Helleeeuuu. We're making some exciting progress in game design! It's Adriaan's department, so I can't speak to the details of what went on in his brain :P But I can show you some of the screen shots I made during testing and explain what's new.

First off, I turned more of our tower designs into pixel assets, and added them to our test level. Here are most of them:



We designed a couple of placeholder enemies, and created larger waves:



And We've put assets on spawn points, so it's clear the enemies spawn out of the Rifts:




We've also added indicators to spawn points, to make building decisions more strategic.



And we made a decision to have resource generators remain inactive when built during a wave, to nudge more towards saving resources for 'engine building' rather than stressing optimizing the exact moment the generator is built. (That's the best I can do at explaining it in 1 sentence :P You'll see what I mean in the demo :D).

Here's a gif of the new generator!



More in the next update!

Ola! Sim here again, working on the art of Rift Riff. A small update/catch up on the tower designs we're trying out. We're still testing all these elements, but I think it's cool to share some of the progress we've made with the towers.

We started off with dummy's for testing game flow and animations.



Then I made an overview of designs and upgrade shapes we may need.



I then saw everything was pretty stale and needed some character in order to really have fun with it. I went back to the drawing board and drew up some designs.



And I'm now in the process of turning these into pixel designs and creating animations:



On to the next! :)

Hey there! Sim here. I work on the art of Rift Riff. Thanks for following and wishlisting! It's really motivating and helps us spend more time on the game :) I want to use this place to share some short, things-in-development-right-now, stuff. But before I do that, I think it'd be cool to give some quick background from the first 100 days of art creation. 1 to catch you up to speed, and 2 because my brain can't handle starting somewhere in the middle :D Here's a summary of how we created the biomes you see in the screen shots. Let's go!

First I sketched the things I knew for certain were going to populate the worlds: enemies, towers, main character.



Then I put them on an isometric grid (the perspective of all Rift Riff worlds) to quickly find out it was... boring.



It needed some objects with more height, like rocks and hills, which brought more atmosphere.



So I started a sketch in pixels, instead of the line art Id previously made.



Turned that into some game assets.



Placed it in the level Adriaan created for testing.



And added shadows and improved the colors further. This was a nice start off point to make more.



So I took the same process and applied it to other environment concepts.



And voila, that's how our first few biomes came to be :)

We are happy and proud to announce Rift Riff, a new minimalistic tower defense game with concise gameplay, a light story, and vibrant pixel art!



[h3]Progress[/h3]

Were currently knee-deep into making Rift Riff and will be sharing our progress with you regularly here on Steam. We have already come a long way in setting a baseline for gameplay, story, art style and music, but theres a lot that has still to be decided and made.

Things like level designs, enemy types, tower types, bosses, upgrades, tier lists, modifiers, over-world, plot twists Wed love to keep you posted on our progress here on Steam and hope to receive feedback as to what to explore next.

[h3]Very Indie[/h3]

Rift Riff is Adriaans first game using the Godot game engine, graphic designer Sims first pixel art game, and music composer and sound designer Matthijs first game ever. We think a team setup like this will take unique approaches and different perspectives on game conventions that will rub off onto the game. We expect a juicy, small, and casual but tactical game experience, with a light storyline, vibrant visuals, and beautiful music. Were *very* excited to show you more!



[h3]Currently Pre-alpha[/h3]

Weve so far made a few levels and found some fun and interesting gameplay, but theres a lot more work to be done before we can get it into your hands. Mainly balancing the towers and enemies, coming up with a few more tower and enemy types, more juicy art and animations, a meta game and an over-world, extended UI, some essential technical features, steam deck support, and many more things. As of right now, we are working on a solid demo that will be hella fun (we hope :D).

[h3]Demo soon, full release later[/h3]

In short, were planning to release a demo in a few months and do the games full release later this year. Theres also a few Steam festivals were hoping the game to be part of, such as the Tower Defense Fest and the Steam Next Fest. Wishlist and follow the game to make sure you dont miss the demo & release!

ttyl,
Adriaan, Sim, and Matthijs