Hello!
The past couple of days were a blast! We are stunned by your overwhelmingly positive reception of The Riftbreaker Gameplay Trailer and the start of the Closed Alpha Test. We would like to extend a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to everyone involved. Your level of enthusiasm for the game keeps us motivated in these difficult times.
Speaking of difficult times - a short update on what’s happening in the studio. Some of you who attend the streams regularly might have noticed that the scenery has changed from the EXOR office to Void’s bedroom some time ago. That’s because we decided to move all EXOR employees to home-office mode. Nobody forced us to do so - it was a decision based on our safety, safety of our families and the people around us. Be responsible, do the right thing, stay at home if you can.
That being said, our work doesn’t stop and we’re back with regular devlogs this week! Apart from fixing bugs, we do not stop working on new features. The one we would like to present to you today is something we’ve been asked about for quite some time. Everyone, meet the drones!
Just look at them go!
Drones are fully autonomous devices, designed to carry out simple, mechanical tasks. You could say that most of the buildings in The Riftbreaker do that - Carbonium Factories automatically collect and process Carbonium Ore, Armories produce ammunition, etc. However, by using drones you do not have to stick to only one specific spot in order to carry out a job. You can cover a much larger area by putting these little robots to good use. There are various types of drones available in The Riftbreaker, each specialized in doing something slightly different.
It's the acid rain again! Scramble, boys, we've got work to do!
The most basic variant will take care of repairing damaged structures in your base. These drones are stationed within the Repair Facility. When the Facility detects a building that’s out of shape within its operation radius, it will send out a drone to fix the problem at the cost of some building materials. There are also drones that will collect rare minerals for you. Their home base is the Crystal Collector building. These robots will scan all the crystalline structures within their range and extract everything that Ashley can use for crafting. We also have drones that take care of planting plants, harvesting them, and each type comes with its own base station, too! Plenty of buildings to build, plenty of drones to fly around!
Spinoff ideas: Mr. Riggs' Garden Adventure, Farming with Mr. Riggs, Mr. Riggs in the land of cabbage...
Of course, autonomous work comes at a cost. In this case, all buildings that serve as drone hubs need a significant amount of energy to operate, as well as AI cores. This puts even more emphasis on keeping your AI hubs operational, as their state will not only affect your defenses now, but also other operations carried out within the base. Carefully balancing the amount of AI devoted to defensive systems and base maintenance will be tricky, but you will be rewarded with a base that functions similarly to a living organism.
Naturally, our drones are still at an early phase. Things will change and new functionalities will be added. What kind of drones would you like us to implement? Let us know in the comments and on our Discord, where you can also sign up for the Alpha! Some of our community members are already testing the drones out!
Speaking of Alpha, we’ve had a little maintenance patch roll out this morning. Here’s the changelog for that one!
Alpha 2 - Update 3, Stable Build 116 - Changelog (March 25th, 2020)
- Fixed crashes related to the repair tower
- Fixed a crash on map save + restart combination
- Fixed a crash in the flame tower when loading a save created while the flamer tower is shooting
Once again thank you for reporting all of these problems and sending the crash reports using the built-in crash reporting tool. This saves us a lot of time and enables us to fix these issues relatively quickly.
The next scheduled maintenance update will be coming sometime next week.
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