Breathedge News

Comrades!

This year is over. And as you may have noticed, 2022 has arrived. However, if you didn’t have time to notice it, we apologize for the spoiler…

The most important thing, of course, is to wish you all the best and nothing bad.
So this difficult matter calls for the good ol’ grandma wish. That’s why we wish you everything that grandmothers do but multiplied by three. If for some reason, your grandmother hates you, then it's not our fault — we still love you, even if you’re lousy grandchildren. Even Bob.

Hear that, Bob? We adore you!



All right, formalities and wishes aside, it’s time to get down to the main topic of this news. As we’ve already mentioned, 2022 has arrived. Surely, you’ve found all these “twos” quite suspicious — and you’re right to do so. The year 2022 consists of two numbers “two,” preceded by two other numbers, one of which — get ready for it — is also “two!”

An amazing coincidence? We don't think so.



Let's move on. 2022 is not that big a problem until the 22nd day of the 22nd month of 2222 comes — this is where it gets very serious. In addition to the upcoming "Great Number Two", we have spent exactly two years in the pandemic or, to be more precise, 731 days.

731 — have you noticed?

If you subtract the last “1” from the second “3”, it will be 2.
If you subtract the last “1” from the first “7” and then divide it by the remaining “3” – you get 2 again!
Even if you add up all the numbers 7+3+1 it will still be two!
By the way, “B” is the average grade in the diplomas of the developers of Breathedge, and it’s the SECOND letter in the alphabet…!

… Another coincidence, you say?



Many of you have probably already started to get nervous and are looking at your watch, where there is probably a number two. Did we guess right? A-ha!

But that's not all.

This piece of news was rewritten twice and was published on the second attempt on Steam, which belongs to Valve Corporation. As we know from unverified sources, 2 is the favorite number of this great company — definitely not number 3, nope.

See for yourself: Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2 (4 = 2+2!!!), Portal 2, Dota 2, Counter-Strike Online 2, and even the Source 2 engine.
Maybe it's still just a coincidence?

No, no, and no!



Was that not enough?

We say “Ha ha!” to you — two times. Number Two hasn’t even started its disastrous march yet.

Right now, walk up to any mirror — come on, don’t be lazy.
How many nostrils, ears, eyes do you see? Most certainly Number Two pop-ups in your mind — only the chosen ones can say they have just one nostril.

Alright-alright, if that doesn’t impress you, the following thought experiment certainly will:

Now, close your eyes… Breathe in and breathe out two times… Think of Number Two, and count to two.

When you counted to two, what was the last number? Don’t rush to look at the answer below… Have you counted it yet?

YES, EXACTLY — IT’S TWO!

“OMG, OMG, OMG!” you scream. “How did they know?!” you keep screaming.

That’s it!



We could provide no less than 222 examples of Number Two entering our everyday life — from two attempts of our programmer to fix bugs to two of us wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year in this piece of News. (Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, comrades! — here it is, the 2nd time.)

But all this, of course, is an extremely huge hint at you-know-what…

Yes, yes, yes!

You probably have already guessed: “All this developers’ “Number Two” speech is for a reason. They’ve probably prepared some information about something we’ve been waiting for so long!”

And you’d be right if you have!

That is true! Today, in the year of 2022, after the release of Breathedge, we’d like to officially announce that we are going to recommend you to brush your teeth no less than TWO times a day! Two! Two. Two, two, two.



So it goes. By the way, if you’ve read this piece of news two times, then you’ve probably noticed that some letters in different words make up the word “two.”

It’s unexplainable, but it’s a fact.

Well, and traditionally we would like to remind you that you can always send your questions, wishes, or requirements to repair your saves to the two contacts listed below. Sometimes we respond via direct messages on social networks, but Discord or mail will convey your idea at times faster, fuller, and better. We don't know how it works, but that's not the point. We would be happy to receive your messages!

Our Discord:
https://discord.gg/uezQcU7

Our Discord:
[email protected]

Our two:
2.

Greetings, comrades!

It's getting a little cold outside, just like being in outer space without pants, but that's not important right now.

The important thing is that the Steam Awards are coming up. We've been asking some chickens around, and they told us we should definitely get the Outstanding Game with a Rich Plot award. Why, you ask? We have no idea, it sounds as distant from us as possible, which means we have to take it. If you love our Man, Chicken, and space dumps, then vote for the Party, Breathedge, and Outstanding Game! Or just for the best game. Or vote for the worst game, or don't vote at all...

In fact, the most outstanding ones here are you, our favorite players. And rich, and the stories are you too, and the games, and the quotes…

That’s all there is to it. And yes, thank you for being with us! We'll see you soon. Someplace, somewhere...

RedRuins Softworks

You might have already guessed what we wanted to tell you about in this post. And yes, you’re correct. “A” is the first letter of the English alphabet, and “U” is... uh, some other letter. That’s all we wanted to inform you about. See you in six months in the next piece of news!

So, before we start to spew another tall-tale, we wish to let you know that the expansion release date is timed to coincide with the expansion's release date that is...today! Goodness gracious. We even made a video about it, a nice one (probably):

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

What do you mean “there isn’t enough news?” What do you mean “we’ll hang you by the part of your body you made this game with”? How can you even threaten to hang someone by their legs? It's highly inappropriate, it's... ah, whatever. So here’s the news.



A lot of time has passed since the release of Breathedge. We could name the exact number of days if we knew how to count, but we’ll just use vague wording instead. The release showed two important things that determined the immediate future of our team:

1. People love us. Yes, that's how presumptuously we can say that a lot of wonderful players wonderfully love wonderful us, and we love wonderful them. And it's wonderful!
   
2. People hate us. Yes, that's how presumptuously we can say that a lot of awful players awfully hate awful us, and we awfully hate awful them. And it's awful!
   

What does it mean? It means that Breathedge was a success, at least part of it. For all this long time after the release, we’ve been discussing, thinking, analyzing, planning, sleeping, eating, and discussing again. So what have we come to? We came to nothing because we haven’t been discussing the game… Haha, just kidding! (Probably) We came to a simple and clear conclusion: we urgently need another project. It’ll make everything better: mechanics, graphics, plot, meaning, mood, digestion, ecology, and you never know what else it will improve. It just has to be created!



Let's forget for a second about new projects, dreams, and unicorns, and return to reality: Breathedge. A completely finished project, from the intro to the credits. The game has one small feature — it was conceived as a short single-player adventure game with elements of survival (or a survival game with elements of adventure, we’ll never know). Of course, this is not a drawback for the game, because why not? But it’s a drawback for its capabilities. Breathedge cannot be qualitatively expanded or radically improved in its current form. All its troubles and sorrows, like backtracking, a stuttering autosave, or the inability to close the crafting window during crafting, can only be fixed by changing the core of the project completely, breaking everyone’s savegames, and destroying their progress. It’s not so easy to implement multiplayer in the game, give a construction set to the suffering, the world cannot be expanded (the game will explode from the number of textures). When we analyze the result, our crooked legs strut toward redesigning everything, but we understand that we won’t be able to make it any worse than it already is anyway... unless we throw some DLC into this Furnace of Horror.



About the DLC, by the way. We have not forgotten that it should be released soon, so we are going to release it as late as we can. As promised, the DLC turned out to be very small, difficult to play, and stupid, like the whole game itself. It may seem surprising, but in the DLC, you will have to survive — yep, that’s right — despite everyone expecting a Barbie florist simulator. However, unlike the main game, where you can survive as long as you want, in the DLC, you will have only thirty minutes to complete a task. Or thirty tasks to complete in one minute... Ah, never mind. This story will be focused on one of the test subjects in a mysterious Leia Interplanetary Research Center. The Leia Center is either a bogeyman story to scare children or a tale of drunken astronauts, but perhaps it really is floating in space and is directly connected with the Breatnedge Global Funeral Agency. A small story about a big world, a little man, a lot of dangers, and yourself, armed with half an hour and your talent for survival. This is kinda what this DLC is about, uhuh.



But we got distracted from the topic of the new project. Analyzing Breathedge in detail, we clearly understand what we would like to improve, where we could add, and where we should’ve cut. We want more, we want improvements, and we still have the strength and opportunities. In connection with this set of big words, we decided not to wait for the end of our fifteen-year vacation and the introduction of a microtransaction system into Breathedge with cute hats for the Chicken, but to start working on a new big project right now instead.



In this piece of news, we won’t tell what exactly we’ll have to work on, we won’t even hint at it. Otherwise, there will be no reason to roll out another piece of news about anything. And yes, we refute in advance the vile accusations that we ourselves do not know what we will be working on. This is a lie and a provocation! We know everything, this is a super-duper project with a beautiful title, and it's about all sorts of different things, there will be characters, locations, and the main menu. We even have a promo concept:



Oops, we’ve forgotten about an ad break! Something-something Frederico Pignole latest fashion collection, yada yada, and something else...oooh, right! Freebies! That’s the stuff. Everyone’s up for some cost-free fun, right? How about taking a camera into your hands, building a makeshift shovel, finding a backyard to pillage, putting on your grandpa’s gas mask, and doing some fighting? We will, that’s for sure. Up until the 7th of October, you can try doing all that in a free demo of Outbreak Island, a nice game made by our dearest friends. It’s something, isn’t it?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1442530/Outbreak_Island/

So it goes. By the way, if you’re reading our news for the first time, then you are probably at a loss on where you can write rapturous reviews about our literary gift? That's why we have a Discord server and email. And we’d like to remind you that we handle negative reviews, objective criticism, and difficult matters with special care, and for such messages, we have allocated a separate folder in our email and called it "Trash". That's how cool we are. We are waiting for your messages, we are working hard, and we will probably see you soon.

Sincerely yours, us.

Our Discord server:
https://discord.gg/uezQcU7

Our email:
[email protected]

Dear comrades! You may have noticed that the release of the game has happened, but if you haven’t, we’re telling you now: it has happened. Recently, we’ve received a lot of different messages, feedback, criticism, praises, questions, etc. We’ve read all that, studied it, made some calculations, and made some ambiguous conclusions. Some didn’t like our decision to make the final part of the game more linear, and some, on the contrary, were unspeakably happy about it. For some, there wasn’t enough craft, and for some, there wasn’t enough construction. Some wanted more shooting, some wanted a game about ponies, and some liked it so much that they tried to give us a crate of beer, but unfortunately, chickens don’t drink beer… Well, there were a lot of interesting opinions.

There were also conspiracy theories about a lack of budget, divine intervention, the scriptwriter’s drinking problem, the expansion of the team, the replacement of the team members with raccoons, etc. So, nothing of the listed things above happened — our cozy chicken coop is still the same, we have plenty of everything, and we continue our work. But questions like “What are we working on now?”, “What have we patched?”, “What to expect from the new add-on?”, “What will happen to Breathedge?”, “Where is the world going?”, and “Why is it going?”, are quite interesting.



The easiest question to answer is where is the world going? It’s going into the future. But why? Because it’s spherical in shape. The flat Earth concept believers would argue with that, of course, but we have solid proof: if the Earth is flat, then how can it move? Huh? Checkmate.



Now a more important question: “What to expect from Breathedge next?” So, there was a time, a long time ago, when we promised a small free add-on. Is it possible? Yes. We can say even more: we are planning two small add-ons.

First of all, we’ve read all your wishes and decided that the project lacks a hardcore survival. Real hardcore survival challenge for the toughest survivalists. And such a challenge will be the first small add-on called “Hold Your Breath”. It will tell the story about the fate of an unknown character from the Breathedge world, inextricably connected with the future of the galaxy. He will face a simple and clear task — to survive a certain amount of time. That’s it. Too bad that it won’t be that easy. You’ll face the struggle for each gasp of oxygen, each can of beer, and each health point — just like in real life. The release of the add-on is planned for the summer of 2021.

The second add-on is called “Escape”. In it, we will try to delve deeper into the mechanics of crafting, building, and exploring space, introducing you to another important character in the world of Breathedge. We’ll tell you about the details later. The release of the add-on “Escape” is planned for the second half of 2021, but not earlier than the first add-on because it’d become the first add-on and the first add-on would become the second one, and we’d be confused.
All the add-ons will be released in the form of simple updates of the original game and will become its integral part, despite them technically not being connected with the main storyline. You may not play as Man, but complete “Escape”, and vise versa. So it goes.



Another important question: What’s up with the balance? We have analyzed many reviews and personal messages about the balance in the game. We’ve recently raised the starting oxygen level and it has made the game a little better. Now it’s time to test the durability of some items without breaking the saves. By popular demand and after thorough testing, we’ve decided to:

1. Increase the durability of the handy scrapper from 35 to 50 points. This became possible thanks to our replacing the usual electrical tape with a more expensive and durable one. You won't notice any difference in the look of the electrical tape, but its chemical composition is unique. It was quite expensive, but now you’ll have to fly to and fro for a new handy scrapper much less often.
   
2. Increase the durability of the repair tool from 15 to 20 points. Sure, it’s not used as often as the handy scrapper, but 5 additional durability points will be good for it.
   
3. Increase the durability of the scanner from 15 to 20 points. Some of you asked to make the durability of the scanner unlimited, but the game then would become too casual to play. Besides, we can’t create any new batteries without breaking the gameplay for everyone. And in general, Man can’t take care good of things, so they break.
   
4. Increase the durability of the drill from 15 to 20 points. Everything is clear here: more durability means more resources per one flight. That’s great.
   
5. Increase the durability of the grabber from 15 to 20 points. As with the drill, it's all for the sake of getting more resources.
   
6. Increase the durability of the magnetic master key from 15 to 30 points. The player has to fly great distances in Chapter 2, so the increase in the durability of any tools, including the magnetic master key, should be celebrated. Probably.
   
7. Increase the analyzer's durability from 35 to 35 points. Yes, that's right. Who needs it in the game anyway? We don’t know either. So after very long calculations, we decided to rebalance the analyzer in this way. Phew! That was hardcore math.
   

By the way, all these wonderful changes, which only new players will notice, were introduced in the most recent update of the project, which has either already been added or will be added in the coming hours.
In addition to our waltzing around and tweaking the balance, the update will also fix some minor bugs that you shared with us, namely:

• The biggest and most annoying problem which several players faced was the inability to complete the task of installing the filtering system in Chapter 4. How some managed to complete the task before receiving this task is a separate question, but now there should be no such problem. If there still is, then we don’t know anything about this.
  
• Another major bug was the final phase of the robot boss in Chapter 4. Several players had a situation where he became immortal after a certain order of saves, deaths, and loads. Now the robot shouldn't do that anymore.
  
• Another fairly common problem was Man getting stuck in the textures. Of course, technically, this has nothing to do with textures. In fact, it’s the collision of Man's body that gets stuck in the collisions of the environment, but this fact is unlikely to make it easier for someone. It’s physically impossible to check every inch of the game, sticking Man into every object of the world at all possible angles. It’s too late to redo the logic of the collision of objects. So what remains is either to put up with it or to try some workaround solution. The most common way out of this situation is to twitch in all directions, like Ace Ventura trying to get out of the rhino, while pressing Space (works 70% of the time). If the twitching didn’t help, the next step might be throwing an object from your inventory. The collision of the object will come into conflict with the collision of Man and the environment, and it might push him out. Or it might not (it works in 50% of hopeless cases). Well, if all else fails, and Man turns blue from lack of oxygen, and your nerves are no longer able to withstand at least a minute of this masterpiece, we’ve introduced a vile cheat: teleporting using the Ctrl + Shift + Alt + U key combination on the keyboard. This command teleports the player to a point on the nearest collision where the player is looking. If you are looking at the farthest object in the world, don’t blame us. By the way, our programmer sent his best regards to the players with gamepads and then locked himself in the toilet laughing wildly. We still can't get him out of there.
  
• In addition, we fixed various minor bugs, such as textures, texts, collisions, icons, and other little things that we forgot to list. There are still some quite unique bugs left that are either extremely rare or don’t have an adequate solution at the moment. For example, there is a mysterious disappearance of the stand with hamsters. David Blaine is probably involved. Another common problem, manifesting itself with varying degrees of intensity, is the scattering of things around the station. Some players will see a photo on the table move slightly, while others will see tables flying around the cabin. We know about this bug, but it’s impossible to fix it without breaking everyone's save.
  
• If there were any critical errors, they were rare and were connected with drivers or hardware, rather than our project. And that’s good.
  

So it goes. Oh, we almost forgot. As usual, you can write to us and share anything you want, be it your wishes, or a photo of your favorite dust ball behind your TV. We are always available: we read your comments on our news, flip through our discord channel, scroll through our email, ignore well-reasoned criticism, and are happy to read your inadequate ones (or vice versa). And don’t forget, if you encounter a bug in the game please contact us by email or Discord. This helps to improve our project and polish all of its rough edges.

Our Discord:
https://discord.gg/uezQcU7

Our email:
[email protected]

Comrades! This long-awaited moment, when we can blame all of you for this, has finally come. Yes, comrades, it’s a straight fact— there would be no Man without you! During the development of the game, you’ve been by our side, you’ve been helping us, criticizing us, giving us advice, and breaking the game. You’ve taken an integral part in the development of Breathedge, and we hope that we’ve met your expectations at least a little (and if we haven’t, then we don’t know anything, never heard of anything, and we’ve got nothing to do with it). Anyway, starting from today, Breathedge is officially a completely finished, full-fledged game. Yes, we’ll add a tiny bit of gameplay as post-release content. Maybe some hotfixes will be needed because instead of v. 1.0 we’ve uploaded 3 GB of the scriptwriter’s private photos, but it’s not that important right now. What’s important is the fact that the release has finally happened. In honor of this, we even recorded the longest trailer in human history (according to our artist, and he usually lies).

https://youtu.be/58XGHeVuT7k

Overall, we could finish our news here, but we’d like to tell you about the project in numbers a little. If you don’t like numbers, you can imagine cute little turtles instead of them. Turtle-based math is more friendly than the usual one.



The first number that is worth mentioning is the date of the beginning of the development: August 9, 2017. On that date, the very first document with the ideas about the future game was created. It consisted mainly of the programmer’s stream of consciousness. Quote:
“A berry gatherer, a quantum burp, hero destabilization, eversion of mackerel, a big mansion, a wild dog, a train of wind, red loafers, hoof health, a chicken’s sorrow, a mother’s leash, Stalin’s glade, a local historian prophet, a voodoo bard, a water fly, pigfall, a peach crutch, mitten sales, an enterprise of courage, products of sorrow, a head valley, drill the shrimp in, sales palm, a crowd of ronins, banning of thyme, creatures have fallen asleep, romance frigate, the miser and the flea»

Phew, so many brilliant ideas. You can take any of them for your projects if you like — we don’t mind.

After a brainstorm session, dull work on the analysis of trends, genres, ways of monetization, and counting the amount of detergent needed for inspiration, slowly but surely we came up with a survival game in space. So, on August 20, 2017, Breathedge had its very first concept, which marked the beginning of the entire visual part of the game, as well as Man’s appearance.



At first, Breathedge was intended to be a serious game in a strict Soviet visual style about a man who gets into a space catastrophe and wants to get to his quarrelsome wife who was flying with him. But then we slept it off, and we got what we got. We’re sorry.

Anyway, let’s get back to numbers. So, what have we done with our team of 5-8-15 people? (We can’t count all those who had something to do with the game.) Let’s take out our colorful plastic toy abacus and see...

1. The game’s script is 43,621 words. Most of the words are obscene. But that’s nothing. This is how the scriptwriter sees it.
   
2. We voiced 1,377 lines for different characters in the game. 1,253 lines belong to the Spacesuit. The longest line lasts 76,833122 seconds, which can put even the most patient players into a coma. So be careful.
   
3. In addition to all the characters’ babbling, the game has 497 sound files, from the sound of footsteps to the "Tachanka" song.
   
4. The game contains 2,722 models (Man, the Chicken, debris, food, tools, a planet, etc.). There is a possibility that some of these models are just junk that was not included in the game. But we tried to keep the project clean, so there aren’t many directories like "New folder — New folder 2 — Delete on release — New folder 3” in the project.
   
5. Apart from the models, textures are also an important part of the game. There are 4,129 of them. You might ask, why are there so few textures, considering that usually, one model requires at least three texture maps, and 4,129 - 2,722 ≠ 3 (sort of)? Well, that's because... Well, yeah, just because. In fact, for the sake of optimization, many models contain the same set of textures, where the most important texture is a field divided into colored squares. Almost every debris in the game world, all buildings, vehicles, ships, and interiors have such textures. At the same time, a very large part of the textures relates to various icons and inventory items. Therefore, in fact, 2,722 models in the game have at best a quarter of the project’s textures.
   
6. Of all the richness of textures, the game has 146 textures localized into 11 languages. We tried to localize various newspapers, screens, packages, calendars, and, in general, any objects containing text. It is difficult and time-consuming, but now you can complete Breathedge in the unfamiliar and beautiful Japanese language, having an unforgettable experience and a complete lack of understanding of what is going on. Isn’t it wonderful? (for our readers from Japan, we advise you to mentally replace part of the previous sentence "... beautiful Japanese" with "... beautiful ________ language”, substituting any unfamiliar language from the list of available ones in the empty field).
   
7. In Breathedge, you can find 107 different effects (particles), from explosions and projectiles to explosions and other projectiles. We have no idea where exactly are these 107 effects, but they are there.
   
8. We are also proud of our set of 380 unique and weird animations. Any complex hand movement is a unique animation, and, usually, two people (an active and a passive animator) worked hard to make it. You can’t find such job positions on any job search sites, but we have them in our studio.
   
9. There are 442 blueprint classes in total. Anyone familiar with Unreal Engine 4 knows that blueprints are simplified rendered pieces of game code. A module, as a building element, consists of several walls, ceilings, floors, and light sources. At the same time, each of the walls is interactive and has its own logic of interaction in the game. All this is collected in one blueprint. Whoop-dee-doo, our long years of work are described in just one ridiculous sentence. Apart from blueprints, there is a lot of C++ code in the game, but it’s impossible to count all the handwritten lines.
   
10. Instead of counting the lines of code, we decided to test the programmer's work in another way. We took a grinder, some pliers, and a magnifying glass, and calculated that the programmer had 1,071,020,491 dead neurons. Stress, comrades, and a lot of work.
    
11. So many numbers. But what about our sales, popularity, money, and shares? Where did we get the money to buy a cruise liner for $79,411,764? Everything is much more complicated here. Nobody, especially our pride, will allow us to tell the exact numbers, but you can find this data in open sources. The range will be as thus: from 100 to 400 thousand players got the game in one way or another. In general, this range is quite close to reality, but it’s already difficult to calculate our earnings even for us. How many copies of the game were distributed to streamers, testers, and the media? How many were sold, in what period, at what price, and at what discounts? How many players requested a refund? How much in taxes did we pay? What were the stores’ fees, technology royalties, bank commissions? How much did we spend on advertising, programs, development, people? Who knows? Let's just multiply 400k players by $25 per copy and get $10 million and be happy rich guys! Woo, let's have a party! (By the way, even this is not enough to buy a liner =( )
    

Well, that's all. So much useless information. We’ve released the game, calculated all the numbers, so what's next? Well, now we have to complete all our work on porting the game to consoles and the release on them (we will announce the date of this separately), make the promised add-on to Breathedge (it’s free, small, and beautiful, like a ripe wombat), and perhaps, something else, but that’s not for certain. So it goes.

And as usual, you can send all your wishes, doubts, and demands, including more accurate calculations based on our incomprehensible figures, by mail or discord. We always read everything and draw our conclusions.

Our Discord:
https://discord.gg/uezQcU7

Our email:
[email protected]