Hello Riftbreakers!

In the past few weeks, we’ve shared some of our design choices and how your feedback has shaped The Riftbreaker. You’ve seen that being a designer means making creative decisions while working within the limits of the game’s world and genre, and giving you what you expect. Today, we want to discuss one of our toughest challenges with every World Expansion: designing Mr. Riggs’ weapons. Combat is a big part of what makes this game unique. Our goal is to let you feel powerful while still keeping the game challenging. In this article, we’ll go over the rules, limits, and ideas we use when creating new weapons for The Riftbreaker.

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Since there are dozens of enemy creature types in The Riftbreaker, we made sure to give you a lot of toys to deal with each type. However, coming up with new weapons is not as straightforward as it might seem at first!

Coming up with new weapons for the game is always exciting. We often have very different ideas for what Mr. Riggs should use, but they all share one thing: they’re based in science fiction. This setting is fun to work with because it lets us imagine powerful weapons, but also gives us some ‘semi-realistic’ limits to follow:

• Every weapon we create must be a human-crafted device. Sorry, D&D fans, no Staff of Firebreathing this time - unless you want us to attach a flamethrower to a stick.
• Weapons need to have a clear and satisfying effect when you use them, but not go overboard. This means we have to skip some of the wildest ideas that would be hard to explain or make work. For example, a weapon that creates sinkholes would be amazing, but there’s no way to make that happen in The Riftbreaker.
• Each weapon should focus on one type of damage. For example, when you fire a rocket, you expect it to explode and cause area damage - not split into lasers that cut the battlefield in half.

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We sometimes bend the rules to accommodate some of our wildest weapons. The Gravity Grenades are a good example of this.

Usually, rules and limitations don't facilitate creativity, but for us, it’s the opposite. These guidelines help us quickly decide if an idea will fit in The Riftbreaker, saving us time and effort. It can be tough to invent a new rocket launcher that feels different from the ones already in the game, but figuring out how to make an idea work in our world is part of the fun.

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In the world of plasma guns and handheld nuke launchers, swinging a regular old sword can be a nice change of pace!

The other fun part is making sure the weapon fits the game’s rules. Getting it to shoot and hit enemies is just the start. Guns in The Riftbreaker can have extra features that really change how combat feels. Besides damage, here are some of those features:

• Ammo cost - How much ammunition the weapon consumes per shot. If a gun can deal a lot of damage with a single shot, you likely won’t be able to keep firing it for long. Some weapons do not consume any ammo, but they are limited in other ways. For example, even the strongest Blaster won’t come close to the power of a Plasma Gun. You can, however, fire it even when your base has been turned to ashes, and you’ve run out of bullets for everything else.
• Rate of Fire - How many times per second you can shoot. Enough said.
• Target Piercing - A percentage chance of any single projectile fired to pierce the first target hit.
• Cluster Projectiles - A percentage chance for a projectile to ricochet off the first target hit and fly off in a different direction.
• Homing - Projectiles with homing will actively try to bend their trajectory to hit the target.
• Auto Aim - Weapons with auto aim will adjust the shot angle to maximize the chance of a hit.
• Spread - This specifies whether the projectiles fired from your gun will follow your crosshair exactly, or if you can expect some variation between shots.
• Hit Point Gain Per Hit - A percentage value that returns some of the damage dealt by Mr. Riggs back to him as healing.
• Splash Damage Radius - How far from the initial hit site the damage spreads.
• Projectiles per Shot - How many projectiles can fire simultaneously per one trigger pull
• Projectiles per Burst - How many projectiles can fire one by one per one trigger pull

Not every feature works for every weapon, so we adjust each one as needed. For example, the Laser or Flamethrower don’t use the “projectiles per shot” stat because they don’t fire projectiles. But we can’t treat them the same across all stats. The flamethrower doesn’t need piercing since its flames go through targets, while the laser works differently. Our designers have to consider all these interactions - some combinations can make a weapon much more powerful, leading to significant differences within a weapon class.

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We gave the Blaster infinite ammo to make sure that you are never defenseless in ranged combat. It is not very powerful, but with the right mods it can be a nice "support" tool.

Our weapons can also use mods to boost their abilities. Mods bring extra challenges because they aren’t tied to one weapon type. For example, you can use the same rate of fire mod on both a machine gun and a nuke launcher, but the effect should be different for each. One additional bullet fired from a machine gun that shoots 30 RPS is nothing. One additional rocket per second for a launcher with 1 RPS is a 100% damage boost. Our designers set the right ranges for each mod by hand. It’s a lot of work, and we can’t always test every combination. But since The Riftbreaker isn’t a competitive game, we let some really powerful combos exist. After all, it’s your game, and you should get to play how you want.

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Cluster projectiles can open paths to some unconventional combat approaches. Pic related.

When we add a new weapon to The Riftbreaker, we also think about its role in the game. We look at how it’s meant to be used and what kind of damage it does. Most weapons aren’t good at everything. Some are great for single targets but not for crowds, while others are better for close-range crowd control but can’t reach far-off enemies. We want all our weapons to work well together, so you can build your own set for any challenge. That’s why, instead of just making a bigger rocket launcher, we focus on weapon types that need more variety. This led us to create the Root Gun, Shard Gun, Wasp Launcher, and Charged Bomb. Each one fills a gap in the arsenal and gives you new ways to play.

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The right combination of mods can turn a single-target weapon to a devastating AOE cannon with pinpoint precision.

Next, we have to think about damage types, which has been trickier than we expected. For each World Expansion, we wanted to create special weapons you unlock after finishing the story. These weapons needed to feel iconic and fit the area’s theme. For Metal Terror, set in Metallic Valley, we thought Laser Swords made sense - metal and energy go well together. In the next expansion, crystals made us think of ice, so we designed a Cryo weapon: a machine gun that fires ice shards to slow enemies. These ideas seemed fine, but after the second expansion, we realized the rewards didn’t work as we hoped.

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The Root Gun is a unique blend of melee and ranged weapons. The infinite ammo aspect plays nicely with many mods, such as rate of fire!

Many of you felt let down after unlocking these weapon blueprints because the creatures in the new biomes were immune to their attacks. After stopping a huge threat, you expect your reward to be powerful in that area, but that didn’t happen. The Laser Swords couldn’t hurt Wingmites, the most common creature in Metallic Valley, and the Shard Gun barely worked in the Caverns biome. The first time, it went unnoticed, but after it happened again, we got a lot of feedback from disappointed players. We learned from this in Heart of the Swamp. At first, we planned for the Root Gun to be the final reward, but it wasn’t very useful in the swamp, so we switched it with the Flame Blades. This time, everyone loved the fire-spewing blades that burned everything. Lesson learned!

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If you find a nuke that can shoot multiple rockets with one trigger pull, it is obligatory to use it. We want to give you as much freedom as possible, but come on. Even we have our limits.

As you can see, even in a made-up world, we have to follow a lot of rules to make weapons fit the game. The good news is, The Riftbreaker is very mod-friendly, so if you want to make some wild creations, you can - maybe even a tower that shoots towers! While we get back to working on World Expansion 5 and some surprises, stay connected with us by signing up for our newsletter or joining our Discord at https://www.discord.gg/exorstudios, where we share news first.

See you next time!
EXOR Studios