We recently told you about the improvements we plan to implement in the game in the upcoming Endgame Update. One of the aspects of the game we have been working on is screen legibility. There are a lot of things happening at any given moment during The Riftbreaker’s gameplay. Whether you are expanding your base, exploring the world, or slaying hordes of aliens, your screen is sure to be full of particle effects, flying wreckage, and lots of other effects. That is the EXOR style - we want you to feel like you’re a part of something epic. It works great most of the time - that is, until we introduce more players.

Large battles against powerful bosses have a tendency to cover the world under hundreds of effects.

The player’s mech is the most significant contributor to the number of special effects on the screen. You carry out all in-game actions through your avatar. Using weapons, building new structures, and even mining generates more and more on-screen objects. Once we add more mechs to the screen, the number of effects on the screen can skyrocket. It is usually not a problem during more peaceful moments. That’s when you are more likely to split up with your friends and do your own thing. One player can build up the power infrastructure, someone else can handle defenses, while another two might go exploring. Things get complicated when you bunch up.

The more players on one screen, the more difficult it is to see what is really going on.

Co-op partners are most likely to group up during an attack wave. That is when you have to focus your firepower and defend what you managed to build together. All hell breaks loose at that moment - your towers start firing, producing projectiles, explosions, and wreckage. You start using your skills, consumables, and the small arsenal of weapons attached to Mr. Riggs, plus your buddies start doing the same. Your enemies won’t stand idle either. They will attack you with all their might, summoning their own effects. At some point during the fight, it gets difficult to tell what is happening altogether. We had to fix that, so we sat down together and had a long discussion about how to tackle the problem.

We sat down and watched hours of playtest footage, analyzing what the problem really is.

Before solving a problem, you have to get down to its root. It was evident that the sheer number of effects was a part of it. However, it wasn’t the whole story. We analyzed a lot of still frames from the gameplay videos we took during playtesting. By doing so, we realized they all had something in common - they were all overexposed. There was too much light hitting the camera, causing the majority of the screen to turn into a bright blob with no detail or definition. That was one part of the issue. We also realized that some of our visual effects stayed on the screen too long and were too complex. That also added to the unnecessary chaos on screen. That is where our problem lies.

We quickly noticed that in many cases, overexposure was to blame for the lack of clarity.

Our analysis gave us a clear path forward. We decided to give our effects a makeover and simplify them just a little. This would make them more legible in busy scenarios and improve both single-player and network performance. We began the long process of analyzing each effect individually. Player weapons were the first item on our list, especially the rapid-fire ones. They can produce hundreds of tiny lights each second when fired simultaneously by four players. These numbers add up very quickly. Additionally, whenever a projectile hits an enemy or an obstacle, a couple of additional particles are spawned, further adding to the chaos. We decided to remove the light effects from most small weapon projectiles. To compensate for that, their particle effects have received a makeover to maintain visibility.

Each bullet fired from the old SMG had a small light. It usually blended with Mr. Riggs' spotlight and making it difficult to spot the bullet itself.

New and improved SMG projectiles. They are more visible, don't have any additional lights, and are less performance-hungry as a bonus.

Next, we investigated what we could do to improve our explosions. Cutting lights from those was out of the question, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find opportunities elsewhere. Our first experiment was to reduce the size of lights. The results were promising - most of the people we asked for feedback couldn’t tell whether they were looking at an explosion with a regular light or a smaller one. That’s one point for the home team! Next, we focused on the number of particles that make up explosion effects. For example, our atom bomb explosion effect comprised 1042 individual particles. We trimmed on those wherever we could. The last thing we changed was the length of the effects. We reduced the lifetime of most explosions and hits by about 25%. Hardly anyone can tell a difference, but those milliseconds do improve the situation quite a bit.

This explosion is made up of 1042 individual quads that spawn in and animate with very precise timing.

Many explosions and projectiles can clutter up the screen very quickly. However, there are also some massive effects that we have been planning to overhaul for quite some time. One such example is the tornado. It has been with us since the first public version of the game back in 2020. The tornado comprised a couple hundred smoke particles that revolved quickly around the axis. It looked okay for the most part, and since it rarely happened, we were not too desperate to change its looks. The situation changed slightly when we added the fire tornado as a usable player skill. We would see it all the time and, in the case of multiplayer, often in several instances on one screen. It was time to rework the effect.

The old tornado effect covered up half the screen, pretty much.

Fire tornado also covered up half the screen, but brighter!

To reduce the number of particles on the screen, we created a simple tornado model and gave it a fully custom treatment. We developed a shader that simulated the movement of the air currents and applied it to the model's surface. The shader’s color can be modified easily, allowing us to create regular, fire, and acid tornados. Of course, the shader itself won’t do much, but together with a small light and a couple of particle effects here and there, we ended up with a nice and clean tornado effect that we will be using from now on.

The new effect is much more subtle. Looks much better in-game - compression killed this one.

And here's the improved version of the fire tornado.

Naturally, the things we mentioned in this article are not the only changes we’re planning to implement. We consider increasing the visual clarity as one of the most important improvements to include in the co-op and endgame updates. If you’d like to learn more about what we’re doing and be the first to test these changes hands-on (eyes-on?), then join our Discord at https://www.discord.gg/exorstudios to always get the news first.

See you next time!
EXOR Studios