Hello everyone!

We are beyond excited to tell you that The Riftbreaker will be released on the 14th of October 2021! The game will be available for a base price of $29.99 and localized into ten languages.



We can't even begin to tell you how excited we are to reach this milestone. Only five weeks from now, you will be able to begin your exploration of Galatea 37 in the Campaign Mode, test your skills in the ever-changing Survival, or simply test the limits of the game and your creativity in the Sandbox Mode.



In the Campaign Mode, you will join Ashley and Mr. Riggs on their mission to open a two-way portal from Galatea 37 back to Earth. This task will require you to set up a network of persistent bases all around the planet to gather all the necessary resources - with less than positive response from the local fauna. The Campaign Mode will test your combat skills, as well as base design and economy management. Procedurally generated maps, dozens of technologies to unlock, and complete freedom of choice will keep you busy on Galatea 37 for hours!



In Survival Mode, you will set to endure as long as you can against hordes of enemy creatures attacking you in waves, increasing in strength and numbers all the time. Gameplay in Survival is much faster than in the Campaign Mode. Research timers and requirements are reduced, and bonus technologies are awarded at the start of the mission to aid you in completing those missions.



The Sandbox Mode is the most relaxed of the bunch, allowing you to simply build the base of your dreams and then test it against all the different threats and scenarios you can come up with. In this mode, you have access to the special Sandbox Control Panel, which allows you to spawn every single variety of creature available in the game, enable some cheats, and even change the weather and time of day.



To further expand the replayability and to give you an avenue to unleash your creativity, The Riftbreaker will ship with the full suite of our in-engine development tools that we used to create the game. The Level and Mission Editors will allow you to create custom scenarios and even entirely new campaigns, while the Riftbreaker Editor will allow you to edit drop rates, weapon properties, research trees, and much more.



The release of the 1.0 version will mark an important point in our 3.5 years-long journey through the ups and downs of The Riftbreaker's development process. When we started working on the game in 2018, we never expected that it would get so much attention and gather an amazing community of players from all around the world. The amount of time you put into playing The Riftbreaker: Prologue, the mods you created for it, and the great feedback you've been providing have all made a difference. We are sure that you will like the final result.

Mark your calendars on the 14th of October 2021 for your trip to Galatea 37.

Hey everyone! We've been working in secret on a special present for all of you and today we can finally anoounce it - Zombie Driver Immortal Edition is now available on the PlayStation 4 and cross-buy enabled with the PlayStation 3. This means that if you've previously bought Zombie Driver on the PS3 or received it for free in the PlayStation Plus subscription, you can now download it for free! There's even more to this news - the PlayStation 4 version of the game is also going to be available on the PlayStation 5, so if you've bought the game once you will be able to play it on three PlayStation generations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M36jVE4l9s

Zombie Driver Immortal Edition runs at slick 60FPS on the PlayStation 4 and includes all of the DLCs that have ever been released for the game. We've poured a lot of love into this game and we're sure that you will enjoy this version. If you like squashing thousands of zombies and loads of unrestricted fun, please consider tossing a coin to your friendly game dev ;)



Have fun slaying zombies!

Hello!

After months of hard work, we are very happy to announce that The Riftbreaker: Prologue is now available to download for free to enjoy for everyone!

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

As the name implies The Riftbreaker: Prologue is the story prequel to our latest project - The Riftbreaker. It allows you to experience the events taking place before the story campaign of the main game. Explore an entirely new world. Gather resources. Build up a base. Defend yourself from thousands of alien creatures. Or just take the scenic route and do whatever you want - the choice is yours.



To celebrate this event we're also running an extra special EXOR Studios Sale with the lowest prices that we've ever done!

We'd like to use this opportunity to tell you even more about The Riftbreaker and how the game is shaping up. Check out the Gameplay Trailer:


We originally started EXOR Studios as a modding group in 2003. Now, 17 years later, we are still working as a small group of individuals with everyone participating in our games' grand vision and design. Fan feedback has always been crucial to how we make our games. We've learned to open up our development process more and more as early as possible. During the next two weeks, we will be running multiple live streams of the Riftbreaker, straight from our latest development build. On August 7th we will be hosting a full day Developer AMA on our Discord with multiple members of the development team. If you'd like to ask us anything, whether it's about The Riftbreaker, X-Morph: Defense, Zombie Driver, or even D.I.P.R.I.P. - we'll be waiting there for you!



Thank you for all your continuing support!

RGB lighting has become a mainstay of gaming accessories in the past couple of years. Apart from giving our peripherals and PC components a sleek, modern look, it can also serve an informative purpose. Different colors can give us a quick update on the state of our machine or the running software. It gives the developers the ability to convey information at just a glance, increasing accessibility and ease of use - some of the most important aspects of good software.

There are various companies that produce RGB-enabled gear for gaming enthusiasts all over the world. Most of those companies, such as Razer, Asus or Logitech, use their own APIs to control these features. They might offer slightly different approaches to handling the communication between hardware and software, so extensive, hands-on testing is key. We decided to implement RGB highlights in The Riftbreaker and X-Morph: Defense and would like to share our experience with you.


The main menu ambient highlight for our previous game, X-Morph: Defense.

We have already had some experience with the dynamic RGB highlights while working on X-Morph: Defense. We were one of the first companies to add the mouse and keyboard support for the Xbox One. Working with the Razer Turret set gave us an option to dip our toes into the world of RGB illumination. In X-Morph, we used the keyboard highlights to show the players which keys could be pressed in order to perform a game action. The row of function keys represented the health of the player’s ship and core. The keys that were not relevant to the gameplay received a blue, ambient highlight. While not overly spectacular or flashy, we thought it would serve the game best.


The action keys receive their own highlights in distinct colors, while the rest of the keyboard informs the player about the status of the ship and the core.

Once we take the controls away from the player, we can go a little more crazy with the RGB effects.

The desire to keep the highlights functional limits our options, but we did go a little crazy at times when we took the controls away from the player. During the cutscenes, we gave our camera shake system a degree of control over the RGB highlights. This way, we managed to synchronize the camera shake with the behavior of the LEDs. The whole keyboard could flash white, yellow, and red according to what was currently going on in the game. It was a great feature for increasing the immersion and expanding the experience of playing the game beyond the screen.

Our next project, The Riftbreaker, follows that exact philosophy. The Riftbreaker is a mix of various genres - it is a base-building game with elements of exploration, survival and hack and slash. The player takes the role of the titular Riftbreaker, an elite scientist/commando, whose task is to prepare a distant alien planet for human colonization. The game runs on our proprietary game engine, the Schmetterling 2.0. It means that we handle the integration with peripherals by ourselves. In order to get the most out of RGB illumination, we thoroughly analyzed the API of our keyboard, looking for ways of implementation that would work well together with our design goals for the game. The fact that the API allows us to either control the illumination of individual LEDs or virtualized keys gives us everything we need in order to design a system that will be both functional and stylish.

Bearing that in mind, when designing the RGB highlights for The Riftbreaker we decided to divide the scheme into two parts. The first part is the full, solid-color ambient illumination of the device. This way we can communicate the application state to the user, as well as emphasize special events in the game. By choosing a single color for a situation and applying it to all the LEDs on the keyboard we achieve a solid foundation that is compatible with all RGB devices.


Exploration mode highlights for The Riftbreaker. We stick mainly to the main colors of the key art - green, blue and orange, creating a consistent visual style.


The key art for The Riftbreaker.

With The Riftbreaker we are embracing this exact philosophy. Instead of solely bombarding the player with a barrage of colorful, flashing lights, we are going to use the RGB lighting in a much more sophisticated way. In The Riftbreaker we can operate in two modes - exploration and building. Each of those modes have their own set of highlights, indicating which keys are responsible for game actions. They are easily distinguishable by their ambient lighting. In the exploration mode most of the keyboard is orange, whereas in the building mode, the ambient light will turn blue.


Both the colors and the highlighted action keys change when going into the building mode.

We are very careful when choosing the color palette and their intensity. It is quite easy to predict the user experience when we use solid colors. The situation would be entirely different if we utilized sudden flashes and extreme hue changes. While these could be acceptable on the keyboard in some scenarios, not all players might enjoy their RGB-enabled TV or chair (yes, RGB chairs do exist!) flashing violently during the gameplay. That is why we need a lot of consideration when it comes to what we want to communicate and in what manner to do it. Once the first part of the design of the highlights is finished we move on to the second layer - custom actions for specific keys.


The F1-F4 and F9-F12 blocks inform the player about the health of the Mecha and the Headquarters, respectively.

All the other keys are color-coded so that you can easily tell which button you should press in order to do something in the game. It can be useful if you forget the full control scheme, or if you are just learning the ropes. Just a glance at the keyboard will immediately tell you ‘something will happen when you press this button’. While this does not get rid of the need to teach the players basic controls, it greatly reduces the risk of forgetting them. Color-coded keys can also improve the tutorial experience. Illuminated keys can help the player get accustomed to the controls and make the learning process faster and easier.

There are a couple of brief moments in The Riftbreaker where you do not directly control Mr. Riggs. We plan to use those to add some cool, full-keyboard effects to amplify the gaming experience. It will happen, for example, during the teleportation between Rifts or after the mech is destroyed. The on-screen effects and the RGB highlights will complement each other, making the game events much more tangible. These are just the ideas we have for now, and we expect to come up with much more over the course of The Riftbreaker’s development.


One of the effects we plan to add in the future - explosion highlights.

Another cool feature that we plan to implement along with the RGB highlights is the stream integration. Streaming allows the content creators and fans to interact in real-time and create a bond that is impossible to achieve in any other way. Even though the broadcaster and the viewer might be thousands of miles apart, the wonders of the internet allow us to feel like we are all next to each other. We want to amplify that feeling. Imagine how cool it would be if the ambient lighting of your RGB keyboard could provide you with the info about the streamer’s game. It would be a powerful tool to convey the in-game atmosphere and increase the viewer's immersion. Small things like these can help us make The Riftbreaker a much more interesting experience.


Teleporting takes the controls away, so we can play with the keyboard a little. Another feature we plan to add later on.

That’s all we have for you today. We hope you will enjoy these features and that they will extend the gaming experience beyond the screen of your device. If you’re interested in more insights into the development of The Riftbreaker, we highly encourage you to join our amazing Discord community, where we discuss the game with our fans. It’s also a place where you can leave feedback and suggestions that we read and respond to on a daily basis. www.discord.gg/exorstudios

Thank you for reading and see you next time!

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

The moment we have all been waiting for is here!

https://youtu.be/d1p6N44UwvI

Today, almost exactly one year after our initial game reveal, we have started sending out The Riftbreaker Alpha Test access keys to our community members! The first batch of keys is out in the open.



The keys are being sent out to those people, who applied to join our testing through the form available on our Discord. Don’t worry if you have not received your key yet. We are distributing them in waves, according to your activity in the community and the hardware you have. We will be sending out new waves of keys together with new updates to the alpha. If you’re new to our community and would like to sign-up for Alpha testing then you can still do so through our Discord. www.discord.gg/exorstudios



This “pre-Alpha 2” build of the Riftbreaker offers an Introductory Mission and Survival/Sandbox Mode. The Introductory Mission is a scripted experience that is meant to guide you through the basics of gameplay. Once you are ready for a real test of your skills, try the Survival mode. You can pick one of the pre-made difficulty settings we designed or adjust the difficulty sliders to your liking. If you feel especially adventurous, you can also randomize all the game parameters and jump in blind, only to see how long you can last. There is also a sandbox mode available, where you can enjoy endless gameplay without being bothered by enemy attacks. It’s a perfect setting to test new solutions and toy around with the game. A Sandbox Control Panel will allow you to change what happens in the game world, too.



Please take note of whatever bugs you find in the game and report them to us, using the built-in ‘Send bug report’ option in the game menu. We are going to be fixing the problems on a regular basis. If the game crashes, it will ask you what you were doing at the time of the crash and ask you to send the crash report. This is very important - the sooner we can catch a game-breaking bug, the sooner we can fix it. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts about the game on Discord, too!



You are free to stream your game sessions, make YouTube videos and other forms of online content. The only thing we ask of you is to disclose to your audience is that the game is not finished and that the footage they see does not represent the final quality of the Riftbreaker. We work on improving the game every day.



Some Streamers, YouTubers and Media have already had access to our previous pre-Alpha build in November. The current “pre-Alpha 2” build has a lot of changes and improvements since that time. If you’d like to know what exactly has changed - here is the changelog for the current build:

• New Streaming Features:
  
• Added votes between attack waves.
  
• Added new event types: rain, meteor shower, unlock research, resource comet, change time of day, new objective.
  
• Added ability to enable/disable positive/negative stream events.
  
• Added streaming settings screen to the Pause menu,
  
• Added a popup informing about streaming after load
  
• New Difficulty Modes
  
• Custom Difficulty - now you can tweak the game’s settings to your liking including gameplay time, resource amounts, enemy wave strength, building cost or even enemy damage multipliers
  
• Random Difficulty - let the game surprise you with some unknown modifications
  
• New Feature: Sandbox Control Panel - It allows you to send in custom waves of enemies, grant resources or summon weather effects. Have you ever wanted to test your defense setup against a wave of 10000 canoptrix?
  
• New Feature: Treasure Detector - an equipable item that adds a whole new gameplay layer of searching for buried resources through a “hot’n’cold” mechanic. Hidden resource caches and resource deposits including geothermal vents can be found across the map.
  
• New surface properties system - different types of surfaces (e.g. ground, metal floor, sand, mud) have unique properties including walk speed, walk sound, walk effects etc.
  
• New Feature: All defense tower types are now upgradable.
  
• New Floor Building System - much improved interface for mass building floor.
  
• New Power Plants
  
• New Building: Carbonium Power Plant - burns carbonium to produce energy
  
• New Building: Animal Biomass Power Plant - burns animal biomass to produce energy
  
• New Building: Plant Biomass Power Plant - burns plant biomass to produce energy
  
• New Resource: Geothermal Vent. A few geothermal vents appear on the map, plus a few remain hidden to be found using the treasure detector.
  
• New Research Path - Atomic Power - it is now possible to mine and refine uranium to build nuclear power plants.
  
• New Resource: Uranium
  
• New Building: Rare Element Mine - used to mine uranium and other rare elements.
  
• New Building: Uranium Centrifuge - used to enrich uranium.
  
• New Building: Nuclear Power Plant - produces energy from uranium.
  
• New Building: Carbonium Synthesizer - produces carbonium from steel using energy.
  
• New Bio Self Sustainability Path
  
• New Building: Flora Cultivator - grows vegetation that can be harvested for biomass.
  
• New Building: Flora Collector - harvests vegetation for biomass.
  
• New Building: Bio Composter - produces flammable gas from biomass.
  
• Walls are now upgradeable - reduce the number of layers necessary to survive
  
• New Weapons
  
• New Weapon: Plasma Gun - rapid fire energy gun.
  
• New Weapon: Small Machine Gun - basic machinegun.
  
• New Weapon: Laser - high power laser that shoots a continuous beam that increases damage over time.
  
• New Feature: Charged attack mechanic. Single-shot weapons can now have an additional, charged attack.
  
• New Feature: Critical Hits System. Mr. Riggs can now deal critical hits with much higher damage.
  
• New Feature: Items can be dismantled for resources.
  
• New and improved enemies
  
• Tougher enemy strains - Alpha and Ultra. They appear mostly on higher difficulty settings.
  
• New Arachnoid Boss design - changed model, added destructible armor, tweaked movement speed in regards to animations, added melee attack. It can now also lay eggs and take part in wave attacks on higher difficulty levels.
  
• New Canoptrix Spawner design, model, sounds, - canoptrix spawn from eggs.
  
• New Feature: Added mass Upgrade, Repair and Deconstruction tools. Now you can perform all of these tasks very quickly.
  
• New Weather system:
  
• Random weather events can now happen during the game also outside of streaming mode.
  
• Added time of day icon.
  
• Added new weather events including Rain and Rock Rain(TM)
  
• Improved world randomization and new map sets. Now the world has even more variety.
  
• Added a new automated crash dump upload and feedback tool - now you can just click “Send” after a crash and type some nice @#$#%^@ for us!
  

• Optimized performance - the game runs up to 30% faster.
  
• Tweaked difficulty modes:
  
• Easy is now much easier
  
• Normal is now slightly easier
  
• Hard is now much harder and lasts 90 minutes instead of 60 minutes
  
• Brutal is #@$%%!
  
• Stream integration: Add and Take Away Resource events now work based on percentage of total storage available.
  
• New event manager handling game logic. Changed quest spawning rules.
  
• The minigun weapon has been moved to heavy weapons and buffed significantly.
  
• Changed aiming constraints for towers - Sentinel Towers can now aim at enemies standing directly beside them, Flamer Towers will not shoot towards the ground.
  
• Tweaked building upgrade levels - higher level buildings have improved efficiency with much better cost/effect ratio.
  
• Removed ammo storage from HQ, added more storage to Mech.
  
• Health and efficiency of many Level 2 and Level 3 buildings tweaked.
  
• Less lights for building effects - decrease visual noise.
  
• Changes to the appearance of damage numbers.
  
• Mines disappear under buildings, changed mine behavior.

• New vegetation shader - added a sub-surface scattering effect to foliage for improved rendering quality.
  
• Unified vegetation fire patterns - all vegetation props are now flammable with improved fire effects.
  
• New enemy damage skin system. - Enemies look hurt when damaged.
  
• LightFadeInOutAffector added to fire - now burning objects light up gradually.
  
• Multiple sets of new rock and crystal formations.
  
• New mushroom models.
  
• Additive bloom - optimized performance.

• New Main Menu music.
  
• Changed building sounds.
  
• New sounds for most weapons.
  
• New GUI sounds.
  
• New bullet hit sounds.
  
• New sounds added for Arachnoid Boss.
  
• Startup sounds buffer increased.

• Fixed shield shader.
  
• Fixed dash melee damage.
  
• Fixed multiple crashes connected to the big map.
  
• Fixed searching for unit type with a fixed distance from the player (look for the boss instead of the marker).
  
• Fixed crash on FinishSurvival event.
  
• Fixed wall flickering
  
• Multiple anonymous small and large bug fixes that didn’t make it into the change log - R.I.P.

Contact us through Discord and Social Media!
www.discord.gg/exorstudios
www.facebook.com/exorstudios
www.twitter.com/exorstudios
www.mixer.com/exor_studios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios

Hello everyone!

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

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

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



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

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

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



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



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

EXOR Studios

You still have a chance to survive in The Riftbreaker when your HQ explodes, but you will have a lot of cleaning up to do.

Now that you know how we prepare particle effects in our games, let’s move on to some practical applications of those. Single explosions, bullets, blood splats or wood splinters flying around look fun, but our possibilities do not end there. We very often combine multiple effects into sequences. Thanks to this technique it is possible to achieve massive, spectacular cascades of fire, sparks, and debris that look as if they were taken from a Hollywood action film. It’s quite an interesting process, which requires some creativity and destructive imagination, so let’s take a look!


Multiple buildings changing their state at once is often a sight to behold.

Most objects that you see in EXOR Studios’ games can be either damaged or completely destroyed during regular gameplay. Some of those objects are small and relatively insignificant - a tree, for example. It can either stand perfectly healthy or be destroyed. Entities with the health point system are a little different. Apart from the “100% OK” state (max health) and the “dead” state (0 health) we also have a ‘damaged” state - anywhere between 1% and 99% health (approximately, of course ;)). The bigger an entity is, the more HP it is likely to have - and if it has a lot of HP, we might give it destruction levels.


Friendly fire is not a thing in The Riftbreaker, but we used it to show you different destruction levels for the Armory in a controlled environment.

Destruction levels are damage thresholds that we use to trigger certain effects. For example, the Headquarters in The Riftbreaker look different when they are at 100%, 75% or 10% health, with more smoke and fire breaking out as the building becomes damaged. This system is not exclusive to buildings and applies to creatures as well - they get wounded and bloody as the damage increases. The purpose of the destruction level system is to give players feedback. We want you to know that your attacks are hurting the creature you’re hunting. We want you to know that the creatures hunting you can hurt you too.


The core blowing up in X-Morph: Defense is not a positive thing, but the visuals at least make up for the game loss.

There are usually several destruction levels for a destructible entity. When the health drops below a threshold specified by one of the destruction levels, a group of effects is triggered. Physical parts are spawned, each with individual properties, such as weight, dimensions, buoyancy, friction upon hitting the ground - you name it. The parts are given the texture of the object they were spawned from in order to maintain consistency. What is also important - the parts do not just appear out of nowhere - they are pushed out by a force at the center of the object that randomly changes the direction and power (maintaining a vector aiming away from the object). This way you can’t predict what the debris will do once it starts flying.


A particle effect can be attached to any of the yellow spheres.

When the destruction level is reached, the material on the object changes as well. Cracks, impact holes and other damage starts to show. To reach the level of visual polish we aim for it’s necessary to add particle effects. They are attached to specific points on the model and we try to set them up as realistically as possible. If there is a structural vulnerability, a pipe, or some exposed wires - we set it on fire. Each model requires manual setup when it comes to attaching effects.


We started playing around with explosion sequences in X-Morph: Defense.

An important aspect of this feature is that we can control when a particle effect starts its ‘playback’. This allows us to prepare sequences of explosions. For example, when the Headquarters in The Riftbreaker reaches 0 HP, a sequence of multiple explosions will start. They happen all over the place, varying in intensity, culminating in the complete destruction of the building in a big bang.

We hope you enjoyed our little articles. If you did, join us on Discord: www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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

Kaboom.

When a Steam user left a review on the X-Morph: Defense Store Page saying that the game looked as if it was directed by Michael Bay, it dawned on us - there are lots of explosions in our games. We never gave that much thought, to be honest, but taking a look back it has always been true for all our projects. We love blowing things up and we think we’re quite good at it, so we would like to tell you what goes into creating realistic-looking explosions (and other effects) for EXOR Studios games, including The Riftbreaker.


A sample scene from Zombie Driver HD. There are lots of particles in this one - blood, sparks, explosions… The game wouldn’t be the same without these effects.

The explosions you see in our games are realized through the extensive use of the particle effects system. The particles are prepared by our artist in a specialized tool and then imported into the game. They consist of quadrilaterals (two-dimensional shapes, often referred to as ‘quads’) with a texture and set transparency. The artist can give each of the quads different properties, changing their overall appearance and how they behave in relation to other quads within the same effect, but it is the texture that is the base of it all. In much simpler terms - we set flat images in motion, make them see-through and add some eye candy.


A view from the editor we use - Particle Universe. The tree goes on and on, and each node is a different variable!

You need to have a general idea of what you want to achieve and pick the right textures for the job. There are many types you can choose from. They vary between each other in how they interact with other textures in terms of light and transparency. We mainly use emissives (textures that appear as if they were light sources and can be blended with textures that are underneath them) and refracts (special textures that distort the surrounding area, like in the case of hot air, or a shockwave). When we are not working on explosions, we also make use of alpha blend textures. They do not fake being light sources, but simply mix with other textures in their vicinity. The whole process of creating a particle effect begins with choosing the right texture for the context.


By choosing correct textures you can get a whole range of effects.

Every effect consists of sub effects. They are lower-level structures that allow you to group quads together and apply some properties to them - more on those properties later, but in general - you can individually move the sub effects and make them behave in a certain way. Of course, it is extremely important to position the sub effects right. You don’t want a large cloud of black smoke to cover up all the fire, sparks and debris from the remaining ones. In general, you need to start creating an effect with a clear end goal in mind. Reference videos and images are very useful at this point.


The effects look different in editor and in game, so it’s necessary to test everything live. By the way - this explosion consists of 1042 quads!

Another important piece of the puzzle is the emitter. Every sub effect contains one. It can be seen as the ‘starting point’ of the particle. It controls the spatial properties of the effect. The quads are spawned from the emitter, and the artist specifies all their properties. The particles can be rendered at any given angle, or they can be set to always face the camera. They can be moved in any direction and at any speed, giving the creator complete control over the end result. That’s already a lot of steps, and we’re not done yet.


Boss dying in X-Morph: Defense - let the images speak for themselves.

What you can add on top of the quads rendered by the emitter are the so-called affectors. An affector is a function that can change the quad you’ve already rendered, for example by changing its transparency or color over time. Take a cloud of smoke as an example. The affector will change it in a couple of ways over its lifetime. First, it will be quite small and opaque, growing larger over time and becoming more transparent, just like smoke in real life. Thanks to the affectors we can control when and how quickly it happens and which direction should the quad move.


The Riftbreaker will feature lots of particles, and since we are always learning new things, you can expect them to be even more flashy!

Combining all these things together is a difficult, but incredibly exciting task. It takes years of practice and hours of watching real-life examples of the effects you want to simulate to reach proficiency. We’re pretty sure our particle artist is on several watchlists by now, because of all the videos of explosions, fires and controlled demolitions he has googled over time. Still - worth it!

Next time we will tell you about sequences of explosions - something even more spectacular :) Stay tuned and join the Discord! www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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

The biggest gaming holiday in Europe (perhaps in the world) has arrived! It is time for Gamescom 2019. We are present there as well. You can find us in hall 10.1, booth A031. We recommend using the official Gamescom app to make the navigation a little easier.



During this year’s event, we are showcasing our latest project - The Riftbreaker. Visit our booth and play our custom-made event demo - a special, standalone mission designed to take you through the basics of gameplay. There is a little bit of everything there - base-building, fighting, exploration, and if you prefer to just admire the views - that is possible, too.

When you’re at our booth, you can also get some sweet EXOR Studios swag. We have loads of goodies to give away, including pins, energy drinks, pens, and X-Morph: Defense game codes. The only thing you need to do is to come over and spin the wheel of fortune. Don’t worry - we won’t run out ;)

Lastly, you can take a picture with a giant, 2.5m sculpture of Mr. Riggs! Come and see it for yourself!



Hall 10.1, booth A031. We’re going to be there during the whole show. Come and say hi, especially if you’re a member of our Discord server. If you aren’t, join now! www.discord.gg/exorstudios We’re going to be chatting there during the event and sharing some sweet, behind-the-scenes footage. We will also be giving closed beta access to early builds of The Riftbreaker through our Discord.

Lastly, we are also going to be streaming The Riftbreaker development builds right here on our Steam page. Look out for further announcements :)

See you there!

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

Hello everyone!

We are holding an AMA on the r/Games subreddit right now. The general topic of the thread is going to be our game engine, The Schmetterling. We have been working on it continuously since the days of Zombie Driver and we think it is a pretty interesting topic in the days of big-name, free-to-use game engines.

The AMA is available under this URL:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/cps839/hello_we_are_exor_studios_we_have_been_making/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

Since this is an AMA - ‘Ask Me Anything’ - you can ask us about anything you like. The questions do not have to be related to The Schmetterling Engine. You can ask about any aspect of indie dev life, our games, plans for the future and other things that might interest you. All questions are welcome!

If you can’t make it this time, join our Discord server. It’s an almost 24/7 AMA ;)
Find us at www.discord.gg/exorstudios!