on steam overlay bug
  
• Fix lock on energy connector creation.
  
• Fix header display after loading game with streaming.
  
• Fixed sword attack timers.
  
• Fixed sword post attack glitch.
  
• Fix materials on building modified.
  
• Fixed dying after falling beneath the floor - now you will teleport over surface instead.
  
• EntityModSystem: listen for equip/unequip events
  
• Fixed research available when the HQ is destroyed.
  
• Fix dissolving buildings on destruction.
  
• Minimap: merge radar size fix, remove unused IsReady.
  
• Fix player and skin icon in inventory screen.
  
• Set planet scanner work onanother maps.
  
• Fix items after comming back to main mission.
  
• Fixed missing icons on buildings.
  
• Fix vein missing effects.
  
• Fix crash in OnBuildingSellEvent.
  
• Fix reattaching bounds to building.
  
• Fix crash in CustomizeControlsMenuScreen.
  
• Fix crash in AugmentsMenuScreen.
  
• Fix crash in EnvironmentService if id passed is invalid.
  
• Fix crash in GuiControlsUtils if mech is dead.
  
• Fix reseting cooldown on shields.
  
• Fix crash in CustomizeControlsMenuScreen.
  
• Fixed TimeDamage initial interval timer.
  
• MinimapSystem: fix vertex sorting, fix for minimap markers randomly disappearing.
  
• GameplayResourceDef: fix crash when overlaying ent files with `CostDesc`.
  
• GameplayResourcePlugin: remove duplicated craft table loading code ( now only CostDescLoadPostprocessListener does it ).
  
• LevelEditor: support for removing % of entities from selection.
  
• RiftbreakerEditor: add EntityEditor & EntityModEditor modules.
  
• TreasureSpawner: optimize SpawnTreasure ( should not extend loading time anymore ).
  
• RiftbreakerApp: unregister crash handler OnShutdown.
  
• DirectoryWatcher: fix possible deadlock when exiting an application.
  
• Sound: fixed "enemies/canoptrix_move" gain and playback freqency, moved to "enemy_steps" group.
  
• Keyboard: reset special keys state on focus lost, update on focus gain.
  
• Fixed borderless problems.
  
• Fixed multi monitors problems on DX12.
  
• Fixed minimap after load.
  
• Fixed hammeroceros 'run' sound effects.
  
• Fixed animation graph freeze.
  
• Fixed resource icons display overlapping.
  
• Tweaked overrides in towers to fix bugs with multiple towers.
  
• Fixed cheat_god_mode - now it works every time.
  
• DestroySystem: fix empty frame between object removal and parts spawn.
  
• Fixed minigun projectiles (position), also made them cheaper performance-wise.
  
• SettingsMenuScreen: fixed 'reset to defaults' functionality.
  
• Fixed planet_surface shader for the Planetary Scanner menu screen.
  
• Tweaks for the grass (proper materials, more subsurface light). Gives it a more natural look.
  
• Prevent crash in RiftTeleportStates
  
• Fixed entering campaign if campaign is disabled. This one's mostly for those of you who like to change things around in the game files or use mods.
  
• Fix mining not decreasing resources from the vein. Happened from time to time.
  
• Fix crash when the mech dies while melee attacking.
  
• Fix crash when floor is being built.
  
• Fixed Exit Game crashes.
  
• Insert english localization variable if other language is empty - no more empty strings!
  
• Energy connectors are still all over the place.
  

• We have started grouping sounds into clusters to achieve a better 'herd stampede' effect and to override the instance limits. Massive hordes of enemy creatures will sound terrifying now.
  
• Lots of creature noise samples have been changed to give them individual identity and make them instantly recognizable.
  
• The sound system has also been optimized to have as little impact on the performance as possible.
  
• Our Granural Synth is finally working properly, which means we will be able to add dynamically changing sounds into the game, such as a Geiger counter.

As always, we are waiting for your thoughts, suggestions and questions.
EXOR Studios

Hello!

It’s a very exciting day in The Riftbreaker’s development. We can finally start telling you everything about one of our most strictly-kept secrets - our collaboration with AMD and the RDNA 2 architecture features that we were able to implement into the game. Without further ado, here’s a showcase video featuring exclusive, previously unseen footage from The Riftbreaker with ray-tracing features enabled.



Do you like it? We hope you do! You have no idea how difficult it was to keep the secret over the year we spent implementing all of these features. The Riftbreaker has benefited a lot from our partnership with AMD since they not only gave us the tools we needed but also directly collaborated with our programmers on the implementation front. The end result is that we learned a lot from this experience and we think you will be pleased with both the visual effect and the performance.


Note how the shadows change when the Arachnoid moves its tail.

All the techniques we used are thoroughly explained in the video, but if you can’t watch it right now, here’s a short description for all of them, along with some eye-candy.


There is an intense light source attached to the creature. When it moves, it changes the way shadows are cast on the entire scene.
Ray-traced shadows allow us to introduce additional shadow casting lights into the game world. For example, we can add an intense light source to a burning boss creature that walks around the scene and casts deep shadows from all of the details that are present in the world's geometry, even singular blades of grass are going to cast perfectly detailed shadows, updating every frame. Another example of how we use real-time ray tracing is special events like a comet flying over the player's head. The comet is an intense light source moving quickly across the sky and creating a fantastic spectacle of shadows on the ground.


Once Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion is enabled, the indirectly lit areas become much more realistic. The jungle, for example, becomes much darker. Once you destroy the light-occluding objects, the entire scene becomes much brighter.

Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion is a very advanced rendering technique. It simulates the behavior of light in places that are not directly lit. It is an approximation of global illumination that was previously available only in offline rendering scenarios. It provides excellent visual results in areas that are covered by dense vegetation or complex rock formations, by creating shade where it would form in real-world conditions. Doing it in real-time was previously not achievable due to the immense amount of computing necessary to calculate the behavior of light. Now thanks to the Radeon RX 6000 series we can enable this technique in The Riftbreaker to achieve very detailed shadowing.


The areas marked green contain less visible details, so the GPU can render it at a lower rate, resulting in improved performance.

Variable-rate shading is one of the latest Direct X 12 Ultimate rendering techniques that allows the GPU to select an area of the screen to be rendered at a lower sampling rate. AMD Fidelity FX Variable Shading allows us to very efficiently select areas of the scene that are low on detail and can be rendered with a lower sampling rate without any visible degradation to the image quality. Some of these low detail areas can include for example places covered in deep shadow, plain ground textures, or areas of the screen covered by transparent user interface elements. Thanks to this new rendering technique we can save a lot of GPU power and deliver much higher frame rates to the player, without noticeable loss in graphical fidelity.


The comet flyby with RT shadows off. It still looks good but lacks the dynamic shadows.

Over the course of the coming weeks, we are going to publish more in-depth articles about each of those techniques. You will learn their exact purpose, their place in The Riftbreaker rendering pipeline and how we implemented them into Schmetterling 2.0.


Once the RT shadows are turned on the entire scene becomes much more realistic and pleasing to the eye.

We are currently working on an update that brings these features to The Riftbreaker Closed Alpha, as well as the Prologue, so you will be able to test all of them out yourselves. We also received some questions about this, so let’s clarify: the features described in this article WILL work with any raytracing-capable GPU, regardless of the manufacturer.

If you want to see real-life, unedited gameplay footage, make sure to join our streams - we go live every Tuesday and Thursday at 3 PM CET. Starting now, we’re going to play with ray-tracing maxed out, so you can see both the performance and the graphics quality. We also know that timezones can be mean sometimes, so we will post some VODs to YouTube as well.

Stay safe and stay tuned!
EXOR Studios

Hello!

We've taken a long break from posting new content about The Riftbreaker on Steam. The reason for that was, as some of you might know already, that I (voidreaver) have caught COVID-19 and had to spend some time in hospital. Fortunately, I am fine now, also thanks to all the positive messages I received from all of you! Thank you for keeping me going.



While I was gone, the rest of the team was working on lots of new features. In order to make it easier to catch up on what's happened over the course of the past month, I compiled a little changelog. Please note that we're not patching the game today - this is a purely informative article, meant to get you up to speed on what you can expect in our upcoming materials and streams (Tue and Thu, 3PM CEST, twitch.tv/exorstudios). Also, not all of these changes will be visible to you, because some of them are implemented with the Campaign Mode in mind. However, a patch for The Riftbreaker Alpha and The Riftbreaker Prologue is coming very soon and will feature even more changes than the ones listed here!

• We have completely reworked all the weapon models. Our goal was to make them immediately recognizable, without the need to look at the inventory screen or the HUD. The new models come with varying skins for each rarity level. They're also animated!
  
• Oh, we also changed models for other equipment pieces - the Detector and mines of all flavors.
  
• We have added tooltips. Hovering the cursor over an icon will now tell you what that icon represents.
  
• The game will now inform you that you have discovered a new species of alien life by displaying a pop-up. Information about that species will be added to the Bestiary
  
• Missions now start with a fade from black. This prevents you from seeing meshes pop into existence.
  
• We have tweaked effect attachment points for weapons, so that the muzzle flash actually comes from the muzzle.
  
• The settings menu screen has been slightly reworked to include a description box. Highlighting any option in the menu will display a short message describing what is affected by the highlighted option. This should help you choose the perfect settings for your setup.
  
• There's much more wildlife in the prologue mission now, including birds!
  
• Our super-cute drones are now even more cute, because they are animated!
  
• New options have been added to the settings screen, as well as the Launcher.
  
• Extended HQ upgrade level 1 attack timeout. Take a breath.
  
• All weapons now have an icon based on the actual physical model you can see in the game.
  
• CrashReporter: include configuration + version number in titlebar. Sometimes you send us screenshots of the crash reports. This will help us identify the version of the game you have problems with.
  
• The Prologue map has been changed a bit, but since the affected area was a secret, we won't tell you what we changed.
  
• Loot items are now pushed away from the dying creatures with more force.
  
• DX12 is now the default render system. If your PC does not support DX12, the game will automatically detect it and fall back to the DX11 renderer.
  
• Teleporting is now blocked during minimap Interference. No escape from the ion storm.
  
• Added Benchmark Results Screen and localization for it. They're human-readable now.

• There is a lot of new units that we're working on! New models, animations and behavior logic is being added as we speak.
  
• One of the new units is Kermon, for example. You haven't seen it yet and you can't see it, because it's invisible most of the time. It's a nasty one.
  
• Don't fret, people, Mr. Riggs can now equip a special item that will turn him invisible, too! You'll now be able to sneak up on Arachnoids and watch them in their natural habitat! Invisibility breaks on attack, or taking damage, though, so beware.
  
• Gnerot's weird cousin, Krocoon, is also mostly done. We'll show it to you later. Can't burn all the coolest stuff in one changelog.
  
• Other creatures in progress are: Stregaros, Bomogan, Granan, Morirot, Lesigian, Necrodon, Nurglax and Shegret. You've seen some of them, most are still a secret, but you will hate them all by the time we're done.
  
• Apart from the invisibility tech we've also added some new movement skills: a short-range teleport, a dodge roll and barbarian jump! You can equip those instead of the good, old, regular dash.
  
• The new movement skills can be upgraded to use elemental damage. Firewall dash? Got it. Toxic fume barbarian jump? Got that one, too.
  
• A dedicated benchmark for the GPU has been added, now with results readable by humans.
  
• A Bestiary has been added. It's a separate menu screen that will act as an encyclopedia on all the species you discover. The more creatures you 'sample', the more knowledge you'll uncover!
  
• Decals, such as blood splats or scorch marks disappear gradually instead of just disappearing at an instant.
  
• The mouse cursor will now react to changes in the mouse sensitivity setting immediately.

• Fixed hammeroceros 'run' sound effects.
  
• Fixed animation graph freeze.
  
• Fixed resource icons display overlapping.
  
• Tweaked overrides in towers to fix bugs with multiple towers.
  
• Fixed cheat_god_mode - now it works every time.
  
• DestroySystem: fix empty frame between object removal and parts spawn.
  
• Fixed minigun projectiles (position), also made them cheaper performance-wise.
  
• SettingsMenuScreen: fixed 'reset to defaults' functionality.
  
• Fixed planet_surface shader for the Planetary Scanner menu screen.
  
• Tweaks for the grass (proper materials, more subsurface light). Gives it a more natural look.
  
• Prevent crash in RiftTeleportStates
  
• Fixed entering campaign if campaign is disabled. This one's mostly for those of you who like to change things around in the game files or use mods.
  
• Fix mining not decreasing resources from the vein. Happened from time to time.
  
• Fix crash when the mech dies while melee attacking.
  
• Fix crash when floor is being built.
  
• Fixed Exit Game crashes.
  
• Insert English localization variable if other language is empty - no more empty strings!
  
• Energy connectors are still all over the place.

The cat is out of the bag. We have partnered with AMD and have been secretly working with them for a long time now to bring you all the best DirectX 12 Ultimate features, including raytracing. You can watch AMD's presentation of their Radeon RX6000 series cards, featuring some exclusive footage from The Riftbreaker with new graphics features enabled. More information will be released on November 12th, with a lengthy feature video about The Riftbreaker's use of the latest AMD technology. Don't miss it!

• We have started grouping sounds into clusters to achieve a better 'herd stampede' effect and to override the instance limits. Massive hordes of enemy creatures will sound terrifying now.
  
• Lots of creature noise samples have been changed to give them individual identity and make them instantly recognizable.
  
• The sound system has also been optimized to have as little impact on the performance as possible.
  
• Our Granular Synth is finally working properly, which means we will be able to add dynamically changing sounds into the game, such as a Geiger counter.

As you can see, this month has not gone to waste at all! The feature set and stability of The Riftbreaker grow day by day. The work on the Campaign Mode is also well underway, so expect regular updates on that, too. If you would like to receive daily updates on our progress, join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. There's a channel dedicated to smaller, more detailed daily changelogs. Also, being active on the Discord can net you access to the limited Alpha test!

Thank you again for your support when I was sick.

See you on the streams!
Piotr 'voidreaver' Bomak

Our socials:
www.facebook.com/exorstudios
www.twitter.com/exorstudios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios

Hi Everyone,

As we've mentioned in our previous update, we've been working on a new Direct X 12 renderer for quite some time now. Direct X 12 Ultimate has enabled us to refactor our rendering pipeline in a way that provides improved GPU performance, lower CPU overhead, and also brings in new features such as ray-tracing.

We've been working hard with AMD on bringing all of these features to you in the best-optimized state and we are very proud that The Riftbreaker is one of the featured titles for the AMD Radeon 6000 series reveal. You can already catch a glimpse of how ray-traced shadows work in AMD's reveal video:


You may also notice a new boss creature in that video that will be making a larger appearance on our channels real soon :)

We will be making a much bigger reveal of all the DIrect X 12 Ultimate features coming to The Riftbreaker on November 12th, so stay tuned:


As always if you'd like to ask us any questions directly, we're reading all of the comments below and you can also find us on the following channels:
www.facebook.com/exorstudios
www.twitter.com/exorstudios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios

Hello Everyone,

We have finally reached the Alpha milestone in The Riftbreaker's development, which means that the game can now be played from start to finish and that all of the key game features are in place and working. This is a very important moment because it allows us to take a step back and assess the work that is still left to be completed in order for the game to be ready for launch. There's not much time left in 2020 and it is obvious that we won't be able to finish the game within this year. We've never announced a firm release date because we are much more committed to quality than to arbitrary deadlines, we still won't be announcing a specific release date, but we are officially moving the launch window to 2021.

Now let's take a moment to look at what we've achieved this year and what is still left to be done to release the game:

- Operation Alpha Test - March 18th - on that date we've finally started to send out closed Alpha keys to the members of our Discord community. It was a huge step forward as we started to receive enormous amounts of feedback that helped us to improve the game considerably. We've released tens of updates to the closed Alpha build that fixed numerous bugs as well as introduced quality of life and design improvements. Looking back we can surely say that this was a fantastic decision that helped us find problems that we wouldn't be able to find ourselves. We released a lot of substantial updates to the closed Alpha throughout the year. This has also resulted in a lot of additional work for the team and moved the release further. All in all, we believe that it's better to fix bugs before the game is released rather than with tons of hotfixes made in painful post-release crunch.

We introduced the closed Alpha testing phase with a Gameplay trailer that you can see here:

- Steam Festival Demo - June 16th - The results from the closed alpha testing have encouraged us to take part in the Steam Summer Festival. We've put a lot of effort into polishing a publicly available demo for everyone to enjoy, and once again we were blown away by the feedback that we received. The demo was downloaded more than fifty thousand times within the few days that it was available. The feedback was very positive, but there were numerous gameplay areas to improve on and polish even further.

- The Riftbreaker: Prologue - August 6th - After the Steam Festival demo was taken down we received hundreds of messages to bring it back and make it available for everyone to play. We gathered all of the feedback from the festival and polished that demo experience for another one and a half month to give you - The Riftbreaker: Prologue. A stand-alone story driven experience that shows the basic gameplay aspects of the game and also explains a bit of the Riftbreaker story. Both the Demo and the Prologue have received numerous updates throughout their lifecycle. We’re planning to further update both the content and the engine of the Prologue, up to the game’s launch and beyond. Up to this day the Prologue and the Demo experience were downloaded well more than three hundred thousand times. This is a jaw-dropping result, we have never expected so much popularity for this short experience. We received thousands of feedback messages and some of you have clocked in hundreds of hours in the demo/prologue. We’ve had countless discussions, on our social channels and especially on our Discord, about the game’s design and the content that we’re working on. All of this has reinforced our obligation not to disappoint you and to deliver the quality that you expect of us.

If you haven’t done that already you can download The Riftbreaker Prologue here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1293860/The_Riftbreaker_Prologue/

- Base Building trailer - August 31st - Due to the ongoing COVID pandemic all physical gaming events have been canceled and/or moved online. The Riftbreaker took part in multiple such events and we tried to supply you with fresh content for all of them. One of the most important events of this summer was Gamescom Online. We prepared a special trailer for this occasion that showed a lot more about the base-building mechanisms within the game and how building remote outposts within the campaign is going to look like.

You can check it out here:

- DirectX 12 and next-gen rendering features - We’ve actually been working on this task since November 2019 and we are finally very close to showing it to the public. A new DirectX 12 renderer allowed us to optimize the game even further and to introduce additional rendering features that make the game look much better. We will be showcasing this tech throughout the coming month so stay tuned for big announcements very soon! We are planning to first do a round of closed alpha testing of the new features with the participants of our closed Alpha (The Riftbreakers). After we are sure that the new renderer doesn’t melt anyone’s PC we will roll out these changes to the publicly available Prologue. This update will also feature a number of gameplay improvements that we’ve been working on since pre-Alpha build 3.5 (max-range energy connectors from Starbugs with love).

If you’d like to join the Riftbreakers’ closed Alpha ranks then head on over to our Discord and register:



- COVID 19 - Unfortunately we can’t go over the list of important events for this year without talking about the raging pandemic. The game development industry has been one of the luckiest ones in this situation. We were working from our homes from February to May and while this worked more smoothly than we expected, we can’t say that this hasn’t slowed us down. Remote communication is not the same as a face to face meeting and precious time is consumed for additional synchronization efforts.

The COVID pandemic is coming back in force and it looks like this wave is much stronger than the previous one. Our Community Manager - Piotr “Voidreaver” Bomak tested positive for COVID-19 more than a week ago with heavy symptoms of the disease. He is currently undergoing treatment in a hospital in Szczecin and asked us to send you his warmest regards and a word of warning - please wear a mask, maintain proper hygiene and stay safe, this thing is serious.



Piotrek is fortunately getting better now and we all hope that he gets back to us in full health! We’ve moved back to “home office” work once again and it looks like it is going to stay that way for the unforeseeable future. In the mean time, if you miss Piotrek too much and can’t wait for him to return to regular streaming you can check out some of the video logs that he recorded while working from home during the previous lock-down phase:


This is already quite a lengthy post, but we promised you more information about what we are working on and what needs to be finished for The Riftbreaker to be ready for the release of version 1.0, so here it goes:

- Campaign mode - we currently have this module in a “feature complete” state which we read as - it can be played from start to finish. However, it is still quite far from being finished as we still lack a lot of content. Most of the missions are still undergoing deep gameplay changes. We’re implementing additional mechanics for unique plants and creatures that are going to change the way you play in the various biomes that you will be exploring. The game’s story-line is non-linear and you will be able to visit most areas of Galatea 37 in any order that you like. This design choice brings a lot of freedom and replayability to this procedurally generated world. It is also very demanding in terms of the work that needs to be done to make all of this work well together. We hope that you will all appreciate the extra work that we are pouring into this.

- Biomes - we’ve already shown you some snippets of the biomes that are going to be available in The Riftbreaker. We are still working on them though both in terms of their look & feel as well as the unique gameplay mechanics that are going to be present in all of them. We want you to really feel that you need to adapt to a different environment each time you go out to explore a new region of Galatea 37.

- New Creatures - the Prologue and the closed Alpha included three different hostile creature species each with three strains and a single boss creature. We’re planning to have about twenty different hostile creature species in the finished game (each with three strains) that are going to challenge your skills. Some of them will appear only in certain biomes while some of them will come out only if certain conditions are met. We’re already more than half-way through with this task and the work is speeding up as we expand our engine and our toolset. We will be revealing new species of creatures as we go by, so stay tuned for future announcements.

- New Weapons - the weapons arsenal that is currently available in the closed Alpha is already quite extensive, but we aren’t there yet ;) We are working on both additional ranged guns as well as new melee weapons. Would you like to see Mr Riggs with a power axe or a mighty shock hammer - we got you covered. We have most of the weapons modelled and textured (close to twenty, with four rarity levels each). We’re still working on the unique animations that are required by each melee weapon type as well as dual wielding different melee weapon types!(?). There’s also a couple of “unique” weapons in our plans. Lots of really cool toys to make your life on Galatea 37 that much more survivable :)

- New Skills - you didn’t think that the Dash skill was the only one that’s going to be in the game, right? Good, rest assured that we already have a couple of additional skills already implemented and a few still in the works. Would you fancy a cloaking device to explore the land uninterrupted?

- New Equipment - more mines, more traps, more buffs, additional utilities, portable towers. Yes, we like the word “more” (and “explosion”).

- New Buildings - the arsenal of towers that are available in the closed Alpha at the moment is quite timid. As we are adding new weapons for Mr Riggs we are also introducing their automated counterparts in the form of new towers. We are also going beyond that by adding more advanced and larger tower types.

- Alien Research - this research path hasn’t been introduced before. Downloading new invention blueprints from Earth you will only allow you to develop the base level of technology that’s available in the game. If you want to go further you will have to gather research specimens and study them in locally operated Alien Research Labs. These are an advanced building that requires a lot of power and a cooling liquid to operate. Things will get more interesting both in terms of how you plan out the structure of your base and your economy. The need to gathering research specimens will also power one of the game’s pillars - exploration.

- Extended modding for weapons and buildings - the modding implementation and balancing that you can currently experience in the closed Alpha is a very early vision of how we see this system being implemented. We are currently finishing work on adding modding capabilities to most building types which will expand the range of possibilities even further.

As you can see above, there’s still quite a bit of work left to be done. According to our plans, as soon as we finish all of the above plans the project will reach the Beta milestone - the game will be feature complete and content complete. We will then start more extensive gameplay testing and balancing with a broader number of closed Beta testers. Once again we won’t be stating any specific release dates for these development phases, but we will make sure to keep you in the loop with regular development updates and gameplay streams.

As always, we crave your feedback. If you’d like to have an open conversation with us about the game (or other topics), you can find us on any of our social channels:
www.facebook.com/exorstudios
www.twitter.com/exorstudios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios

Hello!

The evolution of species on Galatea 37 has taken a slightly different route than here on Earth. What we consider stuff of nightmares seems to be pretty normal in this strange new world. There are many reasons for that - the sheer size of creatures, their outlandish appearance, strange behavior, and many more. The star of today’s reveal seems to combine all of the above. Meet the newest addition to The Riftbreaker bestiary - the Nurglax!


Don't let the terrifying looks deceive you. It's not the Nurglax you should be afraid of.

This oversized slug plays more of a supportive role in the mix of creatures found in the game. It will not attack you directly, but you should not get too excited about that. Instead of throwing itself into the fight, the Nurglax will stand back and launch maggot-filled cocoons straight into your base. The little Nurglax hatchlings will very happily chomp on all your precious equipment. We heard they like energy connectors the most, so build plenty of them. You don’t want your visitors to be hungry, right?


A happy Nurglax family. More babies on their way!

All of this means that as soon as you confirm Nurglax’s presence in your mission area, you should install both long-range defensive towers, such as Artillery, and regular Sentinel Towers inside of your walls. You can also defend your infrastructure by setting traps and mines for the maggots to trigger. Unless you don’t mind sudden power cuts to half of your base in the middle of a fight, of course. Then you are welcome to simply ignore the larvae. After consuming a sufficient amount of food to grow, they will burrow themselves into the ground, never to be seen again.


You're probably wondering how I got in this situation...

Just like every other creature, the Nurglax has a couple of weaknesses that you can exploit during combat. The first one is their low walking speed. When the Nugglax’s cocoon is mature it weighs the creature down even more. Mr. Riggs can easily catch the creature and deal with it - it is largely defenseless if the maggots are not around. Another angle of attack are long-range explosive attacks. The Nurglax’s bodies are very soft and not covered with any kind of carapace. You should definitely deal with it as soon as possible, but be careful - the cocoon might explode...



And there we have it, another giant, disgusting creature you will have to face during your mission on Galatea 37. To be fair, we have only been showing off the largest monsters so far, and there is a good reason for it. Bigger units usually come bundled with more complex mechanics. We’re getting them out of the way first to have more time for testing and making adjustments. We will get to smaller beasts soon enough, and if you join our streams and our Discord you will get sneak peeks even quicker!

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

Hey there!

Hope you’ve all had an amazing week! It’s certainly been amazing to us. The work on the game is progressing really well. Monsters are receiving a lot of polish, biomes are getting filled with new props, we are in the middle of reworking all the gun models... A lot of things are changing for the better thanks to your feedback! Seeing all your comments under our development updates gives us plenty of feedback on how to make the game better. However, reading about the game and looking at screenshots is not the same as seeing the real thing, so come to our YouTube channel!

https://www.youtube.com/exorstudios

This year we have produced a lot of materials for various promotional events that took place instead of the trade shows around the world (PAX, Gamescom, E3, we miss you, <sobs>...). All of our videos are up on the channel, and each of them has at least a little bit of exclusive material in them. We have articles about most of the features in them, but if you’ve joined us a little bit later it’s a great way to catch up on all the available information without going through dozens of news. Here are some examples of the content you can find there:









More videos are going to make their way onto the channel as we get closer to release (we still have a couple of trailers in the works!), so it would be amazing of you to subscribe not to miss anything.



Next week we should also come back to our regular stream schedule. Join the Discord to get notifications about the streams and our progress.

See you next week!

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