EXOR Studios

THE RIFTBREAKER 2.0 IS LIVE! CO-OP IS OUT! The wait is finally over! After months of development, testing, and countless iterations, the Update 2.0 has landed — and it’s the biggest leap in The Riftbreaker history. Check out the overview here: store.steampowered.com/news/…

While making The Riftbreaker, we overtuned Survival on Brutal on purpose a few times, then dialed it back just enough to stay challenging. We never made it through the final wave ourselves, so we were sure nobody would, and we offered a prize to anyone who could send us a video of their win. Many of you did it - with ease. So we sat down and studied the footage. It turns out we were playing our own game wrong! We built small, careful bases. The players who won cleared the whole map, claimed every resource deposit, and had an overwhelming economy by the time the final waves arrived. Thanks for the lesson!

Creature nests in The Riftbreaker used to be a bit of a formality. They kept spawning creatures until you dealt with them, but they couldn't fight back, so destroying one meant standing still and shooting. The nests in the Metallic Valley and the Fungal Swamp already had defenses of their own, and those fights were much more fun. So we tried giving the other nests a health boost and one of our Omega creature abilities - and the event felt better right away! Not every ability made sense, though. A nest that walls you in would only protect you from the creatures it spawns, so the Waller had to go. In exchange, defeated Omega nests can drop a fountain of resources, mods and unique items!

'Is there a mod that turns off random attacks/tornadoes/etc.?' You don't need one! Switch off Negative Events in The Riftbreaker's Custom Difficulty settings, and acid rain, tornadoes, firestorms and creature nests popping up all over the map won't bother you anymore. The good events stay on, so strong winds will still boost your turbines, and comets will still bring you valuable resources. If the attack waves come too often for your liking, the Wave Interval setting lets you stretch the countdown between them, all the way up to 30 minutes.

Two creatures from The Riftbreaker's Cryo Fields worth knowing before they show up at your walls. The Hibernus simply let the ice grow over their bodies. It protects them from the cold and from your weapons alike - but melt that ice away, and they fall like a house of cards! Spikodons are heavily armored, yet nimble enough to reach your walls before your towers can take care of them. Their long-range piercing spike hits the wall and the structures behind it, energy connectors included, so plan ahead!

Programmers sometimes have unorthodox ways of solving problems. Let's use some unorthodox methods ourselves to solve a Co-Op Brutal Survival today at twitch.tv/exorstudios

Lay a row of mines along your walls in The Riftbreaker, and the Canoptrix will do most of the work for you. The flamethrower can handle the rest!

On today's Riftbreaker stream we are getting our hands dirty and digging through the Crystal Caverns biome in Survival mode. Join us at twitch.tv/exorstudios

Some of the numbers behind The Riftbreaker's economy were picked on instinct, back when the game didn't have an economy model at all. In our first prototype, we wanted you to see a steady stream of resources while mining, and five pieces per second felt about right. From there, a Carbonium Factory cost 50 Carbonium - ten seconds of 'manual labor' for Mr. Riggs. The Headquarters cost a little more than the mech starts with, so you'd learn to dig before you could build. (It also gives you something to do while the dialogue plays!) We expected all of it to change. Instead, those first numbers stayed put, and the rest of the economy was built on top of them!

Killtech's REDI mod for The Riftbreaker turns upgrading your extractors into a real decision. His Ore Mill boosts your factories, but level three factories waste some of the deposit they're mining. So, what's it going to be: more income now, or a deposit that lasts longer?

In The Riftbreaker campaign, every research item costs resources as well as time. You pay once, when you add it to the queue. We added the cost once the campaign started showering you with loot, biocaches and Omega rewards. Resources piled up fast, and research had turned into a waiting game - you could queue up everything in a tier and just wait. Now you have to decide what you need first, and your economy matters right until the end. Survival mode keeps its old rules, with no research costs. Oh, and if you can't find something in the tree, there's a search box in the bottom-right corner!

The first time people could play The Riftbreaker was at PAX East, and we gave everyone a small, pre-built base to start with. We figured a busy show floor was no place to build from scratch, so we let you skip straight to the action. Instead, players spent their time upgrading our base, and some of them took it apart to build their own! (We made all those buildings look nice, too.) So the next version of the Prologue started with nothing at all. Your first objective became digging up some Carbonium and building your own Headquarters. Thanks for the hint! (The footage above is from those early days, too - the game has changed quite a bit since then.)

When a nuclear power plant goes down in The Riftbreaker, it doesn't go quietly. Give it some space from the rest of your base!

We have not played The Riftbreaker in co-op for a long time, so today we are giving it a try! We're live at twitch.tv/exorstudios

You might have noticed a little skull hovering over Mr. Riggs after he goes down in The Riftbreaker. That's our Death Skull system, and the first skull is free! Go down again while a skull is still active, and it takes your friends longer to pick you up. If nobody gets to you in time, respawning at the HQ costs you some of your Carbonium and Ironium - 5% for each skull at default settings. Every skull wears off after 90 seconds, so the system only kicks in when you keep going down in quick succession. We added it after co-op players found out that charging in, going down and getting picked up for the revive boost was a winning strategy. If it's not your cup of tea, you can tune every part of it, or turn the penalty off completely, in Custom Difficulty!

Tracers first to soften them up, then the Piercer shot to finish the job. Those swamp creatures in The Riftbreaker never stood a chance!

The Riftbreaker stream is back, and we are doing something fun today - Frognik managed to pack an entire arcade of open-source games into a Riftbreaker level, so let's check it out live at twitch.tv/exorstudios

You might expect The Riftbreaker campaign to get harder at the same pace as Survival mode. It's actually far more relaxed than that, and spread over a much longer time. There's a catch, though: completing key story events raises the difficulty too. That means you get to decide when the next jump happens - so make sure your base is ready before you push the story forward!

A rate-of-fire mod in The Riftbreaker can't do the same thing on every weapon. One extra bullet per second on a machine gun that already fires 30 makes no difference. One extra rocket per second on a launcher that fires one doubles your damage. That's why our designers set the range of every mod by hand. We can't test every possible combination, and since The Riftbreaker isn't a competitive game, we're happy to let some really powerful combos exist. It's your game - play it how you want!

In X-Morph: Defense, not even Paris was safe. We might have gotten a little carried away with the Eiffel Tower!

Online co-op wasn't in The Riftbreaker at launch, and people sometimes assume we just didn't think of it. The truth is simpler: we didn't have the means to build it from the start. When we finally could, adding co-op meant reworking the entire engine. There was no guarantee it would work, and no guarantee it would pay off. Luckily, both came good (we never got it running on consoles, though - that's how it goes sometimes). Would we build co-op in from day one next time? Yes! For now, we're just really happy that you like playing it together.