Breathedge News

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]

Comrades! We gave you the previous piece of news such a long time ago, it’s likely you’ve forgotten about the upcoming release by now. We sure did. And thus, we would like to remind all of you (and notify all those we didn’t know in the first place) that Breathedge will release under version 1.0 on February 25th. The game release includes 3 new story-concluding chapters, 2 new models, 1 new music track, and 50 hours’ worth of title screen fodder text (or maybe not, we’re not sure).
Besides this arch-important reminder, we’d also like to specify the release time by your place of residence:



That’s it, folks. And of course, don’t forget that you can report this low-effort piece of news with the release date and the image it contains straight to our email address or our discord server. We’re monitoring incoming queries all day long with our fatigued, red eyes (and that, for once, isn’t a joke).
See you, space comrade!

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

Our email: [email protected]

Comrades! After reading the headline of the news, you’ve probably thought it will be about the upcoming release of the game. But... no. It won’t be about that. There’s nothing much to talk about the release. The PC release will be on February 25th. The end. Can you even call it news? Where’s the pile of meaningless text, where are the silly jokes, and pictures of Man floating against the background of low-poly rocks? That’s what we think, too. Therefore, this piece of news will be dedicated to the rare Atlantic fish "Pisces Terebro", also called the Drill Fish. Its nose has a universal drill that can function as a jackhammer and twenty-five drills for various types of surfaces. Its built-in flashlight, ergonomic grip, and its removable and rechargeable battery make this fish a unique underwater repair tool. And its slimy scales and nasty temper will keep you busy, for sure. Drill Fish – available in all Atlantic stores! Get one now and never read any news from our team.



All right, it's time to stop all this subtle hidden advertising in the news and get back to the main topic. On February 25, 2021, Breathedge will exit Early Access and will receive an update to version 1.0.

https://youtu.be/Q3TvkZ9vemA
Yep, that’s right! Breathedge won’t be an endless Early Access project anymore. It will receive a completed game status, end credits, and a finished story. We all dreamed of endless development, promises, promises to promise promises, and so on... But, unfortunately, when our programmer started hitting the scriptwriter with the keyboard again, he accidentally finished developing the game. Well, it happens.



For all those who didn’t have the opportunity to buy Breathedge, play 10 minutes, and get a refund, we would like to briefly tell you that this game is about space, a suffocating Man, an immortal chicken, coffins, collecting all kinds of junk, and a world conspiracy. Of course, it has many other useful things for humanity, such as indecent inscriptions on the hulls of ships, strange humor, linear locations, and bad game design decisions, but we’ve deliberately omitted these details so as not to spoil your first and last 10 minutes in the game.



For those who bought the game, but didn’t have time to get a refund, because their spouse/mother/grandmother called them to eat some soup, we would like to remind you that the future release update will add three new, final chapters to the game. We tried to make them as dynamic and rich in terms of the storyline as possible, but things turned out as usual. In the new chapters, you will be able to fly in a spaceship, shoot into the void of space from large turrets, break something, blow up something and, if you're lucky, fix something. As a gift, in addition to the infinity of empty space, as usual, there will be a handful of collectible junk, a couple of new tools, a couple of new resources, and some joke about games.



By the way, this piece of news is translated into all the languages that will be in the game on its release. We are obliged to remind you that the project will have full text and voice English and Russian localizations, and full text localizations (textures, texts, captions, UI) in the following languages: German, French, Polish, Spanish (LATAM), Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean. And yeah, someone has covered our office walls in graffiti with the Brazilian flags because in our previous piece of news we showed only a Portuguese flag. Good thing we don’t have an office at all, but we’ll add the Brazillian flag anyway.



For those who are waiting for the game on consoles, we have some good news and bad news. The good news is that we have finished porting the game to consoles. The bad news is that we have finished porting the game to consoles. Oh, wait, something’s not right… Anyway, we’ve completely finished porting the game to consoles, but we’ll inform those of you who are interested about the release date later. It’s quite possible that the release dates on consoles will differ from the PC one due to long checkups, but we’ll still let you know what the dates are.



And the last thing: those who follow the project saw the information that Breathedge will have a small story expansion — absolutely free and, we could say, given to you by force. So, we’ve started working on it, and you can try to guess what it will be about and what it’ll have (and while you’re at it, we’ll steal your ideas).



So it goes. Anyway, if trying to be real serious, the release of the game is a big and important thing for us, and we’re glad that together with you we’ve walked this long way from the first small location to some other small location, and we even didn’t die. It was awesome, but we’ll try and make it even more awesome.

And as always, you can send all your wishes, your hurt feelings and disappointments, together with bug reports and questions, to our Discord and email. We try to read them all, and we even have some success in it.

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

Our email:
[email protected]

Comrades! The announcement of the release date is almost there, yes indeed, we’re about to tell you when it will happen, we even left some hints here and there for you to find, but nothing too precise, we’re shy like that...Well, it doesn’t matter. What does matter, is that we’re finally almost ready to release our game! It will happen this month - in February. The Man hasn’t suffocated yet, and what we want to do is share this little teaser with you. Check it out!

https://youtu.be/ckPopi2F0jg