In a recent Steam blog, The Riftbreaker developer Exor Studios recently opened up about the various inspirations they took from other successful games like Minecraft and Diablo, among many others.
For the uninitiated, The Riftbreaker is a 2021 indie game that blends base building and tower defense and marries them with ARPG elements. Donning a mechsuit on a distant alien planet, your job is to construct a gargantuan multi-continent-spanning empire of mechanical destruction.
Exor Studios credits Minecraft as an inspiration for being the bedrock of the destructible environment in The Riftbreaker. In the blog, the devs shared,
“When creating the destructible rocks of the Crystal Caverns biome, we took inspiration from the tried and tested voxel-based games that allow you to dig in the ground freely, like Minecraft. We divided the destructible walls into chunks. Then, we iterated on the size of those chunks and the speed of digging to allow a smooth experience.”
The lessons from Diablo and other ARPGs are multifold. While Camera Object Culling has been already implemented in the game, a more robust loot distribution is still in the works. Talking about their attempt of “changing the loot distribution algorithm in The Riftbreaker”, the devs wrote,
“We spent countless hours playing various parts of Diablo, Path of Exile, and Grim Dawn, among many other hack’n’slash games, to figure out what we could do better. We analyzed how often a player gets a chance to loot something valuable.”
The upcoming World Expansion III DLC will see a revamped loot system come to life in The Riftbreaker. In the post addressing the community, the developer also opened up about its journey of implementing raytraced shadows, volumetric lighting, wave simulation, and much more. All of these provide a wonderful insight into the game development process, and how different building blocks come together to form a cohesive whole.
The Riftbreaker is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. Exor Studios is currently working on an online multiplayer component which will arrive via a free update. The upcoming paid DLC titled World Expansion III is also in the works.
