Breachway's beautiful ship designs were honed by architectural expertise

Here's a fact that might keep you up at night: Edgeflow Studios' Breachway has been in development for 6 years.

Before you panic, don't worry. Project lead Victor Rubinstein and his studio peers haven't been slaving away for all that time—the game began life in 2019 as a 1v1 collectible card game with a science fiction theme, and was meant to just be a 6-month side project.

In 2021, he and co-founder Mike Conaway decided to enter full production—but not as a multiplayer game (he called the idea of doing so with a 2-person team "insane"), beginning a three-year journey to launching in Early Access this month. They did so without any formal game development training, which isn't an unusual story in 2024, but it is notable that they did so after going to school for architecture.

And beyond that, they pulled it off while operating from the Romanian city of Timișoara, where they're apparently the only game development studio in town.

Rubinstein told us this tale at Gamescom 2024, and explained how Edgeflow Studios explored a host of interesting design ideas to make its game stand out in a crowded genre.

Breachway was made with "form follows function" in mind

It's fair to compare Breachway to Mega Crit's Slay the Spire. Both are run-based games where characters pick a "character" (a spaceship in Breachway) with unique traits, then set out to traverse various nodes, encountering different obstacles and adding or removing cards to their deck along the way.

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There's also a bit of Subset Games' FTL cooked into the mix, with the physical assembly of the different ships impacting player decisions. In Breachway, players load their ships with different weapons and equipment, which put different decks of cards in circulation. Those equipped objects are also displayed on the model of the ship, and can be targeted by enemies. The player also can target enemy upgrades, damaging or disabling them to secure victory. Which characters operate which systems also plays a major role.

Breachway's eye-catching ship models are a part of the appeal (the game's Next Fest demo racked up a number of players in advance of its recent Early Access launch). Robinson said he and the team wanted to go in a different direction than how many ships are designed in modern games, avoiding the all-white aesthetics of real-world spaceships but also refraining from the organic shapes of alien craft in other science fiction titles.

The SyFy and Amazon series The Expanse (adapted from the book series by James S.A. Corey) was a huge inspiration, with vessels like the Rocinante, the Donnager, and the Razorback looming in Robinson's mind. The ships are bulky and loaded with details meant to evoke "functionality," inviting the player to imagine how they might be used in real life.

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But The Expanse is just a tertiary inspiration. Rubinstein and the game's 3D artist are trained architects who graduated from the same school. "[Architecture] teaches you to always think within the human scale," he said. "So if you look really closely, our spaceships have doors, handrails... I was designing the art style that was like 'this is an object that people use.'"

He said his education emphasized minimalism, on "form following function."

Edgeflow's geographic isolation from the rest of the game development world raises interesting implications. In regions with more populous game development communities, developers regularly interact with each other and learn at overlapping institutions. They're often inspired by similar games (like Slay the Spire), and have to fight hard to create distinctive elements when competing in a space like say, deckbuilder-based roguelikes.

But because Rubinstein and his team weren't so embedded in the same culture, they had a chance to enter the genre with fresh eyes—but also without the same foundational resources.

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The lead developer of Breachway hadn't played Slay the Spire before starting development

Plenty of games like Breachway sprung to life after the success of Slay the Spire. The deckbuilding roguelike format is a great foundation for all kinds of games, with Monster Train, Griftlands, and Inscryption all being shining, standout examples.

Amusingly enough, Rubinstein said he hadn't heard of Slay the Spire until he was well into developing Breachway. Remember, the game started off as a 1v1 card game, and it was FTL that was the team's greater inspiration when they pivoted to single-player.

Maybe that's partly why Breachway doesn't approach deckbuilding the same way Slay the Spire does. "We never saw Breachway as a deckbuilder, but rather a game with turn-based deckbuilder combat," he said. "If you want to make a deckbuilder, then you're automatically boxing yourself in to the standards of the genre. You have one resource type, you play the cards...they go on cooldown, etc."

Breachway requires players to juggle three resource types, themed around attack, defense, and cargo energy (red, green, and blue). Cards are drawn and discarded, but they also have fixed cooldown periods that create different timing windows than milling a deck through the discard pile.

The size of the player's deck was a particular sticking point for Rubinstein—one that led to the unique cooldown mechanic. "In most deckbuilders, having a thin deck is very powerful, so we had to come up with something to solve that issue. Instead of having cards go into a draw pile, each card has a cooldown period."

Players in Breachway can have thin decks (they can go as low as five cards, as of this writing), but encouraging players to make their decks as small as possible doesn't feel as good in a spaceship combat game. "With spaceship games, you want to add a lot of cool weapons, and then you get more powerful. In a card game, you want to have as few cards as possible. Those two things clash with each other."

Fans of The Expanse can think of it this way: Breachway is a game where players can build ships as lean as the Razorback or as chunky as a beefed-up Rocinante.

Scuttling in sideways to the roguelike deckbuilder genre means Edgeflow has a slight...well, edge, on the competition, but it came at something of a cost. Romania is not a country with a large game development community, and as mentioned before, it's the only game studio in Timișoara.

So to learn how to make the game they wanted, the team had to lean on YouTube tutorials, game development forums, and GDC talks. Recruiting was also something of a challenge, since Timișoara is a city with a thriving software community, largely focused on information technology. A small independent team can't match the salaries of a company like local software firm Berg Software.

Edgeflow pulled it off (with help from publisher Hooded Horse), and is now helping build out a small local community. But it can be difficult to talk about game design, Rubinstein said, because developers don't have the same "vocabulary." The internet helps (Rubinstein praised Tim Caine's YouTube channel as a great resource) but it's hard to kick imposter syndrome to the curb when you're learning all of game design from scratch.

Breachway is a great accomplishment for a small team representing a growing region. Edgeflow's lateral maneuver into a popular genre is a strong case study for developers who want to make similar kinds of games.

Update 9/30: A previous version of this story incorrectly spelled Rubinstein's name. It has been updated accordingly.