Hi!

The Steam Games Festival is here! Over the course of this week-long event, you get the chance to meet new players, chat with developers during live streams and find your next favorite game.
Give The Riftbreaker a shot - perhaps it is the one!



The Riftbreaker is a base-building, survival game with Action-RPG elements. You are an elite scientist/commando inside an advanced Mecha-Suit capable of dimensional rift travel. Hack & slash countless enemies. Build up your base, collect samples and research new inventions to survive.



The demo version of The Riftbreaker is a guided, single-player experience, meant to show and explain all the main features of the game. Step into the role of Ashley Nowak during her last mission before venturing into the unknown world of Galatea 37. Using your Mecha-Suit you will have to establish your base, secure your position and brave the wilderness of this alien world.



You can also take the scenic route and take a tour around Galatea 37. The handcrafted map built especially for the purposes of this demo hides many secrets and allows you to get a little taste of what you can expect in the full game. We left plenty of tech options unlocked for you to try out, too!



We also encourage you to join our Discord community to share your thoughts, feedback and bug reports (hopefully there won't be many!). The most active members of the community get access to The Riftbreaker Alpha version which includes the random generated Survival mode in which you fend off hordes of enemy creatures.



During the festival, we are going to stream live from our office twice (or maybe more, who knows?). We are scheduled to go live Thursday, Feb 4th at 6 PM CET and Saturday, Feb 6th, also at 6 PM CET. Join in and see one of the devs fail miserably, assisted by natural disasters brought in by the chat by the means of our interactive streaming features.

See you there!

Hi everyone!

We are super excited to be a part of the Steam Games Festival. It’s a great opportunity for all of us to discover awesome games and get a little closer to each other as a community.

To celebrate this event, we prepared a demo version of The Riftbreaker for you to try. It will show you a lot of the features that you can expect from the final version of the game - giant robots, lots of weapons, swarms of angry aliens, building massive bases and, of course, thousands of explosions!



We would like to invite you all to a live stream from The Riftbreaker development build. We are going to play the Survival Mode, a long, randomized mission that will show you a lot of the features that are not available to the public just yet. You will also be able to influence what happens during the stream by voting on interactive options in the chat.

The stream will be featured both on The Riftbreaker Steam Store Page and our Twitch channel - www.twitch.tv/exorstudios. To take part in the interactive events, you must use the Twitch chat.

Join our Discord - most active users get access to the Closed Alpha build!



Useful links:
www.facebook.com/exorstudios
www.twitter.com/exorstudios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios

Hi everyone!

We are super excited to be a part of the Steam Games Festival. It’s a great opportunity for all of us to discover awesome games and get a little closer to each other as a community.

To celebrate this event, we prepared a demo version of The Riftbreaker for you to try. It will show you a lot of the features that you can expect from the final version of the game - giant robots, lots of weapons, swarms of angry aliens, building massive bases and, of course, thousands of explosions!



We would like to invite you all to a live stream from The Riftbreaker development build. We are going to play the Survival Mode, a long, randomized mission that will show you a lot of the features that are not available to the public just yet. You will also be able to influence what happens during the stream by voting on interactive options in the chat.

The stream will be featured both on The Riftbreaker Steam Store Page and our Twitch channel - www.twitch.tv/exorstudios. To take part in the interactive events, you must use the Twitch chat.

Join our Discord - most active users get access to the Closed Alpha build!



Useful links:
www.facebook.com/exorstudios
www.twitter.com/exorstudios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios

Ever since we gave you access to the Alpha version of The Riftbreaker you have only been able to use one movement skill - the dash. Don’t get me wrong - it’s a very useful skill. It allows you to get around the map quickly, close the gap between you and your target, or it can save your shiny metal hull from getting cornered and destroyed. You wanted more, so we got you more. Here’s what we came up with so far!


INFERNOOOOO!

First of all, the dash itself has received an upgrade. Apart from the regular one, available from the beginning of your adventure, you will now be able to research and craft elemental variants of the dash skill. These variants will leave a trail of fire, acid, or ice in Mr. Riggs’ wake, damaging all enemies that come into contact with it. It’s useful in combat and it looks cool as well. Who wouldn’t love to leave a trail of fire behind them?!



If you are tired of being stuck on the ground you can research and install this next skill - the Power Jump. In its most basic form, the skill will allow Mr. Riggs to jump several meters into the air and land in the target area, causing a shockwave that will do nasty things to all wildlife in the vicinity. Such a skill can be extremely useful, especially if some small animals, like Canoptrix, block your path to the more important and more threatening targets. With the jump, you will be able to ignore those little buggers and go for the big guys instead. Whether that’s a good idea or not is a different story. The Power Jump can be upgraded to utilize elemental damage as well!



If you are not a fan of such a direct approach to combat and prefer to play mind games with your opponents instead, let us present you with the short-range teleport. Much like the dash, the teleport allows Mr. Riggs to quickly move from one place to another. By utilizing the rift technology the process is almost instant and ignores physical barriers, meaning you can escape over a wall, for example. The drawback is that unlike in the case of the dash, you cannot damage your enemies while using this skill. On the other hand, you are invincible during the rift jump, giving you a brief moment of safety. You decide which one you prefer.


That awkward moment when your Power Jump turns into a jetpack... Ah well, fewer bugs to fix later on!

There are some other movement skills that we have been working on, like the classic dodge-roll. We think that by giving you access to a variety of moves you will be able to adapt Mr. Riggs to suit your playstyle a little more. With elemental damage as an added bonus, we could see the skill selection process to become an interesting metagame in its own right! Do you have any other ideas for Mr. Riggs’ movement skills? Let us know in the comments and in the feedback section of our Discord - www.discord.gg/exorstudios.


P.S. Thank you for all the bug reports that you sent our way! We might not have been able to respond individually to each and every one of you, but we checked all the crash reports you sent our way. We managed to find a pattern in those crashes, and we believe we fixed at least one of them. We are pushing out the update right now. If you experienced crashes at startup while using DirectX 12, please check if the issues have been resolved. We will contact those of you with whom we spoke earlier and who helped us fix the problem.

We would also like the following people to contact us. Send me an email to piotr.bomak at exorstudios.com or contact me @voidreaver on www.discord.gg/exorstudios - your crash dumps are very helpful and informative and we'd like to have a way to speak to you :)

Squizle
Dak
Dave-Ayreon
Relykt
mand1as

EXOR Studios

Riftbreakers! We need your help!

The December update for the Riftbreaker: Prologue was one of the major milestones for the project, as we added support for the DirectX 12 renderer. It allowed us to make use of cutting-edge effects and improved the way the game handles its operations on modern PCs.

Just like any other piece of software, this new solution had some bugs, but thanks to your bug reports we managed to hunt down and fix most of them. Most...

A couple of bugs still elude us (they happen about 1 time per 1000 game launches) and we can't seem to find the exact steps to reproduce them. We need your help to find them. That's why we are launching a worldwide bug hunt!



Here's what you need to do in order to take part:

1. Make sure that your system is capable of running DirectX 12.
   
2. Download The Riftbreaker: Prologue.
   
3. Go to your Steam Library, find The Riftbreaker: Prologue and click 'play'. This is important - if you launch the game through a desktop shortcut you won't be able to complete the next step!
   
4. Choose 'Launch Configuration Tool' from the box that appeared.
   
5. Make sure that you've chosen the DirectX 12 renderer and launch the game. IMPORTANT: Do NOT turn on the DirectX 12 diagnostic mode!

If the game launches normally, you can't help us with this issue.

If the game crashes, you might be the person we are looking for. It might crash during loading or during regular gameplay. Try playing the game for some time.

When The Riftbreaker crashes we launch our Crash Reporter tool. It looks like this:



We need you to click the 'Stacktrace' button and make sure you got one of the following results:





If you got one of these two crashes you are on the right track. If they happen regularly, to the point where the game becomes hard to play normally, please contact us! You can send us an email to piotr.bomak[at]exorstudios.com, write a message to bug-reports channel on our Discord (www.discord.gg/exorstudios) or contact us through Facebook or Twitter. One of our programmers will work closely with you to find out what causes the issue and how we can fix it.



We will reward the people who help us find these bugs with Alpha access keys!

Naturally, if you encounter any other bugs, please send us reports and descriptions through the crash reporter.

We count on you!
EXOR Studios

Hello everyone!

The Riftbreaker has always meant to be a great game for live streaming. Randomized content and the open-ended nature of gameplay mean that no two sessions are ever really the same and the game has the potential to remain fresh and replayable for a long time. Interactive streaming events make the experience even more interesting, giving the viewers an opportunity to make events happen in the game world through the chat-operated voting system.



Ever since we announced The Riftbreaker we have been streaming the latest development build twice a week, giving you the chance to check in on our progress and meet other members of the community. Streaming is also the most direct contact form with you. By going live we can chat about our plans, gather ideas, brainstorm, and get immediate feedback. However, not all of you have been able to join us live just yet because of the time zone differences. We would like to do something about that.



Starting next week, we are going to move the Thursday stream. The exact starting time will be determined by the results of this poll:

https://www.strawpoll.me/42466881

Please share this information with your friends and ask them to vote as well. The Tuesday streaming time will remain unchanged at 3 PM CET.



We realize that it is impossible to please everyone and set up a convenient stream time slot for all time zones, but perhaps shifting the show a couple of hours forwards or backwards will help you catch it more easily.



This is an experiment, of course. If it turns out to be successful, we can negotiate to shift the Tuesday stream as well. If we realize that things were better earlier we can always come back to the old schedule. It’s up to you, so click the link, cast your vote, and make your voice heard. If you have any additional comments or ideas, feel free to post them in the comments.

See you in the chat!
EXOR Studios

Hello!

It is time to roll out the first patch for The Riftbreaker Alpha and The Riftbreaker: Prologue in 2021. This update is a rather small one, not bringing any new game content, but it has a couple of important fixes and changes.

• The Arachnoid Boss behavior has been rewritten entirely. It should no longer get stuck in certain poses and it should be able to fight the player more effectively.
  
• The UI scaling for extreme aspect ratios (such as 32:9) has been fixed.
  
• Users will now get notified when they are trying to connect to Twitch, but the service is unavailable.
  
• New memory management system for DirectX 12. The game will default to the DX11 renderer on GPUs with less than 2GB VRAM to improve performance and stability. Systems with more or equal to 2GB VRAM will default to DX12.
  
• The EXOR Crash Reporter will now feature additional information about modified or corrupted content.
  
• A lot of crash and bug fixes.

And for those looking for even more info on the update, here are the unedited, uncensored, and sometimes illegible change commit messages:

• Fix building radius staying forever on the map
  
• fix crash in building system
  
• fix crash in EquipmentSlotScreen
  
• fix crash in CustomizeControlsMenuScreen
  
• moved section 'RemoveBlockedUnits' after the BroadPhase is finished
  
• Twitch : fixed crash on getaddrinfo failed
  
• added GameStreamingError::GSE_PLATFORM_CONNECTION_ERROR
  
• fixed render system resource cleanup
  
• deleted microsoft d3dx12residency manager
  
• new simple residency manager
  
• batched execution of command lists
  
• D3D11: implement multi _executeContext
  
• AudioLoader: fixed crash on corrupted audio file
  
• Added ConsoleService:Write(txt)
  
• added popup "gui/menu/streaming/connecting_error" on ExorGameStreamingGSE_PLATFORM_CONNECTION_ERROR error
  
• fixed SpawnEarthquake and SpawnAcidFissures methods
  
• Extended ZipArchive and AudioFileOgg logs
  
• Increased VfsZipArchive DecoderPool count
  
• AudioFiles: fixed code format
  
• VfsZipArchive: added debug log messages
  
• VfsZipArchive: fixed small buffer 'SEEKING_DECODING'
  
• RenderSystemCapabilities: log available display outputs
  
• Config: do not log commented out lines
  
• LogService: fix mismatched quotes
  
• DebugSystem: fix crash in `r_show_collisions` when passing invalid physics group
  
• MapGenerator: harden PrepareTiles
  
• CrashHandler: forward content modified flag to CrashReporter
  
• CrashReporter: add content corruption warning
  
• CrashReporter: update wording
  
• WaveSystem: temp add IsAlive check
  
• D3D12: add support for stretched-scaling modes in GetSupportedVideoDisplayList
  
• added NSight Aftermath crashdump library support
  
• Fixed crash in SynchronizeBindings/AugmentButton (90ab94d3-4a35-4732-af00-87c4b2e6a6ae)
  
• VfsZipArchive: testing support of local header extra fields
  
• arachnoid boss state machine upodated to the new animation graph
  
• TimeOfDaySystem: fix SetTimeOfDay/IncreaseTime/DecreaseTime
  
• Gui: added GuiScaleMode::STRETCH_OPTIMAL
  
• Gui: fixed horizontal viewport aspect scaling with GuiScaleMode::STRETCH_OPTIMAL
  
• GuiUtils: added ScaleToSqueezedAxis helper function
  
• Gui: fixed GuiSystem scalling
  
• Gui: scalling HudDialogs with GuiScaleMode::STRETCH_OPTIMAL
  
• HUD: fixed scale/size on ultra wide displays (action menu, augments menu)

Good luck deciphering what the programmers meant!
EXOR Studios

Hi everyone!

Well-rested and pumped up for what’s to come, we are back from our holiday break! We hope you also had a chance to get some much-needed rest amidst all the chaos of the past year. Even though we spoke about our plans for 2021 already, we would like to bring you up to speed with what’s happening in the studio at the moment and what our short-term goals are.



First of all, the work on the campaign mode for The Riftbreaker is going really well. We keep improving on our initial design and introduce new ways to interact with the game world. It is an iterative process. It means that we prepare a prototype of a mission or a mechanic, play the game with that prototype enabled, take note of what is working and what isn’t, and then make changes. We even came up with some cool ideas on how to improve the campaign experience over the holiday break, but they have to remain a secret for now.



We are also expanding some of the game mechanics. Those of you who follow our Discord and the daily changelogs (www.discord.gg/exorstudios) already know about the new types of defensive towers that we added. The Riftbreaker arsenal now allows Ashley to make use of Minigun Towers, Laser Towers, Heavy Artillery… These new toys will most likely get their own spotlight article in a couple of weeks, but if you can’t wait to find out about them you should join our streams at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios.



That is actually the next thing we want to talk about - streams. Starting this week, we will stream twice a week - that doesn’t change. However, we received some signals that our usual time schedule - Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3 PM CET - could be improved. We are aware that we won’t be able to suit everyone, given how many people in various timezones follow us, but we could try to change the date of at least one stream per week. We’re waiting for your suggestions in the comments and on the Discord!



Our regular development updates are also coming back this week, so you can expect articles about the latest improvements we made to The Riftbreaker at least twice a week. One of the articles coming in the next couple of days is a deep dive into the raytraced ambient occlusion technique that we introduced with our DirectX 12 patch. There are a lot of interesting details in that one, so stay tuned! If you have some ideas or suggestions on article topics, please let us know.



There we go - we’re all up to speed with what’s going on. If you have any additional questions, suggestions, or requests, post them in the comments or on our Discord. We will make sure you get your answers as soon as possible.

Happy New Year folks, it’s the final stretch!
EXOR Studios

Greetings!

Christmas and the new year are just around the corner. Just like every year, the whole EXOR team is going on a holiday break. This means a pause in new content and streams, as we focus a bit more on Christmas preparations and spending time with our families. That does not mean we will be unreachable, we will still check out the forums, messages and our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. Bear in mind you might have to wait a bit for an answer, though. We should get back on track with streams and articles in the second week of 2021.



Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, we wish you all the best in the coming year, especially when it comes to health and family. We hope that you can safely join your loved ones to celebrate the festivities, and if that is not the case, we wish you loads of video games to fill your time with. Fingers crossed that 2021 will be so good that it will make up for 2020.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
EXOR Studios

Hello!

The end of 2020 is coming closer and closer. While it was not easy to maintain a high level of efficiency through all the chaos and unexpected events we made some good progress on The Riftbreaker - even if we had to slow down a little bit. Let’s take a look at what happened throughout this year and talk a little bit about our goals and wishes for the future.


We opened the portal to Galatea 37 to the first testers in March, beginning the never-ending process of hunting bugs, improving the player experience, and polishing content. This has been a deviation from our standard workflow. Before we would iterate only on the feedback from internal playtests and invite a limited number of testers to try the game out in a controlled environment. Closed Alpha is somewhat similar to that but several orders of magnitude bigger. You have been tirelessly reporting all issues you’ve been encountering and suggesting us better solutions to the ones we had at the time. This allowed us to get rid of many issues that would come up in late development. We’re very grateful for your support and help. While the Alpha will stay ‘invite-only’ rest assured - we’re going to give away more and more keys as the weeks go by.


This event was a huge stepping stone for us. After starting our period of Alpha testing we decided to prepare a short demo that covered the main aspects of the game especially for this event. We counted for some additional feedback and a little bit of growth in our community. What happened next blew us away completely. The demo proved to be very popular, getting more than 50.000 downloads over the course of the festival. This resulted in a lot of valuable feedback, bug reports, and new faces in our community.


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1293860/The_Riftbreaker_Prologue/

After the Festival we knew that we had to make the demo widely available somehow. We spent the next two months polishing the content from the demo. The story was expanded, the mission flow improved, bugs squished - all thanks to our testers and the players who downloaded the demo. We would like to thank our Alpha crew here again - by testing the Prologue on various hardware configurations and trying to break things all the time they helped us immensely. The Prologue managed to catch the attention of a lot of players who later joined our community on Discord (www.discord.gg/exorstudios). Many of them became Alpha testers, too. Something, something, the circle of life?




This is a pretty fresh thing so we’re not going to talk too much about it AGAIN ;) By teaming up with AMD we have had the unique opportunity to work on some cutting-edge visual tech for The Riftbreaker, including raytraced shadows, raytraced ambient occlusion and variable rate shading. The future is now!




The Gameplay Trailer accompanied the beginning of the Alpha period and shows the basic aspects of The Riftbreaker gameplay. If you want to introduce someone to the game quickly - this is the best way to do so.



The second trailer we released focuses a bit more on building and biome exploration. It shows off more complex structures and technologies that will accompany you throughout your adventure on Galatea 37. It also shows you the scope of the bases you are going to end up with in the Campaign Mode of the game. Definitely worth checking out!


Organizers of various gaming events around the world had a tough nut to crack this year. Luckily, many of them decided to hold online versions of their events in various forms, ranging from live streams to entire virtual show floors with individual booths for developers. This gave us an opportunity to introduce even more players to our game and our studio. This does not make up for all the chances we lost to talk with you directly, but we have to wait for that until it’s safe again :( On the plus side, we managed to snag a couple of prizes at those shows, as well!


Our trophy wall, one case for each game.


Our focus is to release the game in a fully playable 1.0 version. There are a couple of things we need to complete before that happens. In no particular order:

• 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 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 modeled 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 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 - 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 gather 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.

Quite a lot, isn’t it? We hope that 2021 will be a bit more considerate towards our plans and that we can deliver a truly unique game to you. We will, of course, still regularly inform you about our progress in articles, on our Discord - www.discord.com/exorstudios, and during our streams.