Breachway News

Hi everyone,

Today marks one year since Breachway launched into Early Access. We can’t believe how fast the time has flown by!

We'd like to start by thanking everyone in our community for their feedback, patience, and support. We're humbled to have such dedicated players.



Over the past year, we’ve shipped a few major balance updates, added the Avalanche missile ship, overhauled the Equipment system, and introduced a meta-progression system. Most importantly, a lot of those changes were driven by your feedback.

The last year of feedback has been really eye-opening. The game's vision is a lot clearer now than it was at launch. We've spent a lot of time figuring out where exactly we want to go with Breachway, and the way forward feels clearer than ever.

It’s easy for to get caught up in the day-to-day tasks of fixing bugs, tweaking balance, and adding features, while losing sight of the bigger picture. But for occasions such as this, looking at some numbers really helps put things into perspective:

• 551,086 runs started
  
• 269,287 boss ships defeated
  
• Average playtime: 9 hours 57 minutes
  

That’s a lot of spacefaring, and we’re incredibly grateful to have you along for the ride. Here’s to many more in the year ahead!



If year one of Breachway's Early Access was about adding extra features and refining existing ones, year two is going to be about new content, a better faction system and a more developed universe.
Our goal for this upcoming year is to keep:

• Expanding the game's content
  
• Improving balance
  
• Enhancing run variety
  
• Fully fleshing out the faction system
  

So the game keeps getting better with every update.

But let's look at what's coming in the very near future:

[h2]Breachway's next update - coming October 10th:[/h2]

Enemy overhaul
We've focused on making enemies easier to understand, with more straightforward card effects and that pose more varied challenges
This means 32 reworked enemies and 8 reworked elites and more than a dozen new enemy cards and effects for the first and second sectors.

Alternate bosses for each sector
Boss variety is something Breachway lacked since launch, we're changing this by adding 4 new bosses you can face at the end of each sector. Sector 1 bosses are done, and sector 2 bosses will be coming in the very next update.

The ability to hire crew in stations
This has been a requested feature for a long time, and something we've always wanted to add. This makes player power scaling more predictable, without being reliant on finding the escape pod to get another crew member.


Crew keyword changes
Crew keywords is a feature with a lot of potential that we really wanted to add, but we never took the time to properly explore.

Right now, we're going through existing keywords, making sure they are all relatively equal in usefulness in the right circumstances and that they all play some part in events.
We'll expand on this further in future updates as well

UI/UX improvements
More information on enemy attacks, such as amount of ignite and shred they will add, and making cards that will be played on their next turn more obvious

Neutral elite encounters and neutral ship skins
Neutral Elites provide the player with a challenge that does not reflect on their faction standing. This enables us to really crank up the impact of faction specific elite encounters in future updates.
We're slowly adding in neutral skins for these encounters


This was another massive rework that took a lot of time, similar to the equipment rework a few months back, both of these are crucial as a base to expand the game from, with more frequent updates. Which is what we're gearing up for!

[h2]What to expect this upcoming year:[/h2]

• Third sector and fourth sectors - The current enemy overhaul is meant to expand our design space in order to create interesting and powerful enemies for the player to face in the third sector and beyond
  
• Larger and deadlier enemy ships - we're preparing a whole new class of enemy ship models for the later sectors
  
• More focused and diverse player ship equipment – This is probably the feature we're most excited to work on, it boils down to less cards in each equipment's drafting library, but having drafting libraries more focused on a specific niche that equipment fills. This will move the focus away from what cards you're offered in the drafting screen, and more towards how you load out your ship
  
• Higher loadout flexibility - We're adding an additional hardpoint to ships and introducing multi-purpose hardpoints that can fit multiple equipment types. This should lead to a more varied build for ships
  
• Event overhaul - Another part of the game that wasn't fully baked on release, we have a lot of design space to explore here, after we have all of the sectors
  
• A more meaningful faction system - Tied to the previous task, faction events will now have a deeper impact on your faction relations, which will in turn affect future events you encounter
  
• More focus on narrative - developing the story and universe of Breachway further
  
• The 1.0 release

[hr][/hr]

We hope this post gives you an idea of what to expect from Breachway in its second year in Early Access.

We’re a small team, but we’ve learned so much from your feedback this past year.
Every bug report, review, and suggestion has helped us see the game more clearly and guided us toward both the improvements we’ve made and the bigger ones still ahead.

Thank you for standing with us through this first year of Early Access. It’s been a wild ride with its fair share of bumps, but now that we’re starting to hit our stride, our focus shifts to delivering new content, fleshing out the faction system, and making every run feel more unique and rewarding.

See you, Space cowboy

– The Breachway Team

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Hey everyone,
hope you're all having a great Summer. We've been awfully quiet lately, due to a number of factors (Summer being one of them :D), but important work is being done, and it's time for an update on what's going on behind the scenes.

First, some team updates:
We parted ways with one of our team members due to them wanting to explore other opportunities.
This in combination with the rest of the team taking a prolonged summer break to put some healthy distance between themselves and the game, has slowed things down.
Good news is that everyone is looking forward to pick the pace back up and get into it.
As for me, being mainly responsible for content and balancing, I took this quiet time to read any and all reviews (talk about an emotional roller-coaster), and figure out where the game needs improvement.

[h2]The work being done:[/h2]
After reflecting on player feedback and just playing the game a whole lot, I identified some core areas that just don't work as intended, and need a refactor.
Enemies, sector maps, and the faction relation system are the areas that need the most work, and I started with focusing on enemy complexity.

[h3]The enemies:[/h3]
Enemies got a complete revamp, and I mean every single enemy.

First of all, enemies were mostly playing the same cards the player has access to. This made them too complex, and it was difficult to follow along with all the interactions of their cards.

It's fine if the player has to set up combos and have to play chain of cards to achieve a major effect, but having the enemies do the same, often results in outcomes that are difficult to predict by starting players, leading to confusion and frustration.

Second, because they were limited to player cards and actions, they were also very limited in what they could do.
Breachway's combat is asymmetrical, the things you can do to your enemy, are mostly not the things it can do to you, and there was very little overlap in cards the enemies could play that made sense.
For instance a big part of player actions is about disabling and destroying enemy equipment, but enemies can't do that to the player.

They can however mess with player card cooldowns, with their economy, card slots, add cards to the player's draw and discard piles, and so on. Enemies can just play big, impactful cards without any of the setup players go through.

This basic realization alone opens up a lot more interesting enemy effects and a higher enemy variety, which is what I'm currently exploring..

Enemies also gradually go up in complexity from the first sector onwards, to ease new players in more with how the game works, before throwing them in the deep end of the pool.

[h3]The Faction relation system:[/h3]
The Faction relation system in a roguelike deck-builder is a pretty unexplored feature, and the first implementation wasn't as impactful as we imagined it would be.
We're currently in the middle of looking at what doesn't work, and looking at what we can do to make it feel more impactful. We're also looking to have the relation system be more fluid, in response to your actions
We're currently also testing out having most combat and waypoint nodes not belong to any particular faction. This gives us more options when deciding what enemy to pick, or what event to present, and allows us more freedom to shape some mini-narratives within a sector.
This also allows us to make faction related nodes be more special and really impactful when you encounter them.
We still have to do some exploration on this feature, but it's great to finally have some time to really dedicate to it.

[h3]Sector and run length:[/h3]
Sector length is being worked on and tested, and it's difficult to get a feel for it without the other elements being in place. So while there is some exploration going on in that area, I'm not confident enough to speak on it in anything more than broad terms.
What we're testing at the moment is 4 shorter sectors, each around 70% the length of a current sector.

[h3]The plans going forward:[/h3]
The current enemy rework is giving some good results, and we have 4 new bosses for the first system. We can't wait to share this with you and get some feedback.
The current plan is to keep working and trying things out until we have the first two systems up and running with new enemies and a larger variety of bosses (the plan is to have 4 bosses per system, one for each faction).
At that point we'll release the update on the experimental branch, get your feedback and start tweaking things.
Once the first two systems are done, my estimation is that we'll be able to add a new system every 6 weeks.
This redesign gives us a lot more room to add new content and makes creating new enemies and bosses faster, In some ways it's similar to the equipment redesign, that gave us more room to scale equipment variety and power levels.


We also have other things we're working on in parallel that we'll share once we are far enough along to see how they fit in the game.
Taking a good hard look at the game has proven to be very fruitful, it made me realize how little I knew of proper game design going in, and how much room there is for improvement.

One thing is for sure, we're committed to keep working on Breachway and launching it into 1.0 in a state that we feel proud of. There may be ups and downs, but our core commitment doesn't change, we're still learning, and we're sincerely grateful to have your feedback and support.

Victor

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