Hello Riftbreakers!
The Riftbreaker has always been viewed by us as a project that we are going to keep developing and improving for a long time. All the insights you have been sharing with us are a large part of the improvement process. A large number of our players have been letting us know that they would love to have a more significant degree of control over the economy of their bases and outposts. We’re happy to let you know that we’ve heard your feedback, and we are working on an entirely new economy management screen that will, hopefully, help you optimize your builds even further. This article will also tell you about the current economy management system and what issues we want to fix with our brand-new screen.
Simple enough... If you have only one base to take care of.
Let’s start by talking about the current display of incoming and outgoing resources. Things are quite easy when you are playing the Survival Mode or if you’re just starting in the Campaign Mode and only have your Headquarters set up. The resource balance display in the top right corner of the screen shows you the current values for resource production and usage for all structures in your base. Color-coded numbers let you know if you are running at a profit or at a loss and warn you about the possibility of running into resource shortages.
Our system allows you to utilize your resources in any place on the planet.
Keeping track of resources gets more complex when we add more bases into the mix. Over the course of The Riftbreaker Campaign, you will likely end up with several outposts in distant biomes. Each of those outposts will probably have its own production chain running, supplying you with advanced and rare resources necessary to complete your mission objectives. In order to simplify the logistics of running multiple bases at once, we made the decision to pool the resources from all outposts into global storage. This solution allows you to mine uranium in the Desert and then use that uranium to power a Nuclear Power Plant in the Volcanic region, for example.
After completing all local objectives, the Orbital Scanner screen gives you the basic stats for the outpost. However, that leaves a lot to be desired.
After setting up a couple of such outposts, it might become unclear where the majority of resources actually come from, especially if you’re getting most of your resources from cultivating various plants and crystals. Currently, you can check the status of each of your outposts on the Orbital Scanner menu screen. If you have no outstanding local objectives, the game will display the number of buildings for the selected outpost and the resource consumption/production balance. In most cases, this is enough to get by. However, if you want to run a very optimized supply and production chain, you might run into problems.
To give you more information about the ongoing production within your bases, we will introduce a new economy management screen. It will feature a couple of key functionalities that will give you a higher degree of control and simplify the management aspect, especially for large and complex production systems. Please bear in mind that the functionalities described here are not finalized yet. It is possible that we will find ways to improve the user experience and make relevant changes before this feature makes it into the live version of The Riftbreaker. This is all work in progress!
Behold the glory of indie game preproduction! Before we start implementing any sort of functionality, we create a simple mockup to see if it makes sense. This is obviously just an example that we're going to build upon, not the finished product!
The economy management screen will display a list of all the individual types of buildings present in your base. You will get information on how many buildings of a given type you have and what resources those buildings consume and produce. This will enable you to figure out quickly which facilities are eating up your resources and if that is a cause for concern in the long run. You will be able to identify potential problems and address them much more efficiently.
Thanks to the new screen, you will be able to turn off any type of facility with just a simple click.
The second major feature of the economy management screen is the ability to control large parts of your economy with just a single click, thanks to the quick switch on/off button. For example - you are running low on power and there is an attack wave incoming. From the management screen you can choose to turn off all the non-essential buildings, freeing up the resources necessary to run your defensive towers and armories. It’s the sci-fi cliche “I’m rerouting all power to weapons systems” personified! Well, not exactly personified - it’s still just a button.
Upgrading multiple buildings of the same kind will also get a lot easier.
Another selling point for this new screen is the ability to make changes and improvements to your base without the micromanagement aspect. The new menu screen will let you upgrade, sell and repair buildings with a single click. This will give you the ability to improve all your solar panels from level 1 to level 2 with just a click, provided you have the necessary technology and resources, of course. The screen will also inform you about the changes to your economy such a change would bring and allow you to make an informed decision about whether you want to do it or not. You won’t have to find and upgrade all the individual buildings yourself anymore.
The Economy Management screen will feature individual tabs for all outposts that make up your production chain around Galatea 37. Together with an additional planned feature that will allow you to assign custom names to your outposts, you will never lose track of your resource production again. We will also have a summary screen to consolidate all that information for you.
This is just one of the quality-of-life improvements that we are planning to add to the game leading up to the release of the second World Expansion - which you should totally wishlist:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2108630/The_Riftbreaker__World_Expansion_II/
Huge thanks to everyone who voted for this suggestion on the Feature Upvote suggestion board - https://riftbreaker.featureupvote.com. Your feedback helps us decide the course of action for future updates and patches. We hope that you will enjoy this new feature as well as many others that are coming your way - we can’t wait to tell you what else we’ve got in store for you!
Have a nice weekend!
EXOR Studios