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.
The most important thing has been the start of Alpha testing.
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.
We took part in the Steam Games Festival: Summer Edition
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.
We also released The Riftbreaker: Prologue.
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?
We added DirectX 12 support and raytracing effects
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!
We released two completely new trailers.
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!
We didn’t go to any conventions, unfortunately, but they came to us online.
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.
2021
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.