Hey Rifters, Ya'll probably know by now how important Steam Next Fest is for small devs teams like us! So please play the heck out of the demo and wishlist the game it helps in reaching more people who may love the game as well, in getting us more feedback and prioritizing development of remaining features, and it helps us get ready for the game's launch in April.
And in case you missed it: we JUST added companions to the Next Fest demo so that you can play around with it and tell us how it feels!
We look forward to a fun and hectic week! If you need us, for anything, reach out to us through the Steam Forums. <3 - Adriaan, Sim, Franz, Matthijs, and Professional Panda

[ 2025-02-24 15:29:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey Rifters! We just updated the demo and added companions! You can now use a prism to unlock the first companion: Otto. This little guy follows you around shooting things. Pew pew.
We added companions partly because many of you played the demo and gave us the feedback you were missing a bit of action with the player character. Companions are only part of the answer to that; we have another feature in mind that we'll share with you later.
We've so far designed 6 companions that'll make it in the final game, but we'll reveal more at a later point. Have fun with Otto! - Sim, Adriaan, Franz, Matthijs, and Professional Panda

[ 2025-02-21 15:15:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey Rifters! Localisation just hit the demo build! Which means the game is now available in 14 languages. Good luck defending your basecamp in your preferred language :D

[ 2025-02-12 11:51:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey Rifters! We're super excited to announce that our new demo is now live! We've worked our asses off to get this demo into your library. It's the first hour of the game + a bunch of challenges if you really want to get your hands dirty :D
In this demo:

• 8 worlds
• 6 tower types
• 1 upgrade type
• 10 monster types
• 8 challenges

This will certainly be enough to give you an idea for where the full release is headed. As we speak, we're making more worlds, more towers, more enemies, more scenarios, more challenges, more, more, more.

NOTE

Localisation will drop on the 13th. So if you fancy playing in a language other than English, hang tight!

[ 2025-02-10 15:59:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

We're looking for people to play Rift Riff and help us understand what parts of the game need improvement. At this stage in the game's development, a screen recording of the game paired with your voice (no face necessary) is the only feedback useful to us. If you're open to that, we'll send you a Steam Playtest key for the latest full version of Rift Riff, include you in the in-game credits, and send you a key of Rift Riff as a thank you (should you want one). Sign up to playtest here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe2I12Gc9X1iCB3toLAB0maFnZ0HJwqVUjIlqRpxrMhTjV85w/viewform If you have questions, we can answer those on our newly setup Rift Riff Discord server: https://discord.gg/3J4JWhBCkq We look forward to seeing Rift Riff in your hands!

[ 2025-01-13 15:30:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey! We're making a new demo that we'll be releasing soon. We just took the current demo offline, because we feel we made too much progress in mechanics, worlds, quality of life improvements and over-world progression, to just patch the latest demo. There are so many small and large things we can't wait to share with you! We're now working on more levels, more levels and.. more levels. Once we've tied it all together we will publish the new demo and update ya'll here! NOTE: If you're a streamer/content creator, reach out to us for full access to our current build!

[ 2024-12-16 08:53:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

New currency alert! While Juice is being sucked out of the ground to feed your insatiable tower construction lust, Prisms will be granted to you after completing a level:
These prisms can then unlock new towers, features and upgrades at shops scattered throughout the over-world. Youll need these unlocks to broaden your playing style and enable different strategies and tower combos as you delve further into the later levels.
See you in the next announcement!

[ 2024-11-28 20:05:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

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!

[ 2024-10-28 08:58:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

[ 2024-09-17 16:59:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

Please let us know on the forums here if you stumble upon anything we should improve or fix. Happy Rifting, Sim & Adriaan

[ 2024-07-31 10:57:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

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 :)

[ 2024-07-25 13:29:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

[ 2024-07-04 08:30:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

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!

[ 2024-06-06 11:39:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

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:

[ 2024-06-04 07:42:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

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!

[ 2024-05-23 10:19:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

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!

[ 2024-05-09 06:56:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! :)

[ 2024-04-25 07:43:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

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 :)

[ 2024-04-12 09:49:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

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.

Very Indie

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!

Currently Pre-alpha

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).

Demo soon, full release later

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

[ 2024-03-25 10:52:30 CET ] [ Original post ]