Hello Riftbreakers!
If you hang around with us on Discord or Twitch, you might have seen what we’ve been up to for the past couple of weeks. Our work on the co-op multiplayer has led us to accidentally come up with a 90s deathmatch-style PvP mode for the game. What started as a joke quickly turned into one of the most valuable multiplayer development tools in our catalog. In this short article, we will tell you how exactly this game mode came into existence, what we use it for, and what we plan to do with it moving forward.
It all started on a beautiful July morning. Two of our programmers, Łukasz and Marcin, were working on optimizing the client-server communication protocols for co-op play. They were playing on a locally-hosted server, introducing changes to the game’s code and testing them in action on the fly. What seemed like a regular day at the office quickly turned into something they couldn’t have predicted. As luck would have it, Marcin had equipped his Mr. Riggs avatar with the Debug Rifle - a development weapon that EXOR Staff use to test various aspects of the game. It also turns out to be one of the two weapons in the game with friendly fire capability. A momentary lapse in concentration from Marcin led to tragedy - a stray shot from his Debug Rifle wiped Łukasz’s a**...ekhm mech from existence. And then it happened again. And again.
After a couple of unsuccessful tests that ended with his mech blowing up, Łukasz decided to take matters into his own hands and teach his friend a lesson he would not forget. Unbeknownst to Marcin, he equipped his mech with a Debug Rifle of his own and gave him a taste of his own medicine. Imagine Marcin’s shock when his own a**...ekhm mech exploded due to a shot from a Debug Rifle from his friend. Anger, shock, and disbelief raged inside his confused mind. There was only one way this could end - a 1 vs 1 duel, with nothing but honor on the line…
Jokes and bad storytelling aside, this is more or less what led our two colleagues to the question: ‘How long would it take us to turn friendly fire on for all weapons in the game’? It turned out to be trivial, and in less than an hour, they could fight each other as much as they wanted. Then, they invited other programmers to join them for a match. One thing led to another, someone implemented a kill counter, and another person quickly developed a multiplayer arena-style map, and that was it - a working prototype of a deathmatch PvP game mode in The Riftbreaker.
It might seem like a useless ‘side quest’ and a waste of time, but in our eyes, it’s a valuable asset. Stripping the game down to its bare bones - running around an alien world in a mech - gave us a tool that we can use to test the connectivity and stability of the server over time. As you could see during our on-stream playthroughs, the biggest issue with The Riftbreaker co-op was the server performance decrease over time. The longer we played the game, the worse the performance would become. Whenever we tried to fix the issue, it turned out that we were fixing only some symptoms of bigger problems buried beneath. This is where our ‘accidental PvP mode’ became more than just a silly joke. In simple PvP deathmatch we don’t have to transfer and calculate an entire base and a few thousand angry monsters. It opens up more subjects that we can start working on in parallel like lobbies, matchmaking, nat-punching, movement prediction, player to player interactions etc.
The Deathmatch server only takes a couple of seconds to set up and it’s just as fast when you’re loading into the game. Instead of waiting a minute for the server to load and another minute to join it, you can have the game up and running in 20 seconds, more or less. It doesn’t seem like much, but since programmers launch and exit the game several dozen times a day, this saves a lot of time. It’s not a miracle drug that solves all problems, though - you still have to recompile the code every time you make changes to it. However, it is much easier to ask a couple of people to test something in a 5-minute PvP match instead of a lengthy and slower-paced Co-Op run.
When we showed live gameplay from this mode some of the viewers were rightfully concerned that we would abandon the development of the co-op mode in favor of the PvP mode. We would like to stress that this is not the case. Co-Op mode for The Riftbreaker is our number one priority. The deathmatch mode that we developed is only a byproduct of testing the game’s features. It is not the intended gameplay experience for The Riftbreaker and we will not spend any considerable amount of time polishing it further. However, since it’s more-or-less playable we have a few questions for you.
The PvP Deathmatch will not be an officially recognized or supported way of playing the game. This makes us wonder - is it worth it to make this game mode public at all? It’s not as strange a question as it might seem at first. This kind of online gameplay was very popular in the 90s. Nowadays, once the novelty wears off, it gets stale quite quickly. To give it a more contemporary feeling, we would need to add some progression rewards, killstreak systems, and set up real match rules. That’s a lot of features already, but their implementation would come at the cost of Co-Op development time, which is not acceptable.
If you think we should make it public, we will try to release it as soon as possible. It could be available as a mod you can download from Steam Workshop and Mod.io. We could distribute it as-is and without any further support or development. However, it would be absolutely free for you to modify and customize further. Here’s where the second question comes in: Would you be interested in modding this type of game mode? As in the case of other mods, we would offer help on our Discord, and we’re eager to hear what kind of support you would like to get from us. Still, Deathmatch would have to rely on you for any kind of improvements, as we’re focused on the Co-Op part of the game.
What are your general thoughts on this?
If you would like to always stay up-to-date with the latest developments when it comes to The Riftbreaker multiplayer, make sure to join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. We do impromptu streams whenever we test something in voice channels on our servers. You’re welcome to join in and have a chat with us! We also stream twice a week on www.twitch.tv/exorstudios, showing off either regular gameplay or experimental previews of things we work on.
See you there!
EXOR Studios