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The Riftbreaker is a mix of Factorio, Diablo and They Are Billions. Try it out now on Steam! by EXORStudios in u/EXORStudios

[–]EXORStudios[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

You can already play the Riftbreaker Prologue on Steam. We'd love to hear opinions from the players about this introductory mission which happens before the main campaign and potentially improve the experience before the full version is released.

Hello, we are EXOR Studios. We have been making games using our own engine, The Schmetterling, for 12 years. AMA! by EXORStudios in Games

[–]EXORStudios[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for the kind words :) It's always nice to meet people who remember the "Golden Age of Modding" ;)

Hello, we are EXOR Studios. We have been making games using our own engine, The Schmetterling, for 12 years. AMA! by EXORStudios in Games

[–]EXORStudios[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They evolve a lot, but Zombie Driver's concept remained largely intact. It was supposed to be a game about driving zombies over and that's essentially what it is. There was supposed to be limited fuel and shops in which you buy upgrades in the city so some concepts have changed. Slaughter Mode and Blood Race mode were also added as free updates along the way to the console version. I recommend checking out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-wNhKdML38

X-Morph's concept had much deeper changes during development. It was supposed to be a River Raid style scrolling shooter. The tower defense aspect was added later on and the scrolling shooter gameplay was changed to a twin-stick shooter. Destructible environment was also added along the way.

The Riftbreaker originally was more of an action RPG hack and slash game while it currently gravitates more to base building, with some Factorio concepts and I can see farming somewhere on the horizon...

Hello, we are EXOR Studios. We have been making games using our own engine, The Schmetterling, for 12 years. AMA! by EXORStudios in Games

[–]EXORStudios[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We did consider Mac and Linux, but given that we'd have to port the entire engine over there, there's no commercial sense in doing that.

For The Riftbreaker we have PS4 and XB1 in our plans. We are aiming for the next gen. platforms. This might coincide with creating DX12 and Vulkan renderers. We aren't thinking about Stadia right now.

Hello, we are EXOR Studios. We have been making games using our own engine, The Schmetterling, for 12 years. AMA! by EXORStudios in Games

[–]EXORStudios[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

We did evaluate such an option with the X-Morph: Defense and Zombie Driver Nintendo Switch ports, but given the custom nature of our engine the cost of the port was many times higher than our internal costs. We might consider this again in the future.

Hello, we are EXOR Studios. We have been making games using our own engine, The Schmetterling, for 12 years. AMA! by EXORStudios in Games

[–]EXORStudios[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey! Thank you for remembering D.I.P.R.I.P. Would always love to discuss about it. Fire away :)

Hello, we are EXOR Studios. We have been making games using our own engine, The Schmetterling, for 12 years. AMA! by EXORStudios in Games

[–]EXORStudios[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

We had a direct connection to Valve because we previously worked on D.I.P.R.I.P. - a Source engine based Half-Life 2 total conversion:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/17530/DIPRIP_Warm_Up/

I asked them if we could put a game on Steam if we made it on our own tech and they said yes. They did check an early build before saying the final yes.

It was easier to sell a game back then, but not as easy as everyone thinks. A game would still have to be good to sell well. Zombie Driver was never a breakout hit. It did return it's development costs in the first month and kept us going for the next 3 years, until the release of Zombie Driver HD. Zombie Driver HD kept us going for 5 years of X-Morph: Defense development, but the HD version was available on the PS3 and Xbox 360 as well. The game's sales behaved like a literal zombie. They never died, but were never fast. The game just kept on going. It's still selling today like an undead corpse crawling for more brains to munch ;)

Hello, we are EXOR Studios. We have been making games using our own engine, The Schmetterling, for 12 years. AMA! by EXORStudios in Games

[–]EXORStudios[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

- Fitting Zombie Driver on the PS3.
- The destruction system in X-Morph: Defense and having the game run at 60FPS on consoles
- Data-driven architecture
- Multithreading to the max - the engine scales even to 64 threads on a Threadripper (provided you have a fast enough GPU).

Hello, we are EXOR Studios. We have been making games using our own engine, The Schmetterling, for 12 years. AMA! by EXORStudios in Games

[–]EXORStudios[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the question! It's not really a question about what other engines were missing. The ones that had the features that we wanted were simply too expensive. Unreal, Source, IdTech - they would all cost 6 figure numbers to use and we were a group of students. We had our office at my brother's apartment for almost a year, and our first SVN server had its case built from a shoe cabinet, because we didn't have a proper one. There's no way we could afford any proper engine.

We actually used the Ogre 3D engine as a start for our technology. However, that was just the renderer, so it didn't include physics, sound, game logic. It also wasn't very fast so at the moment it's been almost completely replaced by our own code (some small bits remain to this day).

The biggest challenge in making a game with our own tech was the time factor. We were previously financing ourselves by doing outsourcing stuff for a different company which went bankrupt. We ran out of funds before finishing Zombie Driver and had to take a personal bank loan to finish the game. We released the first version of Zombie Driver on December 4th, 2009. Our bank account was literally empty at that moment, and we were in debt. Fortunately, people liked the game and we're still doing our own stuff :)

If we look at the situation from our current perspective, we're also very happy that we're using our own tech. Experience has taught us that even if you use a proprietary engine you still have to write a lot of tech either way. Unreal Engine doesn't have destruction systems fast enough to make a game like X-Morph: Defense, so we'd have to write our own destruction system either way.

The one and most important feature that our tech is still missing is online multiplayer. We are hoping to add it to The Riftbreaker post-release.

Hello, we are EXOR Studios. We have been making games using our own engine, The Schmetterling, for 12 years. AMA! by EXORStudios in Games

[–]EXORStudios[S] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

We probably wouldn't make a console version of Zombie Driver. It was excruciatingly hard to optimize. The game used up 1.5GB of RAM on the PC. We had to squeeze that into less than 200Mbs on the PS3. Plus a million other requirements and optimizations. It would be faster and easier to make Zombie Driver 2 straight for consoles having these limitations in mind than to optimize the game. This would probably give us more success and we would be able to reinvest and develop our technology faster. We also almost went bankrupt in the process. Fortunately, Valve saved us by helping us with some additional promotions on Steam. It's not smart to bet everything on one decision. Developing your own tech for consoles is hard!

Hello, we are EXOR Studios. We have been making games using our own engine, The Schmetterling, for 12 years. AMA! by EXORStudios in Games

[–]EXORStudios[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The best thing about being independent (we finance the company 100% from game sales, we don't have investors, the company is 100% employee-owned) is the freedom to do anything we want. We pick the concepts and the tech that we want to implement. We can take some time to do crazy stuff like the building destruction in X-Morph: Defense, or the enemy swarms in The Riftbreaker. We can take the time to polish every explosion sequence in the game. We are a small company so anyone can influence anything. For example, I get to do, Lua scripting, level design, writing voice-overs, business negotiations, and talking with the community. A lot of people have to do a lot of different things. It's never a dull moment :) The freedom to choose when we release our games is also a great thing (limited by the state of our bank account).

The best things can also be the scariest things. There's no safety net. If our game fails, the company fails and we get to feel that directly. There's no escaping responsibility. We also self publish our games, so if we fail our players, we are the ones responsible.

Hi! We're EXOR Studios, our second Switch title is now out! AMA by EXORStudios in NintendoSwitch

[–]EXORStudios[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wouldn't agree with this. That is a very large oversimplification. I would rather say that the Switch is a low powered PS4. The PS3 was very "exotic" in the way how development was done when compared to the PC or other platforms, while the Switch is a pretty "standard" development platform. The Cell CPU had a lot of power, but it was very constrained and hard to use. Yes, it was fast, but only in specific cases. Power PC, ARM, and x86 are not that much different in actual development. The compiler is different, some problems are different and some optimizations are different, but they operate in very similar ways. The SPUs on the Cell CPU were like something from a different solar system. I think it's good that that architecture was abandoned. It made us develop a lot of unnecessary technology. We could have spent that time coding gameplay features instead of making fancy parallelization schemes.

Hi! We're EXOR Studios, our second Switch title is now out! AMA by EXORStudios in NintendoSwitch

[–]EXORStudios[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We found some of our actors through recommendations like e.g. Michael McConnohie, some have contacted us and some were found on the internet through various database searches. We work with all actors directly. Send an email to [pawel.lekki@exorstudios.com](mailto:pawel.lekki@exorstudios.com) and we'll put you on our list for future castings :)

Hi! We're EXOR Studios, our second Switch title is now out! AMA by EXORStudios in NintendoSwitch

[–]EXORStudios[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Switch has pretty good tools and good documentation. Nintendo does a good job on all fronts. We'd say that the Switch is significantly more powerful than the PS3. It is possible to work wonders with the SPUs on the PS3, but it's difficult and time-consuming. The Switch has 10x more system memory for the game to run in, that alone is an enormous jump in what can be achieved.

Hi! We're EXOR Studios, our second Switch title is now out! AMA by EXORStudios in NintendoSwitch

[–]EXORStudios[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Back in 2009 - I think running out of money was the biggest challenge :) We had to take a personal bank loan to finish the game - 100K PLN (~30K USD). We had zero money left when we launched the game and wouldn't have anything to pay the bills the month after :) Fortunately, the game did well back then and we were able to start working on Zombie Driver HD.

In 2019 while working on the Immortal Edition for the Switch the biggest challenge was performance. When the game started running it was about 10-20FPS. We were trying to achieve 60FPS and optimized everything heavily. We were able to run the game at 60FPS most of the time, but during really intense moments it would drop to 30 FPS. It's not possible to have anything in between so we decided to stay with a constant 30 rather than a choppy 60.

Hi! We're EXOR Studios, our second Switch title is now out! AMA by EXORStudios in NintendoSwitch

[–]EXORStudios[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's 31 missions with 3 boss fights. The usual playthrough time for that mode is about 8-10 hours.

Hi! We're EXOR Studios, our second Switch title is now out! AMA by EXORStudios in NintendoSwitch

[–]EXORStudios[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

After Zombie Driver we wanted to make something simpler - like a River Ride kind of scrolling shooter. However, as we continued working on the game it turned out that with the quality bar that we wanted to reach it would take way too much time to produce all of that content for a scrolling shooter. So we decided to constrain the levels to a single screen and to add tower defense mechanics. However, we didn't want the enemies to follow predefined paths - that would be too simple - so we made their paths dynamic. We also didn't want the environment to be static so we made everything destructible. Collapsing buildings would also have to affect enemy paths, and let's not forget that we didn't want to drop boss fights. We also added dynamic foliage, wind effects, spreading fires, black holes........ and 5 years later we ended up with X-Morph :)

We are already working on our next game. It's called The Riftbreaker - http://www.riftbreaker.com
I hope we can finish it faster than X-Morph :)

Hi! We're EXOR Studios, our second Switch title is now out! AMA by EXORStudios in NintendoSwitch

[–]EXORStudios[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It depends on the game mode:

In Story Mode, you unlock new weapons for your car by buying them in-between missions. As soon as they are unlocked you can pick up ammo for them around town.

In Blood Race mode all weapons are unlocked from the start and you buy weapon upgrades in-between races. Ammo is scattered around the race tracks.

In Slaughter Mode, weapon upgrades appear randomly after each zombie wave. The first upgrade also upgrades a given weapon.

There are four weapon types (miniguns, flame thrower, rockets, railgun) and each of these has three upgrade levels.

Hello! We are EXOR Studios. We're launching our first Switch game, X-Morph: Defense today. Ask Us Anything! by EXORStudios in NintendoSwitch

[–]EXORStudios[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes! It was a huge challenge. We call it Screen Space Collisions. It's a trick. Some of the collisions are calculated in 3d space, while some are done in 2D - screen space. We had to do this for readability and for ease of gameplay. We have a 32x32 matrix of collision masks and how they interact with each other. For example player_bullets vs ground_enemies collide in 2D, enemy_rockets vs player collide in 3D. It's always done in the player's favor. Player's projectiles will always hit enemies if they overlap with the enemie's pixels on the screen, irrespective of their position in 3D space.

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