Hi Friends, and welcome to our first monthly development recap, going forward we’ll write one of these updates every month so you can keep up with our progress on Breachway.
January has seen some important additions for Breachway, we finished a new ship, defined more of the meta-game, and the most exciting addition: we added a feature we’ve been talking about for months - Equipment targeting.
We’ve always defined our game by being a mix of Slay the Spire’s card combat with it’s synergies, deckbuilding elements and turn by turn decision making, and FTL’s combat, ship upgrade system and equipment. Up until now, the FTL part was only reflected in the meta-game by the ship upgrade and equipment , and various events that happen as you traverse the map. Combat played mostly like any regular card battler, and it didn’t feel right.
Now with the integration of Equipment targeting, I'm happy to say that combat feels a lot more like FTL’s. So besides managing your hand and resources, you also have to consider what equipment you want to target on the enemy ship.
The way this works in our game is that each piece of equipment on the enemy ship plays one card at a time, and depending on the equipment and the card’s power, it can take anywhere from one to three turns to play the card.
If you manage to damage and disable the equipment associated with that card, it will no longer be played for the duration the equipment is disabled, and potentially the countdown to playing that card will be reset.
You can see it in action below:
An important distinction here, as displayed in the gif, some weapons (like the laser) have precision attacks that are able to target specific pieces of equipment , while others like the Flak cannon and explosive damage from missiles, are considered area of effect weapons that have a chance to damage random pieces of equipment on the enemy ship.
The chance to damage a point of equipment durability is based off of how much hull damage you deal with an attack from a specific weapon. This allows us to further differentiate the weapon types, by giving each weapon a percentage chance to damage equipment for each point of damage, making weapons like the Rail-gun specialize in disabling enemy equipment while dealing lower damage , and the Flak dealing high amounts of damage, but not reliably being able to disable enemy equipment.
Visual updates:
One of the main perks of doing a space game, is having the chance to create spaceship models and have it count as actual work.
The latest ship we finished in January is a small patrol and intervention vessel belonging to the Starkin, one of our game’s main factions. It’s a small vessel measuring 35 meters in length, crewed by 4 people, and has 2 PDC turrets as well as 2 main weapon hardpoints.
Check it out below:
Talking about PDC turrets, we made a system that has the turrets on player and enemy ships actually track and destroy missiles whenever a point defense card is played:
We also finished some new character portraits, belonging to another one of our factions (and I use that term loosely here, as they are mostly independent, not belonging to any of the major factions), the Free-roamers.
This is it for this Devlog, if you’d like to be part of the discussion about what is presented here (or just want to show your support, which matters a lot), feel free to do so in the comment section, or on our Discord Server.
Thanks for reading, and see you next time for some details about the meta-game, more ships, and other things we'll be doing in the meantime
Victor