Hello!
Yesterday we released the first public Riftbreaker demo version as a part of the Steam Game Festival: Summer Edition. This demo version is a result of months of refactoring and polishing many elements of the game, thanks to all the feedback we have been getting from our Alpha testers and our Discord community. They tested the game with us and helped us find and fix numerous issues and bugs with the game. We would like to sincerely thank everyone involved - your support was invaluable.
As we were working on the demo we updated many features and fixed many issues with the main game. Today, we can finally release the long-awaited Update 3 to our closed Alpha testers. It’s a massive patch that includes a complete overhaul of the inventory system and adds randomized stats to weapons, as well as weapon modding possibilities! The full changelog can be found at the end of this message.
We have also released a patch for the public demo version. There is no changelog for that one (sorry, no time, we need to go and fix even more things). It contains a lot of fixes for crashes that the demo players have reported overnight. Yay automation!
To celebrate the launch of the demo and Update 3, we will be sending out a wave of Alpha invites to the most active members of our Discord and streaming community. If you don’t receive your key today do not worry - if you participate in our community you increase your chances by a lot.
ALPHA UPDATE 3 CHANGELOG:
FEATURES
- New weapon crafting system with randomized stat rolls: - All weapons now have four different rarity levels - standard, advanced, superior and extreme. Higher levels have additional randomized properties and extra modding slots. - Mods now drop from enemies. This feature deserves an article of its own but in short - you can modify and customize weapons to your liking and according to your current needs. - Weapons of all rarity levels are now researchable. They differ in costs, number of available mod slots and properties the player can roll into.
- Hardcore mode - Permadeath for the craziest riftbreakers out there.
- New ambient creature - Jurvine - aka Boingy-Bongo. They never attack you, are generally scared of outsiders and may become really useful in the future!
- New ambient creature - Quelver - the garbage removal service of Galatea 37.
- New natural events added to the pool: - Thunderstorm - Thick clouds reduce the amount of sunlight, but increased wind speed means more power from windy boyz. - Blue hail - Yo, I heard you like acid rain. - Fog - It's fog, what more can we say? :P - No Wind - self explanatory - Strong Wind - 200% power production from windy boyz! - Weak Wind - 50% of the usual wind strength. - Ion Storm - it makes a lot of your equipment non-functional, but increases all power production by a lot!
- All weather events now have a warning, start and end dialogue lines
- We have working drones now! Repair Facility, Flora Collector, Crystal Collector and Flora cultivator all utilize drones to carry out their tasks. Multiple things have been tweaked and improved since the previous version.
- Fusion power and plasma technology added to research tree
- Ionizer building added as a means of supercharged plasma production.
- All walls and gates are now upgradeable to level 2 and 3
- Teleporting to a Rift Portal now leaves a temporary, green portal behind. You can quickly come back to your base to build some new structures or defend the base from an attack, and then pick up exploration where you left it.
- Support for Custom Difficulty levels - you can tweak game parameters before a Survival run to create your dream version of a Survival run.
- New Prologue Mission as a replacement for the old demo that was shown during events like PAX and Gamescom
- New resources added to the game - cobalt, ferdonite, rhodonite, titanium and palladium. Currently used for crafting.
- GUI: Added double click support - for ease of equipping items and mods
- Added "New Objective" as an interactive stream event - you can now trigger side missions (destroy the nest, kill the boss) as a stream event.
CHANGES
- The Inventory screen has been reworked - It now features a 3D model of Mr. Riggs and reflects his current equipment and health state. Item lists and equipping have been reworked to work well together with mods. Animations have been added.
- Changed lighting parameters during rain
- Solar panels now turn off during a tornado
- Wind power adjustments
- Lower mech speed on basic floor - it was really difficult to navigate around the base with the speed boost granted by the floor. If you still have the need for speed you can craft some upgrades yourself.
- We changed the collisions shaped for buildings to spheres - it is now possible to move between all buildings in the base, no matter how tightly packed they are.
- Research and building names have been shortened to match the UI width
- Sandbox Control Panel - players are now informed in the Sandbox Mode description that they can control the game using the Sandbox Control Panel under the F11 key
- The rift portal icon on the minimap has been changed from an unidentified swirl to a Riftbreaker triangle.
- New unit system - the backend for all units has been simplified and optimized
- New types of wind with biome affectors
- Improved damage numbers display - added colors, damage type icons, critical hits. Damage numbers can also add up to each other in order to reduce clutter on the screen
- Watch out for acid bulbs - the yellow explodey things - they are really dangerous now.
- Repairs are now cheaper.
- Camera shake has been reduced for some small building explosions.
- All the buildings that use drones to carry out their operations now need AI cores to work.
- Proximity Mines no longer require explosive emmo to be crafted
- Tornado got buffed - it now destroys all vegetation on its path!
- The structure of audio announcements has been cleaned up - they should no longer get in the way of regular dialogues.
- Irydonium resource removed from the game
- Tower and mech ammo have been separated, naming convention changed.
- Global effects can now be mixed - it's possible to have a couple of weather events at the same time. It won't occur naturally, but the F11 menu awaits your commands.
- The most important parameters for defensive towers are now displayed on the HUD.
- Storage buildings now conduct electricity. They do not require any power to operate, but will no longer break your power grid.
- Added blur to the menu background.
- Energy lines are now supported by their very own system, so that Starbugs can play around with them all day long.
- All weapons with a charged attack now have the description of its effects in the menu.
- The effects of wind are now visible - particles fly around, foliage starts swaying more heavily, sounds play in the background.
- Gates now dissolve the enemy corpses - no more bouncing Canoptrix!
- The light from the Base Lamp building does not cast shadows anymore - performance optimalization.
- Soft radius changed for some small units - it allows them to attack in more tightly packed groups.
- Changed max logic updates per frame to 1 by default (the game slows down, instead of stuttering)
- Skins for arachnoids changed (again) - we want every basic version of the enemy to be red, so that they are easily visible when you first meet them.
- Disabled console in the demo mode. No cheating for you.
- Check if SSE 4.1 instruction set is supported. If your CPU does not support this instruction set, the game will fail to initialize, but cite this as the reason.
- Version info is now at the center of the screen for all menus to avoid overlapping with other GUI elements.
- The event manager should not roll the same event twice in a row in a single-player, non-streamed game.
GRAPHICS
- New and improved particle effects for weapons, world events, environment... Lots of them.
- Resources, damage types and weapons have new icons.
- Animated main menu!
- Added pbr/vegetation_deform shader - alien life forms will now deform in strange and mysterious ways...
SOUNDS
- New SFX for many weapons - includes fire, enemy hit and world hit effects.
- All weapons with a charged attack now use a unified charging sound - makes it easier to pinpoint the exact moment when the charging is finished and you can take the shot.
- All voiceover samples have been normalized to -17 LUFS, that should give us a nice, even dialogue flow.
BUGFIXES
- Optimized performance - we should probably add even more monsters, just don't tell our programmers ;)
- Optimized save game time (about 600%) and game perforamnce while the game is saving
- Loading times have been massively optimized - in some cases loading is now 300% faster than it used to be in Alpha 2!
- Fixed dash attack! <3 The elusive, Riggsbreaking bug has finally been squashed thanks to your help!
- Missing resource icon does not show up on the minimap anymore while building a structure.
- Fixed an issue when entities would load into incorrect positions from a save file.
- Drones no longer get stuck in the flying state.
- All building cubes now disappear after the building process has been completed.
- Fixed units not animating if spawned on the screen (from spawner eggs, for example).
- Multiple fixes for navigation issues. Creatures still get stuck sometimes, but the issues have been reduced by a lot.
- Fixed boss getting stuck on objects it should destroy. Shooting pattern restored to normal.
- Profiler: fix random crash caused by the removal of subsystem name memory
- Fixed build menu problem with clicking on first or last item move selection instead of selecting
- Fixed controls rebinding problems.
- Increased size of ResourceValue from 32 bits to 64 bits - this fixes the issue with some resource counters bugging out when the values are too high.
- Fixed soft shadow jitter.
- Deleted water projection grid from shadow rendering.
- Fixed vegetation emissive blinking .
- Fixed mech aiming mining glitch between fighter/build mode switching.
- Fixed weather time of day fadein/out blend - thanks to that, all the weather events now transition in and out instead of going 0/1.
- Fixed multiple prop dissolving - you could start dissolving the same prop multiple times by building several small buildings in its vicinity.
- Volume magma/mud/sludge/water doesn't cast shadows - performance boost.
- InventorySystem: fix for not pickable loot after save load
- Collisions in decals deleted in two scenes - no more invisible boxes blocking our movement!
- Fixed shadow culling for soft shadows (less draw calls = more performance)
- Added auto scaled flamer particle range - the flamer effect now reacts properly to changes in range
- Cleanup any effects after vegetation destruction - especially any leftover lights.
- Multiple smaller bug and crash fixes that we wouldn't have been able to catch so quickly without your help.
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