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Rust developer Facepunch Studios has announced its next game, the twin-stick arcade shooter Riftlight.

According to a post by primary developer Adam Woolridge, Riftlight will also include loot and other "light-RPG" stuff, such as character levels, abilities and talent trees.

Riftlight's three different classes are currently called Melee, Ranged and Caster. Melee's basic weapon is a close ranged energy beam that gets bigger with the more damage you do, and shrinks down when you're not attacking. Caster will wield "cool spells and magical stuff" but will be more vulnerable to damage than other classes, while Ranged is a more traditional shooter class, equipped with "loads of bullets and cool guns."

Riftlight will also feature a co-op mode, currently in the early stages of development.

Woolridge explained that a game featuring all of these elements fills a gap in the market.

"I havent found a game that is all of those things, or Id already be playing it," he wrote."So, Im going to try and make it myself

While the game is still in a prototype phase, Woolridge's next step will be getting an early build into the hands of players.

This shortly followed...

Facepunch Studios founder Garry Newman, who wrote the post, also addressed community anger after the reveal of the studio's new game Riftlight last Friday.

The announcement triggered an onslaught of negative feedback from the community, as highlighted in Newmans post, over the developer working on a new game while Rust is still in Early Access.

I think its probably fair to say that like the majority of internet commentators these guys probably read the headline, looked at the pictures, then posted their comments," Newman wrote. "Will people actually read this text or will they need to register their outrage at the title immediately?"

Assuming they read the full post and got all the information and are still angry.. they are probably going to be even angrier to find out that we have three other prototypes being worked on by Facepunch staff," he added. "And guess what, we havent finished Rust, and we havent finished Rift-Light, and we havent finished those three other prototypes.. and we want to hire more programmers to start even more prototypes.

The studio first released Halflife 2 sandbox-mod Garry's Mod late 2004 and launched it as a standalone title via Steam in 2006. Facepunch then rolled out its open-world sandbox survival game Rust on Steam Early Access last December. According to a diagram created by Newman, Garry's Mod and Early Access units of Rust have shifted 5.8 and 1.8 million units to date, respectively. Garry's Mod sales surpassed $30 million earlier this year, with Rust sales apparently exceeding that. The developer wrote in the recent post that the financial success of the titles are being channelled into the new projects.

Arguing that we should be re-investing that money back into only those games is like telling apple they cant spend the money they made from iPhone and Macs to fund the development of the iPad," the post read. "Keep in mind that we spent money Garrys Mod made to develop Rust and that turned out pretty good, right? Or should Helk and Pat have been working on Garrys Mod all that time?

Newman told Kotaku that 0.04 percent of Rust's revenue was invested into the development of other prototypes, such as Riftlight. Currently in a prototype phase, Riftlight will feature co-op mode and three different classes tentatively called Melee, Ranged and Caster. The game will also include loot and other role-playing game elements such as character levels, abilities and talent trees.

What do you guys think about this?