Hey, IndieDB! We have some exciting news to share with you today. The moment we have all been waiting for is here!
Today, almost exactly one year after our initial game reveal, we have started sending out The Riftbreaker Alpha Test access keys to our community members! The first batch of keys is out in the open.
The keys are being sent out to those people, who applied to join our testing through the form available on our Discord. Don’t worry if you have not received your key yet. We are distributing them in waves, according to your activity in the community and the hardware you have. We will be sending out new waves of keys together with new updates to the alpha. If you’re new to our community and would like to sign-up for Alpha testing then you can still do so through our Discord.
This “pre-Alpha 2” build of the Riftbreaker offers an Introductory Mission and Survival/Sandbox Mode. The Introductory Mission is a scripted experience that is meant to guide you through the basics of gameplay. Once you are ready for a real test of your skills, try the Survival mode. You can pick one of the pre-made difficulty settings we designed or adjust the difficulty sliders to your liking. If you feel especially adventurous, you can also randomize all the game parameters and jump in blind, only to see how long you can last. There is also a sandbox mode available, where you can enjoy endless gameplay without being bothered by enemy attacks. It’s a perfect setting to test new solutions and toy around with the game. A Sandbox Control Panel will allow you to change what happens in the game world, too.
Please take note of whatever bugs you find in the game and report them to us, using the built-in ‘Send bug report’ option in the game menu. We are going to be fixing the problems on a regular basis. If the game crashes, it will ask you what you were doing at the time of the crash and ask you to send the crash report. This is very important - the sooner we can catch a game-breaking bug, the sooner we can fix it. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts about the game on Discord, too!
You are free to stream your game sessions, make YouTube videos and other forms of online content. The only thing we ask of you is to disclose to your audience is that the game is not finished and that the footage they see does not represent the final quality of the Riftbreaker. We work on improving the game every day.
Some Streamers, YouTubers and Media have already had access to our previous pre-Alpha build in November. The current “pre-Alpha 2” build has a lot of changes and improvements since that time. If you’d like to know what exactly has changed - here is the changelog for the current build:
FEATURES:
- New Streaming Features:
- Added votes between attack waves.
- Added new event types: rain, meteor shower, unlock research, resource comet, change time of day, new objective.
- Added ability to enable/disable positive/negative stream events.
- Added streaming settings screen to the Pause menu,
- Added a popup informing about streaming after load
- New Difficulty Modes
- Custom Difficulty - now you can tweak the game’s settings to your liking including gameplay time, resource amounts, enemy wave strength, building cost or even enemy damage multipliers
- Random Difficulty - let the game surprise you with some unknown modifications
- New Feature: Sandbox Control Panel - It allows you to send in custom waves of enemies, grant resources or summon weather effects. Have you ever wanted to test your defense setup against a wave of 10000 canoptrix?
- New Feature: Treasure Detector - an equipable item that adds a whole new gameplay layer of searching for buried resources through a “hot’n’cold” mechanic. Hidden resource caches and resource deposits including geothermal vents can be found across the map.
- New surface properties system - different types of surfaces (e.g. ground, metal floor, sand, mud) have unique properties including walk speed, walk sound, walk effects etc.
- New Feature: All defense tower types are now upgradable.
- New Floor Building System - much improved interface for mass building floor.
- New Power Plants
- New Building: Carbonium Power Plant - burns carbonium to produce energy
- New Building: Animal Biomass Power Plant - burns animal biomass to produce energy
- New Building: Plant Biomass Power Plant - burns plant biomass to produce energy
- New Resource: Geothermal Vent. A few geothermal vents appear on the map, plus a few remain hidden to be found using the treasure detector.
- New Research Path - Atomic Power - it is now possible to mine and refine uranium to build nuclear power plants.
- New Resource: Uranium
- New Building: Rare Element Mine - used to mine uranium and other rare elements.
- New Building: Uranium Centrifuge - used to enrich uranium.
- New Building: Nuclear Power Plant - produces energy from uranium.
- New Building: Carbonium Synthesizer - produces carbonium from steel using energy.
- New Bio Self Sustainability Path
- New Building: Flora Cultivator - grows vegetation that can be harvested for biomass.
- New Building: Flora Collector - harvests vegetation for biomass.
- New Building: Bio Composter - produces flammable gas from biomass.
- Walls are now upgradeable - reduce the number of layers necessary to survive
- New Weapons
- New Weapon: Plasma Gun - rapid fire energy gun.
- New Weapon: Small Machine Gun - basic machinegun.
- New Weapon: Laser - high power laser that shoots a continuous beam that increases damage over time.
- New Feature: Charged attack mechanic. Single-shot weapons can now have an additional, charged attack.
- New Feature: Critical Hits System. Mr. Riggs can now deal critical hits with much higher damage.
- New Feature: Items can be dismantled for resources.
- New and improved enemies
- Tougher enemy strains - Alpha and Ultra. They appear mostly on higher difficulty settings.
- New Arachnoid Boss design - changed model, added destructible armor, tweaked movement speed in regards to animations, added melee attack. It can now also lay eggs and take part in wave attacks on higher difficulty levels.
- New Canoptrix Spawner design, model, sounds, - canoptrix spawn from eggs.
- New Feature: Added mass Upgrade, Repair and Deconstruction tools. Now you can perform all of these tasks very quickly.
- New Weather system:
- Random weather events can now happen during the game also outside of streaming mode.
- Added time of day icon.
- Added new weather events including Rain and Rock Rain(TM)
- Improved world randomization and new map sets. Now the world has even more variety.
- Added a new automated crash dump upload and feedback tool - now you can just click “Send” after a crash and type some nice @#$#%^@ for us!
CHANGES:
- Optimized performance - the game runs up to 30% faster.
- Tweaked difficulty modes:
- Easy is now much easier
- Normal is now slightly easier
- Hard is now much harder and lasts 90 minutes instead of 60 minutes
- Brutal is #@$%%!
- Stream integration: Add and Take Away Resource events now work based on percentage of total storage available.
- New event manager handling game logic. Changed quest spawning rules.
- The minigun weapon has been moved to heavy weapons and buffed significantly.
- Changed aiming constraints for towers - Sentinel Towers can now aim at enemies standing directly beside them, Flamer Towers will not shoot towards the ground.
- Tweaked building upgrade levels - higher level buildings have improved efficiency with much better cost/effect ratio.
- Removed ammo storage from HQ, added more storage to Mech.
- Health and efficiency of many Level 2 and Level 3 buildings tweaked.
- Less lights for building effects - decrease visual noise.
- Changes to the appearance of damage numbers.
- Mines disappear under buildings, changed mine behavior.
GRAPHICS:
- New vegetation shader - added a sub-surface scattering effect to foliage for improved rendering quality.
- Unified vegetation fire patterns - all vegetation props are now flammable with improved fire effects.
- New enemy damage skin system. - Enemies look hurt when damaged.
- LightFadeInOutAffector added to fire - now burning objects light up gradually.
- Multiple sets of new rock and crystal formations.
- New mushroom models.
- Additive bloom - optimized performance.
SOUNDS:
- New Main Menu music.
- Changed building sounds.
- New sounds for most weapons.
- New GUI sounds.
- New bullet hit sounds.
- New sounds added for Arachnoid Boss.
- Startup sounds buffer increased.
BUGFIXES:
- Fixed shield shader.
- Fixed dash melee damage.
- Fixed multiple crashes connected to the big map.
- Fixed searching for unit type with a fixed distance from the player (look for the boss instead of the marker).
- Fixed crash on FinishSurvival event.
- Fixed wall flickering
- Multiple anonymous small and large bug fixes that didn’t make it into the change log - R.I.P.
Contact us through Discord and Social Media!
www.discord.gg/exorstudios
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