Hello everyone,
Breachway is releasing into early access tomorrow! It’s been a long road to get here, with a few delays along the way, but the wait will come to an end soon! For everyone who is curious, here is a handy graphic that shows the release time in your region:
We also wanted to take a moment to share what the game will feature on release, and what the general directions are that we are going to expand on throughout early access.
Early Access Launch
Breachway’s initial early access offering will feature:
- Four playable ships, each with their own layouts, synergies, specific bonuses, and initial faction standings.
- Multiple types of combat systems to wield in tense turn-based combat, from lasers and missiles to flak and railguns, and even hacking!
- A large collection of over 300 cards to discover for your equipment allowing you to fine-tune your loadout.
- Over 60 submodules with a wide variety of effects. Add them to your equipment to further increase their power, and unlock more synergies and possible combos.
- 6 unique crewmembers to recruit along the way, each bringing their own special ability to deploy in combat.
- 40 regular enemies, 16 elite enemies, and 2 boss enemies.
- Two star systems to traverse, with their own events, enemy types, and boss encounters. Use the fuel system to reach difficult areas, and navigate on the optimal path to your target!
- Meta progression between runs – a wide variety of bonuses you can unlock and then mix and match.
- An escalation system that make runs progressively more challenging as you master the game’s mechanics.
- Four fully fleshed-out factions, each with their own associated events and allegiances.
- Space stations, missions, items, random events, and more!
- A soundtrack of 19 space-themed tracks to accompany you as you chill in space stations, explore, and fight other ships.
Our main focus for the early access release was to have the game be as close to a complete experience as we could manage. This meant eliminating hundreds of bugs, adding extra music, sound effects, a polish pass on everything graphical, etc.
However, because of this, we had to put a pause on creating content, and ensuring what already is there, is as enjoyable as a team of 4 developers working on such a complex project can make it.
Early Access Roadmap - the general plan
Our main focus going forward is going to be content. We want players to be able to experience a full run as soon as possible, that means traversing three sectors, gaining more powerful equipment and cards, encountering new events, and facing more challenging enemies.
Some features, such as items players can find and use, still offer a lot of untapped design space. We have some interesting plans for them, and we’ll share more details soon.
The same is true of the crewmembers, we have a crew leveling system that we we want to flesh out more before bringing it to players, that will also be one of our focus points going forward. We also plan to have special events for how each crewmember you find along your journeys joins you.
Another major part of our focus going forward will also be expanding on the universe of Breachway. Besides further fleshing out the main motive for each ship to get to the source of the signal, you will also find some small pockets of exposition— on defeating the first sector boss, on reaching the second sector, and so on. These narrative moments will be unique based on your crew and ship, and they’ll only appear once to avoid disrupting gameplay. We plan to add many more of these small slices of world-building, triggered by in-game events and conditions, and tailored to your ship and crew composition.
Early Access updates
Speaking of which, we should outline what our plans are for updates.
Initially, we’ll likely need to patch the game frequently, as thousands of players will find bugs that our smaller group of testers missed. Sadly this is the nature of games with such interdependent systems with some crazy edge-cases.
After the initial flurry of hotfixes, we plan to settle into a rhythm of smaller updates every few weeks where we do balance changes, add new events here and there possibly, and polish and further develop out visual effects.
Then once every couple of months, we are going to release larger updates, that will feature things like new ships, new enemies, new regions, missions, crewmembers, and more—possibly even some surprises we haven’t thought of yet. We already have a new ship we’re working on for the first big update. This ship is all about missiles and blowing enemy ships to (space)dust.
That’s all for now. Back to work—just one more day until we can finally share the game with you.
See you soon, space cowboys!
Victor & the Edgeflow team