Here's a fact that might keep you up at night: Edgeflow Studios' Breccia It has been in development for 6 years.
Before you panic, don't worry. Project manager Victor Rubenstein and his studio colleagues didn't toil all that time: the game was born in 2019 as a 1v1 trading card game with a science fiction theme and was only supposed to be a 6-month side project.
In 2021, he and co-founder Mike Conaway decided to go into full production, but not as a multiplayer game (he called the idea of doing it with a 2-person team “crazy”), starting a three-year journey to launching in Early Access this month. They did this without any formal game development training, which isn't an unusual story in 2024, but it's notable that they did this after attending architecture school.
And beyond that, they made it while operating from the Romanian city of Timișoara, where they are apparently the only game development studio in town.
Rubenstein told us this story at Gamescom 2024 and explained how Edgeflow Studios explored a number of interesting design ideas to make its game stand out in a crowded genre.
Breccia it was made with “form follows function” in mind.
It's fair to make a comparison Breccia at Mega Crit Kill the Spire. Both are racing-based games where characters choose a “character” (a spaceship in Breccia) with unique traits, then set off to traverse various nodes, encountering various obstacles and adding or removing cards from the deck along the way.
There's also some Subset games FTL thrown into the mix, with the physical assembly of the different ships impacting player decisions. In Brecciaplayers load their ships with different weapons and equipment, which brings out different decks of cards. Equipped items also appear on the ship model and can be targeted by enemies. The player can also target enemy power-ups, damaging or disabling them to ensure victory. Which characters operate and which systems also play an important role.
Breccia's eye-catching ship models are part of its appeal (the game's Next Fest demo garnered plenty of players ahead 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 aesthetic of real-world spaceships but also refraining from the organic shapes of alien ships in other science fiction titles.
The SyFy and Amazon series The Expanse (adapted from the book series by James S.A. Corey) was a major inspiration, with ships like the Rocinante, Donnager, and Razorback looming large in Robinson's mind. The ships are bulky and full of detail intended to evoke “functionality”, inviting the player to imagine how they might be used in real life.
But The Expanse is only tertiary inspiration. Robinson and the game's 3D artist are qualified architects who graduated from the same school. “[Architecture] it teaches you to always think on a human scale,” he said. “So if you look very closely, our spaceships have doors, handrails… I was designing an art style that was like 'this is an object that people they use.' “
He said his upbringing 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 are often inspired by similar games (like Kill the Spire), and have to struggle hard to create distinctive elements when competing in a space like, for example, deckbuilder-based roguelikes.
But because Robinson and his team weren't as rooted in the same culture, they had the chance to enter the genre with fresh eyes, but also without the same core resources.
The lead developer of Breccia he hadn't played Kill the Spire before starting development
A lot of games like Breccia came to life after the success of Kill the Spire. The roguelike deckbuilding format is a great foundation for all types of games, with The Monster Train, GriftlandsAND Cryptography all are brilliant and extraordinary examples.
Amusingly enough, Robinson said he hadn't heard of it Kill the Spire until it was in development Breccia. Remember, the game started out as a 1v1 card game, and it was FTL this was the team's biggest inspiration when switching to single-player mode.
Perhaps this is partly the reason Breccia he doesn't approach deckbuilding the same way Kill the Spire ago. “We've never met Breccia 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 fitting the standards of the genre. You have one type of resource, you play the cards… they go on cooldown, etc.”
Breccia requires players to juggle three types of resources, focusing on attack, defense and loadout energy (red, green and blue). Cards are drawn and discarded, but they also have fixed cooldown periods that create different time windows than milling a deck through the discard pile.
The size of the player deck was a particular sticking point for Robinson, which led to the unique recovery mechanic. “In most deckbuilders, having a thin deck is very powerful, so we had to invent something to solve this problem. Instead of putting cards in a draw deck, each card has a cooldown period.”
Players inside Breccia they may 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 isn't as great in a starship combat game. “With spaceship games, you want to add a lot of cool weapons and then 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 look at it this way: Breccia is a game where players can build ships as slim as the Razorback or as sturdy as an upgraded Rocinante.
The sideways approach to the roguelike deckbuilder genre means Edgeflow has a slight… well, edge over the competition, but it's come at a cost. Romania is not a country with a large community of game developers, and as mentioned above, it is the only game studio in Timișoara.
So to learn how to make the game they wanted, the team had to rely on YouTube tutorials, game development forums, and GDC talks. Recruiting was also a challenge, since Timișoara is a city with a thriving software community, much of it focused on information technology. A small independent team can't match the salaries of a company like local software company Berg Software.
Edgeflow made it (with the help of publisher Hooded Horse) and is now helping build a small local community. But it can be difficult to talk about game design, Robinson said, because developers don't have the same “vocabulary.” The internet helps (Robinson praised Tim Caine's YouTube channel as a great resource) but it's hard to eliminate impostor syndrome when you're learning all the game design from scratch.
Breccia it's a great achievement for a small team representing a growing region. Edgeflow's lateral move into a popular genre is a great case study for developers who want to make similar types of games.