Hello Riftbreakers!
2022 is almost behind us. It’s been a very busy year for us, and we are looking forward to taking a short break from the office and clearing our heads a little bit to put our future plans in motion. The support that we’ve been receiving from you has been simply incredible. Thousands of players visit Galatea 37 daily. Our inboxes are filled with messages of support, feedback, and questions about co-op (wink, wink). Today we’re taking a look back at what we’ve managed to get done in 2022, the lessons we learned from those events, and what we aim to make happen in 2023. Read on!
Let’s start with a short summary of the major milestones, as well as some statistics that characterized the course of The Riftbreaker’s development in the year 2022.
An artistic depiction of void crunching the numbers and mashing all these stats together. 2022, colorized.
- We released 7 major updates for the game in the past 12 months:
- The Lunar New Year Update, which introduced Temporal Anti-Aliasing, added the statistics screen, and a lot of bug fixes. https://steamcommunity.com/games/780310/announcements/detail/4977042432578909854
- The Riftbreaker World Editor Suite Update - gave you access to all the internal tools that we used to create the game, plus a couple of additional ones that made modding a bit easier and accessible. https://steamcommunity.com/games/780310/announcements/detail/3100170362348856752
- World Expansion I and Metal Terror DLC - a huge free update and a brand new part of the Story Campaign taking place in a new biome. The update included a new survival map and dozens of technologies, weapons, and enemy species never seen before. https://steamcommunity.com/games/780310/announcements/detail/3367020691428249994
- A major optimization update aimed at better use of your system’s RAM and improving The Riftbreaker’s working relationship with very high-core-count CPUs. https://steamcommunity.com/games/780310/announcements/detail/3308478967661599934
- Introduction of Intel XeSS: https://steamcommunity.com/games/780310/announcements/detail/3293844715131761794
- Steam Workshop implementation, integrated modding support, and addition of AMD FidelityFX FSR 2.1 and SSSR. https://steamcommunity.com/games/780310/announcements/detail/3441341498983126653
- Expanding the modding support to Mod.io and reworking the late-game survival waves on high difficulties. https://steamcommunity.com/games/780310/announcements/detail/3638375952811679288
- We released 46 updates on Steam. 7 of them were major updates, 21 were experimental updates, and 18 were either smaller patches or hotfixes. A major update for The Riftbreaker sees 3 preceding experimental updates on average.
- We released a total of 136 updates for the game across all versions on all platforms. That’s one patch for some version of the game every 2.68 days!
- For every update, we need to perform several manual and automated save tests: loading, saving, and reloading 132 save samples. The automated process takes 3:09 hours on average. We ran save tests a total of 295 times this year. They took 55,755 minutes to complete. You can watch The Lord of the Rings Trilogy Director’s Cut 77 times during that time.
- On the 1st of January 2022, The Riftbreaker repository revision number was 26911. We end the year on revision 34397. That’s 7.486 changes we’ve made to the game over the course of the year. That’s 20.5 changes a day. An average member of EXOR contributed 499 times.
- We had to expand our server storage by over 24 TB this year alone.
- Void streamed 68 times for you while you watched him for 6610 hours, or 275 days. That’s about how long it takes for a baby to come into this world!
- We published 81 news articles on Steam, amassing 26.489.858 impressions (times they showed up when you were browsing Steam). That’s 327.035 views per news article. Naturally, a very small percentage of that converts to reads, but let’s imagine that every time we publish a news item, the entire population of Orlando, Florida, looks at the thumbnail. Weird. They have so many nicer things to look at over there.
- The population of Riftbreakers has grown by another 350.000, bringing up the total to slightly over 1.000.000 players across all platforms, with more than 90.000 braving the Metal Terror.
That’s quite a lot, isn’t it? Naturally, with loads of tasks to complete, there are plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong. Miscommunications, lapses of concentration, or pre-existing biases will inevitably lead to mistakes. However, it is important to learn from those and take steps not to repeat those errors in the future. Here is a short summary of some of the things that we learned while working on The Riftbreaker through 2022.
Lesson 1: Clearly communicate your intentions to the players, especially in case of changing existing mechanics. Being assertive and confident about your decisions is one thing. Making sure that others understand there is no ill will behind your actions is another.
We spent the early months of 2022 patching the game up and introducing various tweaks and balancing changes. Some changes were overwhelmingly popular and appreciated, for example, making the acid rain/hailstorm events local instead of global. Unfortunately, others were not - look no further than changing the yields from cultivators. In the early days, it was entirely possible to just ignore the economy aspect of the game as long as you had an array of cultivators and collectors working 24/7. While we still stand by our decision to reduce their output, we could have communicated our intentions behind this change much better, which we did a week later. Still, we should have given you the full picture up-front and will do so in case of major changes in the future..
Lesson 2: It’s okay to give yourself a bit more time. Plans work great on paper, but as life evolves from day to day, plans need to evolve as well. We underestimated the time needed to playtest and polish the Metal Terror World Expansion. We learned that extracting the ‘fun factor’ can take a lot of time.
At the beginning of the year, as we moved from one patch to another, the production of Metal Terror was going full-steam ahead behind the scenes. We originally planned to release the expansion on May 30th. We had everything lined up: the trailer, press release, we arranged for some content creators to play the game and make videos… We encountered a problem though - we needed more time. The expansion was almost ready. All the assets were there, the voiceovers and videos were already recorded, and all the missions worked as they should.
Unfortunately, it was lacking a couple of finishing touches and details that would bring Metal Terror to the standard that we aim towards. We didn’t want to disappoint you with something half-baked, so we made the difficult decision to postpone the release until July. Your response was amazing - we received hundreds of messages telling us that you were happy to wait a little longer if it meant the game would be more fun. It was heartwarming and motivating for the entire team. The extra time you’ve given us allowed us to reach the goal and deliver a sizeable expansion that ties in nicely into the entire story of The Riftbreaker.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1945600/The_Riftbreaker_Metal_Terror/
Lesson 3: Don’t be afraid to share your work with the world ahead of release. Sure, keeping a game’s story a secret is a no-brainer, but everything else should be fair game. It allows you to get feedback early, introduce changes, and get everyone excited for what’s coming.
Staying on the topic of Metal Terror, our approach to sharing information about it was much different than during the development of the main game itself. We purposefully decided not to release any articles about the upcoming creatures, technologies, and storyline because we didn’t want to spoil things for you. In our fear of not letting you know too much, we missed an important opportunity to gather feedback and make improvements on what we’ve done. Holding everything in secret hampered our ability to gather feedback early. This resulted in a too optimistic approach to announcing release dates and a lot of resulting stress. This is why we will be sharing a lot more info with you leading up to the release of the second world expansion and its story-based part - Into the Dark.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2108630/The_Riftbreaker_Into_The_Dark/
Wishlist now!
Lesson 4: Minimize the effort that you require from players when giving you feedback.
This leads us nicely to another thing that happened last year: the introduction of our feedback board at riftbreaker.featureupvote.com. For a very long time, we have been collecting feedback and suggestions from across all our media channels. We knew that some issues came up more often than others and made a point to include them in our development schedule. However, what we didn’t take into account was the fact that we only collected feedback from those players who devoted time and energy to actually type out a message to us.
Only after setting up the suggestion board did we realize what your opinions on the requested features are. We learned that single-player content is just as important as multiplayer. We also realized that not that many of you would like us to prioritize PVP modes. That gave us a lot of information to work with. Feature Upvote doesn’t require setting up any accounts, logging in, or writing essays on things you would like to see changed. Any user can just come to the board, click ‘upvote’ on things they like and move on. The ease of use and accessibility have given us great, actionable feedback we could start implementing right away.
Lesson 5: Don’t be afraid to share information, even about the most difficult of topics. Our ‘Co-Op when?’ article was one of the most popular blog entries in EXOR history. Almost 60.000 of you gave it a read. Hundreds have left comments appreciating the explanation and asking for more.
The overarching theme of 2022 and the number one most requested feature has always been clear - CO-OP WHEN?! We’ve known since the beginning that implementing multiplayer mode for the game was going to be very tough, and it was going to take at least a year. It turned out to be longer than that, and with the Q4 2022 release becoming more and more unlikely with each day, we decided to tell you everything about it in a lengthy, detailed article. It explained the network architecture we chose for the multiplayer module, listed the things that we had already reworked, and pointed out the plans for future reworks and optimizations. That leads to a very important conclusion - take the time to share what’s going on behind the scenes. People will appreciate it!
Enough about the past. Let’s talk about the future of The Riftbreaker.
A lot of good things are coming in 2023, starting with the second world expansion and its story-based campaign part - Into the Dark. The story will follow Ashley and Mr. Riggs into a network of caverns and tunnels beneath the surface of Galatea 37. The new expansion will open up a new biome, along with its unique fauna and flora, and give you access to tons of new technologies and gameplay mechanics. And as we promised - we’re not going to be secretive about it. Be on the lookout for articles featuring the new content!
We absolutely love how this piece of artwork turned out. Full res version this way.
We won’t slow down with regular updates, either. Our plans to expand the endgame of the Campaign Mode are big and won’t happen overnight. You can expect plenty of updates featuring new mechanics, reworks of existing ones (looking at you, mods!), as well as updates to the game’s balance. We can’t wait to see the final results!
We are also continuing our efforts on the multiplayer front. As soon as we have a working version that would allow two players to have a go at one of the survival maps together, we want to make it available as a closed beta. We will use that as a base for further development of the co-op mode that will allow you to enjoy all the content available in The Riftbreaker together with your friends. Those are, naturally, not the only things we have in store for you in the coming year. We plan to add even more content and technical innovations. We also want to involve you in the process of development in more ways.
Mr. Riggs wants to get involved, too!
Speaking of involving our community - a huge thank you for your positive response to the brutal survival challenge we issued a couple of days ago! We received many entries, and the first three people who successfully completed the challenge were:
- mic - Acid Brutal
- eandersson - Magma Brutal
- Zazou38 - Desert Brutal
Mr. Riggs plushies go your way! We also have an honorary mention - Harkonnen28, who was actually the first one to send in the video. Still, he was going to receive a plushie, either way, thanks to his contributions to the community.
Cracking presents means something different on Galatea 37.
We leave you with the Winter Holiday seasonal event active. The jungle biome of Galatea 37 is covered in snow, landmines turned into gift boxes, sentinel towers became snowmen, and the lamps in your base resemble gas lights. If you don’t see that in your game just yet, make sure to enable the ‘seasonal events’ option in the gameplay section of the options menu. If you prefer the classic look of The Riftbreaker, you can turn that option off, too. We don’t mind. You can even switch between the two modes on the fly. Go wild. We’re not going to tell you how to live your life.
Most of the EXOR Studios team will be back in the office in the second week of January. At that point you can expect the return of regular streams at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios, new articles about the upcoming content, as well as game updates. For now, though, we would like to wish you a great winter holiday. Spend some time with your loved ones, eat some good food and have a break from everything. You earned it.
Happy holidays!
EXOR Studios