Hi!

Thanks for joining us once again in our series about the towers in The Riftbreaker. The previous two parts covered the general rules that apply to all the tower types, and the characteristics of the most basic defensive building in the game, the Sentinel Tower. We highly encourage you to check out those posts first, if you haven’t done so already. You can find them here and here. Today, we are going to show you the first of the advanced tier of defensive towers - the Artillery Tower.

The Artillery Tower is not available to the player at the beginning of the game. Getting access to this technology will require the player to carry out research first. We achieve two things thanks to this. The first one is streamlining the early game. There is no need for the player to choose from multiple towers at the beginning of the adventure, making the early game and the new player experience much more accessible (not to mention that advanced towers have a ton of requirements, more on that later). The second thing is the balance. We want the Artillery Tower to be considerably powerful and having access to it right away could be detrimental to the gameplay overall.

Greater power comes at the cost of greater need for resources. The Artillery has to be connected to power to remain operational but does not consume energy every time it shoots. Instead, it uses explosive ammunition, the same type that the player can utilize with Mr. Riggs’ rocket launcher. The amount of ammunition available is limited by your storage capabilities. It is also worth noting, that the more Artillery Towers you build, the more ammo they consume. A salvo of 15 shells at once might be splashy, but it will churn through your resources quickly. Moreover, ammunition is not easy to come by. You need weapon factories to do that and they, in turn, require a lot of energy and carbonium, so the cost of using the artillery is quite high.


TurretDesc
{
target "ground_unit"
speed "300"
aim_volume "SphericalAimVolume"
{
range_min "0"
range_max "60"
aiming_range "70"
}

aiming_cooldown "1"
aiming_target_time "2"
aiming_idle_angle "20"
pitch "be_barrel"
gravity_factor "8"
yaw "be_turret"
check_target_visibility "1"
}


Moving on to the more technical parts, here’s what the turret description looks like. If you read the previous part of the series, some of these elements will look familiar to you. What is different, though, is the way the projectiles fired by the tower behave. Instead of following a straight line, they fly in a parabolic pattern. In real life, the shell fired by artillery climbs very high before eventually hitting its target. In order to make thing a little bit more spectacular, we strengthen the force of gravity for the shell. This way, you can follow the whole flight pattern, from the moment of ignition to the final explosion.

Another trick that we use when it comes to our Artillery Towers is connected to the target visibility. We do not want the towers to waste your precious resources by firing at a target they can’t possibly hit, and that is what would happen if we used ray tracing in this case. Instead of that, the whole projected flight pattern of the artillery shell is divided into small pieces. Then, we check each piece of that line for possible collisions. The tower will fire only if the whole path is clear. This also allows the artillery to fire over terrain obstacles.

The last property that makes the Artillery Tower a really devastating weapon is its range. Just like in real life, our towers can shoot farther than you can see. At first, there is little advantage to it, since the fog of war will not allow you to decimate the enemy forces from a safe distance. However, the Artillery Towers can help you if you are exploring the world of Galatea 37 on your own and happen to find a group of monsters within the artillery range. Building radar stations is another way to increase the effectiveness of the artillery.

We hope you enjoyed this article and that you learned a thing or two. Make sure to join us on our Discord server to learn more about The Riftbreaker before it launches. We are waiting for your feedback and ideas. www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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