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• Announcements·28 Aug 2026Official

  Mod Spotlight: Rift Exploration Defense Industry revisited

  Hello Riftbreakers! Today, we want to shine a light on a mod we first mentioned back in 2024: Killtech’s Rift Exploration Defense Industry, or REDI. Back then, the mod was just getting started, but it already showed a lot of promise. Two years later, it has gone far beyond what we expected. REDI is now almost a complete overhaul of the game, and making it took an incredible amount of work. We reached out to Killtech for some insights so we could share what it’s like to play REDI now. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/34659267/a71694c5f8d6a6b855cdbc47e78b21f537611128.png Click the image above to get the mod or install it via the in-game mod browser! Killtech started working on his mod because he enjoyed The Riftbreaker, but thought the economy did not exactly hold up during a longer campaign. Once your base has power and resource production set up, you barely have to do anything else. Killtech thought that it was meaningful enough for survival, but left him wanting more when it came to our Story Campaign (you can read his explanation on his GitHub page). So, he decided to rebuild the whole game, not just the economy, but also the campaign pacing and combat. He wanted to move away from an “unlockathon,” where you just check off technology items, to a game where you have to constantly manage your resources - a much bigger logistical challenge. Everything in the mod is built around this idea. Let’s start by looking at how REDI changes resource mining, which is where every Riftbreaker campaign begins. https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/780310/extras/4a4e82d99f12452f0092aef1c1b327a9.webm?t=1756478584 If running kilometers of intersecting pipelines sounds like fun to you, you will have a great time with this mod! Expanded Economy In the original version of The Riftbreaker, there are separate factories for Carbonium, Ironium, and rare resources like Cobalt. Killtech combined them into one building: a strip mine that works for all surface resource deposits. ...
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• Announcements·7 Aug 2026Official

  Trailer_final_6_better_7_fixed_4_4k.mp4

  Hello Riftbreakers! The title of today’s article is not a mistake - that’s a typical filename for an EXOR Studios trailer in the final stages of its production. Looking at our gameplay trailers, you’d never expect that their production takes a long time - it’s just a couple of gameplay clips stitched together, after all. However, the opposite is true. Our trailers are a result of a long process that is a bit messy at times, but always very fun and definitely more interesting than the file name suggests. It's also a process that makes the game itself better in some unexpected ways. This article will talk about gameplay trailers only. We have a couple of CG trailers out there, but the workflow is completely different in their case. Our very first gameplay trailer for The Riftbreaker. What you can see in the video is pretty much EVERYTHING we had in the game at that point. If you pay attention to details, you will quickly notice that there are only three enemies shown for the entire duration of the trailer. That's because these are the only ones we had. There is also one voiceline that is spoken by your truly. Can you tell which one? Paweł spent an entire week setting up the map for the last scene with the horde and nukes! Every gameplay trailer we put out is either made fully in-house or in collaboration with an outside editing company. Before a single frame gets recorded, we write a paper draft of the trailer, fully scripting each second of screen time. What do we want to show? What does the mech look like? What kind of weapons are in use? Which setting are we in? We try to make each scene robust enough to convey its own story, but we also pay close attention to continuity between shots. We don’t want to create a blur of cool-looking clips stitched together for no reason. That’s a music video, not a game trailer. If a scene cannot justify its own existence in the context of the whole trailer, it doesn’t make the cut, no matter how good it is. All the placeholders and...
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• Announcements·23 Jul 2026Official

  The Evolution of The Riftbreaker Graphics

  Hello Riftbreakers! Our game has changed a lot since it came out in 2021. Over the past five years, we've added a lot of new content and features for you to enjoy. The Metallic Valley, Crystal Caverns, Fungal Swamp, and Cryo Field biomes bring more variety to the original four biomes. We've also added hundreds of new technology items to help you take on the challenges in these areas. The expanded endgame campaign gives you something new to work toward after finishing the main story. And of course, we can't forget multiplayer mode. It took us a bit longer than planned, but it's become a big reason why many of you still play. These updates are easy to spot on the release calendar. But there's another change, or a series of changes, that's harder to pinpoint on our development roadmap: the graphics. Today, we want to give you a quick look at how the graphics in The Riftbreaker have evolved. There are lots of links in this article. If you would like the full picture and details on each of the changes we mention, give the other blog entries a read! 2009: ENGINE ORIGINS Here's our 'origin story' video, showing the progress we made during the development of Zombie Driver. Before we dive into The Riftbreaker, let's talk about our game engine, The Schmetterling, and how it came to be. We built it because we needed a solution. Our first big release at EXOR Studios was D.I.P.R.I.P., a total conversion mod for Half-Life 2. At that time, we used free tools and didn't expect to earn anything from our games. We soon realized this approach wasn't sustainable, so we needed a way to support our future projects. That meant making our own game. We came up with the idea for Zombie Driver, but before we could start, we had to pick a game engine. All the commercial engines were way too expensive - licenses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That didn't fit with our zero-budget approach, so we had to look for another way. https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/ap...
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• Announcements·10 Jul 2026Official

  The Rules Behind the Guns

  Hello Riftbreakers! In the past few weeks, we’ve shared some of our design choices and how your feedback has shaped The Riftbreaker. You’ve seen that being a designer means making creative decisions while working within the limits of the game’s world and genre, and giving you what you expect. Today, we want to discuss one of our toughest challenges with every World Expansion: designing Mr. Riggs’ weapons. Combat is a big part of what makes this game unique. Our goal is to let you feel powerful while still keeping the game challenging. In this article, we’ll go over the rules, limits, and ideas we use when creating new weapons for The Riftbreaker. https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/780310/extras/70daeb4508f3583a826fd22c9bb2b213.webm?t=1756478584 Since there are dozens of enemy creature types in The Riftbreaker, we made sure to give you a lot of toys to deal with each type. However, coming up with new weapons is not as straightforward as it might seem at first! Coming up with new weapons for the game is always exciting. We often have very different ideas for what Mr. Riggs should use, but they all share one thing: they’re based in science fiction. This setting is fun to work with because it lets us imagine powerful weapons, but also gives us some ‘semi-realistic’ limits to follow: Every weapon we create must be a human-crafted device. Sorry, D&D fans, no Staff of Firebreathing this time - unless you want us to attach a flamethrower to a stick. Weapons need to have a clear and satisfying effect when you use them, but not go overboard. This means we have to skip some of the wildest ideas that would be hard to explain or make work. For example, a weapon that creates sinkholes would be amazing, but there’s no way to make that happen in The Riftbreaker. Each weapon should focus on one type of damage. For example, when you fire a rocket, you expect it to explode and cause area damage - not split into lasers that cut the battlefield in half. h...
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• Announcements·26 Jun 2026Official

  Players vs. Developers: What We Learned

  Hello Riftbreakers! As game developers, we have the incredible pleasure of building games that we would want to play and sharing them with millions of people around the world to enjoy. As awesome as that is, we are often quite anxious about every new release. After all, the release day is always the ultimate test for the game - not only when it comes to the technical side, but also from the game design standpoint. Luckily, playtesting exists, and players are usually more than happy to play the game early and share feedback. This allows us to fix the vast majority of serious errors, but also reveals that real players play the game very differently from developers. Today, we would like to share some things we observed when watching you play the game - what we saw in live playtests, streams, YouTube videos, and co-op sessions. Some of these things really were eye-opening! https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/780310/extras/3d3ef4c973db40ad3bd9136395860455.webm?t=1756478584 Going back to the 2019 demo was an experience for sure. We didn't even remember that old Sentinel Towers did not need any power back then. The Riftbreaker was first revealed on the 8th of March, 2019. The first opportunity to play the game itself came just three weeks later, at PAX East in Boston. We prepared a special “event demo” for the show. It was a very early version of the Prologue we have in the game today, but it had one significant difference: you started with a pre-built basic outpost. It wasn’t anything fancy - just a couple of factories, some walls, and a couple of Sentinel Towers. Our intention was to let you jump into the action straight away, skipping the building phase. We assumed that the trade show floor was not really optimal for staying longer and building up a base on your own. However, while observing our visitors play the game for the first time, we realized they put a lot of effort into the building phase, actively upgrading the structure we had m...
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