In Rift Riff, your Basecamp is not just an object you have to defend. It can actually do things: It shoots, it generates resources, and it now has a shield! Your Basecamp has a certain amount of health, which will regenerate in between waves. Its shield works just the same, and will protect the Basecamp as long as it's in tact. When it breaks, it explodes, which will deal damage to all monsters surrounding it. After that, the Basecamp revives its health to 50% and is ready for battle again!

One of the key differences between Rift Riff and other tower defense games is that Juice, the build and upgrade resource in Rift Riff, is generated during waves and not simply granted to you after you complete a wave. Story-wise, the juice-generating towers are actually the very reason the enemies are attacking you... but I won't be going into the game's lore here. Because juice is generated during waves, you'll find yourself going into the wave with one plan but restrategize into another: more and more monsters enter the battlefield, more juice flows in, and you have more and more build options.
How much juice is generated each wave depends on how many juice-generating towers you have. Those kinds of towers can only be built on these different-looking tower bases that have a bit of energy flowing out of them. We're currently calling that class of towers 'Defensive towers' but that name may change before the game comes out.
Your Basecamp generates juice, as well as the towers with the fitting name 'Juicers'. There's a few more towers that generate juice, but we're still designing and improving those. One of those is an armored well that doubles as a bunker with a lot of health, but doesn't generate as much juice as its alternatives as a result.
One feature in Rift Riff that feels really good is that destroying towers fully refunds the costs of both building and upgrading that tower. This means that after barely surviving a wave, you can refund a bunch of towers and restrategize your defense based on the incoming enemies.
That should explain the main build resource in Rift Riff! If you have any questions, drop 'm in the comments.

Hey! Thanks for playing the demo! We're collecting feedback, fixing bugs, and improving the demo continuously. Here's everything we've updated since the initial demo release:

New

• Shops in the overworld show a swirly thingy when there're something you can buy there.
• Added a wave counter to in-game interface.
• Added a settings button to the pause menu.

Improved

• Improved tower targeting. It's the same algorithm (the enemy closest to its target) but more reliable.
• Made both scenarios in Pondonia a tiny bit easier to beat.
• Improved edge colliders of Pondonia to reduce the chances of getting stuck with the player character.
• Made enemies less likely to get stuck behind towers.
• Differentiated tower base types (basecamp, defensive, and offensive) more from each other.
• Slower projectile graphics better match their range.
• Scenario description now also highlights when a scenario is still locked.
• Minor improvements to English translations. (Other languages will have to wait for now, sorry!)
• Various minor interface improvements.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed flashing cloud reflections in the ponds of Pondonia.
• Fixed the in-game interface disappearing on with multiple monitors setups on Windows.
• Removed unused tower bases in the Beach level.
• Fixed loading getting stuck in the overworld when trying to escape during the loading screen.
• Fixed option not being shown as selected when running into a build inspector with an input direction.
• Fixed various small bugs relating to pausing the game.

We launched our demo! It contains 3 scenarios in 2 worlds, a few towers to play around with, and a lot of pesky monsters to destroy. Can you defeat all challenges and unlock all upgrades? We would very much like your feedback on all aspects of the demo! Just leave us a comment here :)

We're working our butts off creating level candidates for the demo :D Here are some sketches for biomes:
The one we felt complemented the green and pink ones we've already made:
And the 'end' result:
The relaxed vibe may be misleading though :P It's probably going to be a very challenging level.

We finally got to creating an over-world and connecting the levels we've made thus far. It's literally an in-between world, enabling you to jump between rifts as you progress through the game. A riff....of rifts, one might say. We'll, off course, be adding more levels, but this is what it currently looks like:

We also added a pickup at the end of each level:
with which you can shop for new towers and upgrades (and more?) in the over-world, at this obelisks:
looking forward to testing and refining all these things! Until the next one!

Our friend Aran (part of Sokpop) just released clickyland! It's a really fun, clever, and totally underpriced tower defense game / village builder where clicks are your main resource. Check it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2751050/ Fun GIFs from his steam page:

Hey! We gave the UI some love. We decided it should live in hi res space instead of pixel land, because we want to be able to use normal fonts (legibility of pixel fonts is meehh) and 'cause it ended up actually looking better!
We redesigned the icons that represent the towers to be more intuitive.
Costs are now shown in numbers instead of dots.. which was somewhat impractical.
We added a 'spawn point inspector' so that you can now make informed decisions.
And the upgrade icons got a small overhaul after the feedback we've received on the previous ones.
We also simplified the HUD. Left is an icon indicating what's going in the world (here, it show enemies are currently spawning) the number in the middle is the amount of resources coming your way, and the number to the right is the amount of resources currently available.
Next up is making an over-world/level selector with the ability to configure your experience (i.e. choose tower setup, challenges, unlock things, et cetera). Bye!

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!

Progress

Very Indie

Currently Pre-alpha

Demo soon, full release later