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Turn-Based Tactics Into the Breach: Advanced Edition - mech tactics game from FTL devs with Chris Avellone writing

Nutria

Arcane
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Mar 12, 2017
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한양
Strap Yourselves In
I'm no fan of mechs either, but I love it. Just think of it as a game where around 50% of the vehicles happen to have legs.
 

Arnust

Savant
Joined
Dec 22, 2016
Messages
680
Location
Spain
A fair lot of the mechs being literally a mobile weapon, most of Science and the Artillery class for instance. The most ridiculous one would be like the Laser Mech that looks a bit like a metal gear and the Thunder Mech that's like Whiplash the Iron Man antagonist.
 

miles teg

Scholar
Joined
Jan 18, 2015
Messages
130
Because it's a lot of work and there is little to gain - mobile market is owned by big titles. It's not PC or even console, where even an obscure indie can become a sudden hit.
Moreover, people play games there while shitting during break in a public toilet. They will not even remember your title.
Handheld consoles like Switch or PSP is a nice alternative though.
I have to agree with this. Bought the game on Switch and having a blast. It's PERFECT on this console.
Pretty sure my old Android phone couldn't even run the thing.
But you can shit while playing the Switch, too!
 

Latelistener

Arcane
Joined
May 25, 2016
Messages
2,579
But you can shit while playing the Switch, too!
You can, but the problem is that mobile and PC/Console audiences are very different in their cores.
Handheld consoles became an unexpected shelter for JRPG tactics like Valkyria Chronicles (which sold poorly on PS3 and moved to PSP).
 

Zarniwoop

TESTOSTERONIC As Fuck™
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Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Messages
18,650
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Which is why I don't want one (apart from it being ridiculously overpriced, the same price as a PS4? lul)

No Japaneseru kwaii desu crapperu for me, thanks.
 

Black

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2007
Messages
1,872,592
The longer the better. If you don't know the joys of peaceful shitting in silence you're probably still a teen.
 

baud

Arcane
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3,992
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Septentrion
RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
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Infinitron

I post news
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Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,234
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-into-the-breach-came-very-close-to-givi-1833498295

The Creators Of Into The Breach Came Very Close To Giving Up On It

The strategy game Into The Breach is elegant in its simplicity, but that’s because its designers had to scrap several huge sections of the game that just didn’t work. Matthew Davis and Justin Ma, the minds behind FTL andInto The Breach, came on Kotaku Splitscreen during GDC 2019 to tell Jason and me how many times they almost gave up on making their game.

Justin Ma: It was literally years of just banging our head against the wall, trying to get something to work and be fun. I hope our next project won’t be that, because it’s a little hard after maybe three or four times throwing out six months of work to still feel like, “There’s something good here.” I’m the more optimistic one of the pair of us, and—

Matthew Davis: You nearly always think, “There’s something here.” And I’m like, “No, it’s terrible.” And we’re back to scratching it all out.

Justin: I think if we’d had to do that one more time, I would’ve been close to giving up.

Matthew: We were very close to giving up on the game.

Jason: Really? So what was the roadblock? Or was there a “eureka” moment where suddenly it all clicked? Or was it the opposite where it was just like, you were trying to climb this mountain?

Matthew: It’s hard to narrow down to one exact thing.

Justin: If we’re hyper-simplifying, we figured out combat that seemed like there was something interesting. And then we spent forever trying to make a meta-game around that. Is it XCOM? Is it other types of tactic games?

Jason: What was the combat part you figured out?

Justin: So combat is just literally fighting in the grid.

Matthew: What you actually think of when you think Into The Breach. And then you have the island map that has where you select missions and you upgrade your mechs. We had five different iterations on it. Completely different iterations.

Justin: We had city-building. We had multiple squads. All that sort of junk. The closest thing to our eureka moment was just literally, “This part of the game works. This part of the game doesn’t work. Cut all that, and just focus on the part that does work.”

Jason: Which parts didn’t work?

Justin: Everything besides the combat. So maybe 60 percent of the game, we just dropped it all and say, “Okay, it’s just a bunch of missions in a row. Screw it.” We know that the actual combat, which is the entirety of the game as it has released, that was 30 percent of what we were hoping.

Matthew: We were hoping for that more XCOM experience where you have lots of missions popping up with times and alerts, and your people get hurt, and you have to devote resources and time to fixing them or healing them.

Justin: Repairing the city.

Matthew: We had huge research trees, repairing the cities.

Justin: We had the FTL text events where your equipment and your mechs would change the options.

Jason: And what wasn’t working about that stuff?

Justin: All of it. It was just terrible.

Jason: So you’re just playing it and it’s not fun? How do you even know, “It’s not fun because this isn’t working”?

Justin: That’s the challenge.

Matthew: There is an element of just an intuition that this doesn’t feel right.

Justin: Matt would be largely the gut check person. You were coding the whole thing, and so I would be in the trenches of trying to iterate and iterate on micro-design, and then Matt would have a chance to boot it up to play and be like, “This is all terrible.” And we were like, okay. Back to the drawing board. Scrap all of that. Let’s see what we can do.
 

Darth Canoli

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Perched on a tree
Interesting interview, that's exactly how i felt when i played the game, that 70% of it was missing.

A shame they gave up on something more complex, the game is fun as it is, just not for long, for me at least but the combat part is very good, that's for sure.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,234
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Postmortem at GDC: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025772/-Into-the-Breach-Design

Session Name: 'Into the Breach' Design Postmortem

Speaker(s): Matthew Davis

Company Name(s): Subset Games

Track / Format: Design

Overview: 'Into the Breach' took Subset Games four long years to develop after finishing FTL. This talk will detail that process from the early design drafts to the final balancing decisions. Diving into years of cut content and iteration, this talk will show how Subset Games approaches difficult design challenges. How do you decide which feature to cut? How do you successfully "steal" design elements from other games while remaining original? How do you decide on the correct difficulty? How much RNG should you use?
 
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Myzzrym

Tactical Adventures
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Developer
Joined
Apr 12, 2019
Messages
168
Agreed with Canoli, it was definitively an interesting game but I felt like something was missing on the non-combat side. Story, Progression, something. I wouldn't be able to tell what, but it felt far less complete than FTL.

A shame really, I really liked the game.
 
Self-Ejected

A_boring_GOG_bot

Self-Ejected
Joined
Dec 29, 2018
Messages
338
Currently on sale ( 33% off ) on Gog .
 

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