Hello Riftbreakers!
One of the most common questions you ask in the comments section of our articles is, ‘Will we be able to play the Campaign Mode in Co-Op?’ The short answer is - yes. However, it’s a great question that demands a longer explanation. Most of our posts talk about the technical details of the multiplayer mode or the conclusions we have reached while playtesting the Survival mode. Today, we would like to tell you why we hardly spoke about Campaign Mode, our experience with it, and what kinds of problems we have faced and solved.
The playtest we will discuss today was held quite some time ago, so we have no footage of it. Instead, we will share some shots from today's Metallic Valley playtest. Suffice it to say, it's a bit harsh!
We usually fill these articles with as much knowledge and fresh information as possible. We most often choose the topics we have recently worked on. When working on a single element of the game, like the death sequence we discussed last time, you can focus clearly and speak in more detail than weeks after the fact. Remembering all the small details and reasoning behind our design decisions is much easier. Lately, we have been occupied with implementing improvements based on the feedback we got from the Closed Beta playtest. The playtest allows players to play Survival Mode, which naturally steers our focus in that direction, also when choosing the topic for our articles.
Players now get notified when someone falls on the battlefield. Look at the team rushing to help their downed friend!
We plan to have the entirety of The Riftbreaker playable in Co-Op mode. We chose Survival as the target Beta experience because it is a one-time-limited and self-contained mission. People are much more likely to finish a survival mission within a single session and give us meaningful and actionable feedback. The above does not mean we forgot about the Campaign Mode. On the contrary, we conducted playtests long before the Beta went live. Sometime ago, we gave two of our programmers the task to try and play through the entire Campaign in Co-Op, fixing any issues they found along the way. They played on the internal office network, using their own PCs in the personal server mode. Here’s our best recollection of what happened during that time.
The visibility of deactivated mechs was one of the key issues in the previous builds. To combat this problem, we have attached some additional effects to the wreckage and added a "repulsor" that prevents the creatures from covering the mech.
The scope is the most significant difference between the Campaign and Survival Modes in The Riftbreaker. The Campaign takes place across multiple maps, and players can teleport between them at any point. In Survival, the entire mission takes place on one map only. Unsurprisingly, one of the first problems our boys encountered was traveling between maps. Initially, the game would just crash when trying to change maps. Additionally, only the owner of the server could decide when and where to travel. The programmers quickly fixed the technical side of things and were able to travel without issues. However, we still need to add a way for players to vote for map travel. We will likely do that via a pop-up window, asking whether you would like to travel to any given map and count the votes.
Moving between maps also created many problems when it came to resources - especially ammunition. It is very common that your ammo-producing Armories are located on the HQ map while you are out and about saving the rest of the planet from imminent doom (which you may or may not have brought yourself). When players travel to another map, we take a snapshot of the world state, taking note of how much resources they can produce. Since all players share the resource economy, it was not an issue. However, since ammo is separate for both players, the game got a bit lost when it had to produce ammo remotely for more than one player. Depending on the situation, the game would either refuse to produce ammo altogether or produce it at an insane rate - x^n, where x is the base production value, and n is the number of players. Luckily, that was also an easy fix.
New biome means new boss combinations. Magmoth is resistant to area damage, and Canceroth scoffs at physical. You have to pick your weapons well to fight a creature like this.
Not all problems were quite that easy to figure out. You might already know we always maintain backward compatibility for our saved files. Everything would work fine if you loaded saved games from the 1.0 version in the current public build. However, those saves wouldn’t be usable in the 1.0 version anymore. That turned out to be a problem for us. When our playtesting programmers encountered a bug, they immediately got working on a fix. Then, they had to test if their solution worked by loading a saved file right from before the crash. If everything went well, they could progress further. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always the case. sometimes, their attempts at fixing the initial issues generated new ones… and corrupted their saves as a bonus. Since the entire campaign couldn’t be completed in one session, you can imagine how often they had to salvage their save files and start the entire campaign from the beginning.
Undeterred by all the errors and crashes, our brave heroes pressed on, fighting Galatean bugs and software bugs at the same time. At some point, they stumbled upon one of the exploration missions in a new biome. During those missions, you are not required to build an outpost, so you have no place to respawn. If Mr. Riggs is destroyed, you see a ‘defeat’ screen with the option to reconstruct your mech and start the mission anew. It didn’t work as intended when there was more than one player. If anyone died at any point during that mission, all players would see the ‘game over’ screen, regardless of how many mechs were alive and operational. This actually led us to the first prototype of the revive mechanics. A dying mech would drop a holo beacon that others could interact with to bring them back. This, coupled with the fix for the premature ‘defeat’ screen popping up, solved the issue. The team's problem-solving skills were instrumental in overcoming this and many other challenges, instilling confidence in the game's development.
We also increased stats for some creatures to make them more effective in the boss form. Behold - the Roid Rage Krocoon. Faster, stronger, more angry than ever.
Our team's persistence was evident as they continued to test not only the main Campaign storyline but also the DLCs we had available at that time - Metal Terror and Into the Dark. Both of them had their fair share of issues, but Into the Dark was far worse. For example - the system that clears the objects in front of the camera so that you can see your mech didn’t work at all, which made exploration, combat, and building way more difficult than it should be. Additional problems arose when our playtesters got around to fighting the Anoryx Worm. That fight is the only place in the game where we take away the player’s controls and move the camera elsewhere. Having more than one player and more than one camera was an exception that the game didn’t know how to handle. As a result, the camera would jump from one player to the other without end. Our crew fixed such errors case by case, finally drawing closer and closer to the end of the game.
More bugs awaited as our playtesters came close to the end of each of The Riftbreaker’s storylines. The end of each DLC and the main campaign is marked by a video cutscene that shows you the consequences of your choices. The game logic would hang completely after playing back any of those cutscenes. It was strange because there was an intro cinematic at the beginning of the game, and it worked fine. Digging deeper, we soon figured out that the problem lay not in the cinematic itself but in the operations we carried out after that movie finished playing. After each of our final mission cinematics, we teleport the player to a different map. This also happens in stage transition cinematics in the Crystal Caverns biome. The logic structure of the mission demanded the game to transfer the player after the video finished playing, but the game had no idea which player. It was an unhandled exception that caused the entire thing to stop in its tracks and halt the game’s progress, which could only be fixed by loading a save file.
Our boss creatures will also receive a visual overhaul to make them look more distinct from the rest of the horde. Here's an improved version of the Baxmoth boss.
Most of the issues that we faced were straightforward and easy to fix. However, without playing the game from start to finish, we wouldn’t have been able to catch a large portion of these bugs. Features often work in isolation or a controlled testing environment but fall apart at the seams when tested in real-life scenarios. The fact that we were able to complete the campaign some time ago does not mean we would succeed today. Rest assured that we are working on making onlince coop work in campaign mode. However, each full playthrough of the entire campaign can take weeks when we include the time that is required to fix some problems. Hence, the Survival mode is a much better tool for quick iteration and resolving all of the issues that are common for any type of gameplay.
All of the things we mentioned above can be summarized as follows: we are working on Campaign Mode coop, but it’s a much more difficult process than working on Survival mode and much more difficult to share because of the length of the game Conducting the Closed Beta test in Survival Mode allows us to work through the issues of each biome one by one, but more work will need to be done on top of that. We are planning to run an open beta of the campaign mode online coop experience using the experimental branch of the game. However, it will have to wait until we are sure that it’s mostly functional and that you won’t have to restart your progress due to architectural changes that invalidate your save file. As usual - we don’t want to promise when that is going to happen.
Today, the playtesters were no match for the Lesigian army, lead by Lesigian Omega with healing ray.
That is why, rather than talking about hypotheticals that you won’t be able to verify for months, we prefer to talk about facts that you can get access to - just sign up for our Closed Beta test at:
SIGN UP USING THIS GOOGLE FORM
We hope that this article clarifies the situation and allows you to set your expectations accordingly. If there are any other aspects of the game you would like to learn about, any details that we might have skipped, or if you simply want to tell us to stop picking our noses and release the game already, the comment section is yours!
See you next time!
EXOR Studios