Hi there!

We're excited to let you know that StormEdge: Wind of Change is now available on Steam!

Embark on a journey with Lily, one of the initial mages to sense the Elemental Storms, serving as a prologue to the expansive StormEdge narrative. Enhance your abilities, strike a perfect balance between defense and offense, and unleash your creativity in gameplay by experimenting and innovating!

The game is completely free to play, and we'd love for you to give it a try!

See you!

With another month almost over, it is finally time for the monthly update. As announced, this one is a bit smaller, but still comes with a total of 17 noteworthy (and some smaller) changes. A friendly reminder: I am still looking for playtesters who would like to test the full version. The details can still be found here: https://thumbtanks.com/playtesters-wanted.

Tanks can now do critical damage with a low probability. The mood system ensures that this probability of critical damage improves when things are going badly for a player. Although critical damage and the mood system should slightly favour weaker players, no major changes to the balancing are expected. To make the end of rounds more exciting, in the Deathmatch game mode all rounds will end in "Final Frenzy", a phase of 15 seconds in which every shot will do critical damage.

During the game, each player is now shown when his talent is currently active and what effect it has. In order to free up the necessary space in the interface, the display of the currently available special weapons has been combined and simplified.

From now on, settings such as the display of the buttons and the volume can be changed from the pause menu during a round. The pause menu has also been adapted so that it is now hardly possible to end the game by mistake.

A number of adjustments were made based on tester feedback. For one thing, the camera is now zoomed out a little further during the round so that you can see more of the playing field. The award boxes have been removed completely (and will be replaced with something hopefully better in one of the next updates). Contamination now does a little less damage, some talents have been adjusted. In addition, the number of mountains on the map has been slightly reduced.

It is also worth mentioning that the behaviour of Theodore's Drone has been adjusted. It can now be shot down, has its own health and becomes less efficient the more damage it takes.

At the moment, I would like to wait and see how the situation around Unity develops. That's why I expect a somewhat smaller update in October.

The big to-dos, apart from some rare but annoying bugs, are still a new special for Serwa. More orders (and adjustments to the existing ones) and changes to the draft are also planned.

The biggest change, insofar as it makes it into the October update, will be an adjustment to the draft. New pick-ups will give players more options in the future.

Ahoi,

Small update here. Just bringing you some seagulls 👀

Minor Update 0.5.4:

• Added seagulls flying around the north sea

Patch 1.10.03 notes:

- Fixed problem with finisher on Ribald Robocop
- Fixed problem with double image of Robot in his presentation
- Fixed problem with second player re-join after leaving campaign mode
- Fixed problem with wrong amount of lives when changing game modes

We've heard your feedback! Many players have said that the base game speed is too slow, so we have increased the overall pace of gameplay. While the 15 minute timer remains the same, the game itself is a bit faster paced - with characters and enemies all moving faster, shooting faster, and generally being more action-packed.

• Added Charlotte, a cute potted plant that will periodically grant you powerful buffs!
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Added Painterly, an adorable sea turtle that will send out a tsunami, pushes foes back
  
  

• We've added [Hard] and [Brutal] warnings on some of the most dangerous Plot Twists
  
• Butterfingers: Reworked! Now deals much more damage to enemies, and tosses XP more consistently in all directions
  
  
  
  
• A Shocking Number of Explosions: Reworked! Now several smaller explosions can appear back-to-back, instead of a single large one. This can be used to your advantage, chain-explode enemies!
  
• Paranormal Exercise: Ghost duration reduced from 10 -> 7s
  
• Spring-Time Dancing: We lowered the difficulty/insanity of this act 1 twist

• Fixed several crash bugs
  
• Fixed an issue with knockback sending enemies extremely far away

New fixes for 22-09-2023:

• Resistance was calculated incorrectly should be fixed now.
  
• Pressing escape can now close most popups, including deck view.
  
• Persist card/text view choice in battle
  
• Previously players were unable to buy the bewitched and Enchanted upgrades (stronger versions of Attuned). This also meant you could only buy 63 of the possible 65 upgrades.
  
• Last Stand can now be activated when under 50% health instead of under 10 health. Making it useful at higher levels too.

As you might already know, The Riftbreaker runs on our own game engine, which we call the Schmetterling. Although working with your own tech is not always easy, it gives us the freedom to implement any number of new features and techniques to make the game look and feel better. During the development of the Into the Dark expansion, we realized we needed one key rendering feature to significantly improve the biome’s atmosphere. The effect in question is volumetric lighting. Today, we will tell you what role volumetric lighting plays in graphics, how games tried to emulate its effect in the past, and how we implemented this new feature in The Schmetterling engine.

Light scattering phenomenon

Atmospheric scattering is a phenomenon that affects everything we see around us. Even though we don’t often think about it, the air around us is a mixture of various particles that can interact with one another. They are also large enough to interact with photons - particles (and waves, but let’s not get too deep here) that carry electromagnetic radiation, including light. As a result of these interactions, some light gets scattered, some is absorbed and transformed into kinetic energy, and some passes through. Thanks to this, we can observe the blue sky above us and atmospheric fog when looking into the distance and many other beautiful effects.



The same principles apply on a smaller scale. Imagine entering an old, dusty house on a sunny day. As you enter, the microscopic dust particles covering the floor are set in motion and suspended in the air for a while. You look up to the window and see a beam of light cutting through the mix of air and dust. The light illuminates the room, but you can see that it is dispersed unevenly, as the varying density of the air-dust mixture creates a mesmerizing spectacle of light and shadow. The same thing happens during concerts when spotlights cut through the thick smoke. Or when a single beam of light cuts through a hole in the clouds. Or when your car’s headlights create a ‘wall of light’ effect when driving through fog.



The point is - it is rare for light to get from its source to the final point of its journey without encountering any obstacles. Each interaction with other particles along its way will change the light’s color, direction, or intensity. The result would look ‘flat’ and artificial without considering all this when rendering computer graphics. However, when appropriately implemented, the light and objects on the scene work together to create a cohesive and natural-looking image.

How it's emulated in computer graphics

Several techniques have been developed to replicate the scattering effect and achieve realistic results at an acceptable performance cost. Some developers used particle effects to emulate this (we do this too). Still, it was a very tedious process - the particle had to be created with a specific, static scene in mind and didn’t work in any other circumstances. Other developers used post-processing shaders that added lighting effects based on screen-space information. Those could adapt in real-time, but only as long as the light source was on the screen. In The Riftbreaker, we limited ourselves to exponential distance fog - a simple algorithm that created a fog that got denser the further it was from the camera. We could change its color to adapt it to the time of day. It worked okay in open areas, but we needed something better in Crystal Caverns.



The technique we decided to use is called Volumetric Lighting. It can emulate the previously mentioned effects based on a couple of relatively simple steps. Instead of painstakingly calculating light scattering for individual pixels by casting rays, the scene is simplified by dividing it into larger volumes. We conduct calculations for all of these volumes individually and later combine the results into the final rendering output for the visible scene. This dramatically reduces the workload while giving us an approximation that is good enough for in-game use.

Volumetric Lighting explained

The scene is sliced up into cubical volumes calculated from the camera frustum perspective. Their exact number depends on the game’s rendering resolution, which we divide by 8. If we take 1440p as an example, we get 320 volumes by width and 240 volumes by height. When it comes to depth, the resolution is fixed - it’s always 64 layers, which, given The Riftbreaker’s isometric camera placement, gives us roughly 300 meters of depth to work with.



At this point, the volumes are empty, and the light would travel through them unobstructed, like through a vacuum. We must add a transfer medium to the equation for the desired result. As we mentioned earlier, the air serves that function in the real world, along with all the suspended particles. We generate a 3D texture to simulate this phenomenon. It uses the exponential height fog at its core, generating a dense mist at the deepest points of the scene that becomes thinner as the distance from the ground increases. The texture carries information about density, which varies slightly from point to point. A new texture with different values is generated every frame. We can control its density and variability using a set of parameters to get the desired artistic effect.



We can now move on to the next stage of the process. Using the density volume grid from the previous step, we can calculate how light would behave while traveling through each volume. When we combine the air density data and the light parameters, we approximate how the light would scatter in that area. We perform these calculations for the entire grid, creating a 3D map of light scattering on the visible graphics scene.


A sample scene we used for development. It features multiple sources of light, which sets a good benchmark for us.


64 layers of the light scattering model data generated from the sample scene. They are presented one by one, going from the bottom to top.

To present these results to the player, we need to perform one more step called light scattering transmittance accumulation. During this operation, we sum up how much light is transmitted through each of our 64 layers of volumes and what the final result should look like from the perspective of our game camera. Starting from the camera’s position, we take the light scattering values for the first volume and add them to the layer beneath it. Then, we add the sum of our first two layers to the third one, considering the air transmittance value. Rinse and repeat until we reach the bottom of our 64-layer grid.


The same data presented after the light scattering transmittance accumulation step. You can see the influence that the underlying layers have on their neighbors.

The simplification we applied earlier, treating the scene as a lower-resolution grid, now causes some issues. Since we have taken average values for larger areas, the resulting image would be full of solid-color squares with sharp edges visible where different volumes meet. This image artifact is called banding. The unpleasant phenomenon can be fixed by applying temporal techniques. First, we add a slight jitter to our calculations. For every frame, the lighting for each volume is calculated at a different point within its bounds. This guarantees that the result will be different in every frame. Then, we can use a couple of frames of data to get an average of volumetric lighting within a time period. This allows us to achieve a soft image without aliasing, banding, or other artifacts, apart from slight ghosting, which is unfortunate but far better than the alternatives.





A sample scene before and after the temporal techniques are applied. You can clearly see the lighting artifacts on the light shafts, which disappear completely after introducing jitter into our calculations.

Performance results

We conducted some performance tests to see what kind of impact Volumetric Lighting has on The Riftbreaker at various points of the day and night cycle. We chose sample scenes in various biomes and measured the performance results at 0:00, 8:00, 16:00, and 21:00 in-game time. We conducted these tests on a Ryzen 5 5600X CPU, 32 GB DDR4 RAM, and RTX 3080 GPU machine running Windows 11. The game was running at 4K resolution, with all settings at maximum, raytracing enabled, and no upsampling or resolution scaling.


Sample scene from the Jungle biome.



Sample scene from the Magma biome.



Sample scene from the Caverns biome.



Sample scene from the Acid biome.

Conclusion

Volumetric Lighting is not a new technique. It has been used in games for years, and you have most likely seen it in dozens of them. The introduction of the Crystal Caverns biome into The Riftbreaker seemed like a perfect opportunity to add this feature to The Schmetterling Engine. It makes the graphics scene more realistic and adds significance to what used to be empty space. It also gives our artists additional tools to create atmospheric ambiances, with delicate fog and lights playing a significant role in creating the game’s mood.

We hope you enjoyed learning about this technique as much as we enjoyed the R&D process behind it. What other aspects of game development would you like to learn about? Let us know in the comments and on our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. Volumetric Lighting is undoubtedly not the last feature we will expand our engine with. When we decide to add something new, you will certainly hear about this on our Discord first. You will also see the previews during our Twitch streams at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios every Tuesday and Thursday. See you there!

EXOR Studios

Hey everyone! We want to thank you for checking out the demo and continuing to play since the Future Games Show. Since the world premiere of the game, we’ve learned a lot. We want Stop Dead to be the best game it can be; so we’ve decided that on October 5th we’ll be releasing the game into Early Access.

While this is a slight change of plans, as a two-person development team, switching to Early Access will give us more time to take in community feedback, make changes, add content, and make the game the very best version for a full launch. We’re ready to hear all the feedback, so pull in your friends for Early Access and let’s make this game kick-ass together.

Early Access will have 23 levels for you to experience at first. Additionally, we have made many changes since the FGS demo. The remaining levels are built, but we want to use this extra time to polish them even more. We will be releasing these levels over the course of Early Access, story included.

Leaderboards and Twitch Integration will also be available during Early Access for you all to compete and have fun with.

We’ll keep updating you all on the development. Thank you for coming along on this wild run with us.

- Ryan and Mike

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2164030/Stop_Dead/

Hey, Gas Jockeys! ⛽

Another hotfix related to the Employee Update is live. We're still tracking the issues that you've been sending us in the comments under the announcements, Steam discussions, and on our discord servers. Rest assured, our team is working tirelessly to investigate and fix those issues.

But enough talkin' Let's jump straight into the patch notes:

• Fixed an issue that prevented cars from being removed by the UFO button
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented employees from using newly acquired features (fuel pumps, car lifts)
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented employee autopay when the amount of money was too small
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented employees from taking the second assignment when their main job was to clean the station
  
• Fixed an issue that made employees stuck in resting mode in some scenarios

Just before we finish this announcement, I'd like to let you know that our team is already working on a much anticipated quest system rework. I cannot say much more for now, but as soon as I have something new to share in that matter, I'll happily announce it here.

And of course some of our team members are already working on a freshly announced Tidal Wave DLC. If you want to stay up-to-date with any news, consider adding it to your wishlist.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2600880/Gas_Station_Simulator__Tidal_Wave_DLC/

~Your humble marketing guy – Sewek

The dawn of the Steam-SHMUP-Festival brings with it a brand-new M.O.O.D.S. demo which is available right now!

Test yourself against corrupted mechs who will stop at nothing to obliterate you, upgrade your weapons and unleash (bullet)hell upon your foes.

Our demo will give you a taste of what is to be expected in the full game and features the first two levels of the Pride Kingdom and the Roaring Smelter, two bossfights, local coop with up to 4 players, 4 playable classes and a huge arsenal of guns and modifications!