Hello!

It’s been quite some time since we last published a development update. In fact, in the last real article, we promised that regular devlogs were coming back. However, a lot of new online events have been taking place in the absence of all the gaming shows this year. With most of them requiring some form of exclusive assets we simply did not have enough time to cover everything that has been happening in the studio.

With that being said, we are nearing the end of the festival season, with the final couple of events happening this week. First of all, we are going to be a part of the Indie Arena Booth for Gamescom Online 2020. As a part of the event, we’re going to hold an AMA and a bonus live stream. Secondly, we have been selected to be the Polish representative in the Europlay competition that takes place on Friday. It’s essentially a gaming counterpart to the Eurovision song contest. We’re going to need your help to win, but that comes on Friday.

In the meantime, our programmers and artists have been working on lots of sweet stuff that you might have already read about in our Discord daily changelogs. Today, we unveil one of those super-secret developments - a new creature, straight from our nightmares to your computer screens. Meet Baxmoth!

Baxmoth is a very interesting and dangerous creature. You can encounter it almost anywhere on Galatea 37, as long as there are enough flowers there to keep Baxmoth alive - its diet consists solely of flower nectar. Seeing one in the wild is quite terrifying. The large body of the creature is covered with a thick carapace and sits atop six long, blade-like legs. This would be enough to deter any Riftbreaker from interacting with this monstrosity, but it gets worse. The Baxmoth is not just a single, hideous creature. It is a hive on a stick (or six sticks, to be precise).

The disgusting abdomen of this creature houses a colony of flying drones. Their job is to scout the area in search of nectar, which they collect and bring back ‘home’ to share with their host. They are also Baxmoth’s main protection mechanism, as the drone swarm can easily incapacitate any hostile creature that threatens the wellbeing of the hive. It is not yet known, whether Baxmoths and their drones are the same species, or two different ones living in symbiosis, but you will have plenty of opportunities to find that out yourselves during your research on Galatea 37. The Baxmoth will be one of the creatures that come to your base during attack waves.

As we mentioned many times during our streams and on our Discord, creating a 3D model for a new enemy is the easiest part of the entire process. All aspects of the Baxmoth, apart from its appearance, are still work-in-progress. That means we still need to prepare proper animations, behavior, sounds and tens of other small things before we will be able to put this creature into a public build of the game. However, here’s a little sneak peek for you.

Swarms of little flying creatures are also a great stress test for the navigation system in The Riftbreaker. Here’s 10.000 drones navigating the map all at once!

There is still a lot of work to be done when it comes to implementing new enemies, but we are on the right track. Our schedules are filled with various tasks meant to bring even more creatures to life and we are going to show them off with increasing frequency, so stay tuned.

Finally, we have pushed an update to The Riftbreaker Alpha, as well as The Riftbreaker: Prologue. It contains stability fixes, as well as a couple of features that should make our modders’ lives a little easier. If you would like to join our wonderful modding community, visit our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios - the results of their work is incredible, given the limited nature of the Alpha and the Prologue!

The full changelog for this patch:

Changelog for Stable Build 195 on 2020.08.26:

• Fixed miscellaneous crashes when closing the application
• Fixed memory corruption that was causing random crashes
• Fixed a few obscure crash bugs
• Improved loading time - optimized underground treasure generation algorithm
• [Modding] Added a user-friendly warning message when trying to start a mission that doesn't exist
• [Modding] Fixed overlaying loose files over .zip archives
• Audio: limited submit sample rate to 200kHz

There has also been one more patch last week, but we didn’t have the time to issue a changelog on that, so here it is now:

Changelog for Stable Build 191 on 2020.08.21:

• Audio: limited submix sample rate to 200kHz
• disable IME on win32 platform (potential fix for some users' with IME enabled for input being stuck)
• Mouse: fixed window size
• Fixed MouseWin32 cursor container integrity
• Multiple misc crash fixes:
• fix crash in AugmentsMenuScreen
• fix crash in OnBuildingSellEvent
• fix reattaching bounds to building
• fix crash in CustomizeControlsMenuScreen

See you soon!