Hello Riftbreakers!
The year 2024 has come and gone, and what a year it has been! The past 12 months were filled with equal parts hard work and excitement. As is our tradition by now, we will take some time to reflect on what we’ve done in 2024 for The Riftbreaker and our studio as a whole. We will draw some conclusions from this year’s achievements and try to set our goals for 2025. There will also be a portion of fun statistics to show you some aspects of the game development process that are not always obvious at first glance. Enjoy!
2024 HIGHLIGHTS:
We're very pleased with the visual side of the new Fungal Swamp biome. The models, textures, lighting, and reflections come together to form a very cohesive environment.
- We released the World Expansion III free update, and the Heart of the Swamp paid DLC in June. The update allowed you to visit the Fungal Swamp, a brand-new biome on the surface of Galatea 37. As usual, when developing this game expansion, we explored the unused design space that lingered in the back of our heads for years. We’ve always wanted to create a biome where water plays a major role, challenging you to build bases on small, scattered islands. To facilitate that, we gave you access to more than 70 new technology items, including powerful superweapon towers like the Heavy Cluster Missile Launcher and the Floating Piercer Towers. Your tactical prowess would be put to the test by the hordes of new creature species. We also introduced visual improvements, like our new liquid rendering techniques, which are so essential in a swamp-themed biome.
The co-op tests have been a lot of fun. The online mode is not perfect yet, but it doesn't prevent us from having a blast, whether we play with each other at the office, or with our testers online.
- We launched the Closed Co-Op Beta test. We have already let hundreds of our community’s most active members play their first matches of The Riftbreaker Survival mode over the web. We can’t stress enough how massive this milestone is for us. As we have mentioned in our previous articles, the multiplayer mode for The Riftbreaker has been in the works for at least three years. Despite all the hardship we endured and the obstacles we had to overcome, we finally managed to get a playable version of online play into your hands. It performs better than we expected, and, more importantly, it is a lot of fun! For now, the Beta version is limited to three Survival scenarios, but we keep updating it every couple of weeks with new content and performance optimizations. We also send out more access keys every week - the latest wave has gone out today!
Both the World Expansion III and the Co-Op Beta were the goals we set for ourselves at the end of 2023. We are very happy that we managed to complete these objectives. However, there was one more item on our last year’s to-do list - the Endgame Update. We decided it needed more time in the oven to have the quality and impact it deserves.
WHAT WE ARE CURRENTLY WORKING ON
We have started our work on the Endgame expansion for The Riftbreaker. We call it Extended Story Campaign, but in reality, it is so much more than just that. This massive, free expansion will completely overhaul large portions of the game. It will open up an entirely new mission branch if you decide to stay on Galatea 37 instead of going home. The update will feature:
Improved Orbital Scanner functionality, allowing you to scan Galatea 37 for even more interesting areas within the biomes you’ve visited previously. The scanner will allow you to pick and choose where you want to go, but each location presented to you will be noteworthy - some of them will be full of resources and perfect for an additional outpost. In contrast, others will show signs of anomalous activity that you will have to investigate. No matter what you choose, you won’t be disappointed with the rewards - tons of sweet loot await those who dare!
Here's a sneaky preview of one of the 'encounter' map tiles we've created. It's a lot different than what you usually find in the Radioactive Desert biome.
Exploring and expanding to new areas of interest will be essential to fulfill the expanded endgame goals. We won’t reveal what they are at this point, but we can share just a little bit. Ashley wants to ensure that when humanity finally arrives on Galatea 37 it doesn’t turn it into yet another industrial wasteland. She will have to lay the foundations for that, preparing enough sustainable infrastructure to deter her fellow humans from their usual STRIP-MINE-EVERYTHING approach. You will have to build complex networks of new structures, power plants, and factories to facilitate that. New resource outposts will be essential to that goal.
Omega creatures are beefier and more dangerous. All of them received new models to stress their uniqueness and significance on the battlefield.
While traversing the unknown, you will run into powerful Omega-strain creatures. These giant beasts have evolved abilities far beyond those of their smaller family members. Each Omega creature you encounter will be a test of skill for you and your mecha-suit. Apart from being much more demanding than Ultra-strain creatures, Omegas have unique abilities that will keep you on your toes the entire fight. Still, you will want to fight them for your future safety and the rewards.
Each weapon you find in the wild has a couple of 'boosted' stats. This allows you to break the power ceiling of the craftable weapons.
The new and improved loot system. Each time you defeat a powerful Omega creature or open a Bioanomaly, you will get the chance to receive a unique weapon - sometimes even beyond your current tech level. Weapons you find in the wild will get additional stat bonuses and will generally have a higher potential than those you craft yourself. For example, you can encounter a crazy Minigun with a built-in splash damage increase, which you can mod even further. Alternatively, you can just dismantle it for even more resources.
We felt the minigun was too weak, so we added nuclear explosion effect to every hit. Thoughts? <this_is_a_joke.png>
Such a massive overhaul of many systems will require balance changes. We will give you many ways to spend your extra resources that would often become irrelevant later in the game. We will also give some love to various weapons that turned out to be underperforming in real gameplay scenarios. We have actually received a 40-page document from Wzysb, one of the community members, pointing out problematic areas when it comes to our guns. Wzysb makes some good points there that we will give careful consideration to.
Here’s a randomized map from the new generator we mentioned earlier, plus a sneak peek at the new and improved map screen layout.
- Lots of quality of life improvements. The map screen has been reworked to offer greater clarity, especially in large and densely built bases. The most significant buildings now have dedicated icons, allowing you to find what you need quickly. The map will also feature a symbol legend so you always know what you are looking at. Or more robust liquid compression-decompression mechanics. Or improved inventory screen. There’s a lot of QoL stuff coming for you!
As you can see, the Expanded Story Campaign update will be a massive change. This requires us to be extra careful and take time with our decisions. There is still a lot of work ahead of us. Luckily, our Closed Co-Op Beta is a perfect playground to test our ideas so that the final product will be tried and tested by us and the community. We can’t wait to hear what you say about this free expansion.
We are also continuing our work on the Online Co-Op Multiplayer mode for The Riftbreaker. Community feedback from playtesting allows us to make the necessary gameplay changes and adapt the Survival missions to the reality of multiple mechas running around, wreaking havoc. Internally, we have completed several full Story Campaign playthroughs, which, surprisingly, were far more stable than we expected. It feels like we are making progress every day, which fills us with enthusiasm and motivation.
With the new prediction algorithms in place we will reduce the amount of data transferred by an order of magnitude. It will give you smoother gameplay, and less network problems overall.
Netcode is the current focal point of the development of Riftbreaker Co-Op Multiplayer. Our team is researching and developing prediction algorithms to make the gameplay experience smoother and more predictable. These algorithms will allow us to send data from the server to the client much less often while the client's PC fills in the blanks by predicting what happens between updates. Implementing a suite of prediction and error correction algorithms will make the game feel more responsive and play smoothly, even in cases of long-distance connections with high latency. Of course, higher latency leaves more room for error, but we test our solutions with an artificially implemented lag to make sure that they hold their ground. We know that real-life scenarios are never perfect, and there are a lot of variables in play - this is why we want to be prepared for them in advance. We will test these solutions carefully with our closed beta testers and make sure that the final product meets your expectations.
FUTURE PLANS
The Extended Story Campaign update and the Online Co-Op Mode release are incredibly complex projects. The extent of changes they bring is so massive that we dubbed these updates combined as ‘Riftbreaker 2.0’. This is going to be the largest and most impactful update for the game to date. We will be gradually testing it with the community, first through the current Closed Coop Beta and later through an open-to-everyone experimental phase. It is a lot of work and we don’t expect it to be ready sooner than within at least 6 months.
STATS
It is time for our yearly portion of fun stats and trivia. We've hit a couple of milestones this year!
- We started the year on The Riftbreaker repository revision 42203. We managed to break the 50000 revision milestone, finishing the year on revision 50203. That is 21k revisions more than X-Morph: Defense’s and 28k more than Zombie Driver’s lifetime revision numbers.
This gives us exactly 8,000 times someone uploaded changes to the game’s repository. However, this number doesn’t tell the whole story. These 8000 ‘commits’ contained a whopping 177718 total file changes. From missing semicolons through blueprint changes to the new cinematics - it’s all there.
The graph showing the commits over time to the game's main repository. You can clearly see the pre-release heat, and the month where we all took a holiday together!
Commits to The Riftbreaker repository don’t tell the whole story. There is a separate repo for The Schmetterling Engine. This one is primarily used by our programmers. Here the stats are as follows: 2502 commits, 42999 file changes.
As you can see, the engine develops alongside the game, expanding it's capabilities each and every day.
- An average member of EXOR contributed to the main game repository changes 533 times over the course of the year.
- Our automated save test gauntlet ran 412 times. This means we forced our PCs to load 80+ game states gathered from various campaign points, save the game, and load it again. All these tests amount to more than 1600 hours. In this time, you could complete the journey from Miami, FL, to Seattle, WA, on foot, and you still have 400 hours left to watch soap-cutting videos on TikTok. (We know it's cringe, but we have to stay up to date. If you could drop us a follow, we would be very grateful: https://www.tiktok.com/@exor_studios)
- Zombie Driver has turned 15 years old, which means we are very old indeed.
- We have consumed more than 50 kilograms of coffee. Given that a kilogram is roughly 8800 beans, that’s about 450.000 beans that we turned into code and animated explosions. 450.000 is the approximate population of our city—Szczecin, Poland. We could have given every citizen a single bean instead of drinking it all, dang.
- We have streamed on Twitch 73 times for a total of 154 hours and 10 minutes. You watched our struggles for 229.214 minutes total, or 3,820 hours and 14 minutes. That’s almost 160 days of nonstop watching—half a year. Mental!
And with that, it’s a wrap on 2024. Thank you for your support and patience this year. We are entering 2025 with a clear path forward and good foundations laid out. We hope you stick with us to see everything we’re working on now.
The in-game Winter Event will launch any day now. Luckily, we tried if it still worked ahead of time. Our snowmen were quite unruly this year!
Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!
EXOR Studios
