Jun 7, 2024

Breathedge 2 - Redruins Softworks

Greetings to everyone who doesn't mind greetings! We say goodbye to those who mind, perhaps, or whatever they'd like instead of a greeting.
We did a bit of research and found out that a lot of people read more than just headlines in our updates. This puts us in an awkward position where we have to not only rub the keyboard with a dirty rag, imitating news texts as we usually do, but also memorize them, comment on them and fulfill some promises. By the way, we would like to note that it is not very reasonable to fulfill promises made by a floor rag, but that's just the way it is.

In the previous update we managed to promise an entire announcement. We wish we could go back in time and promise something more realistic, like a picture of a cookie, but we eventually had to get to work. Well, it can't be helped. In fact, we’ve worked quite intensely, and got a chance to scribble not one, but two announcements at once. The first one will be dedicated to Breathedge 2, and the second one will concern the whole studio, but let's start with the familiar and the most relevant one - Breathedge 2.

We would release the game as soon and as buggy as possible, but we simply can't do it - our mom objects. On the other hand, we really want to show something and make sure we’re doing things right, and here goes the most suitable old school method - a free demo version of the game. Yes, yes, we want to announce the release of “Breathedge 2 Demo” on Steam, hopefully this year, not in 125 years, as it's written in the development schedule.

“What's going to come out?” - those unfamiliar with game demos will ask. “'How would we know?” - we'll answer proudly and openly. Although, in fact, Breathedge 2 Demo will be a tiny piece of the game, literally 30-60 min, in almost final quality. Why almost? We have quite massive plans for the final project that involve various aspects, from advanced customizable game settings and accessibility options, to gameplay features that can't be included at this stage of development. We will add all these things at later stages, closer to release. The demo will show the overall picture and vision of the project - animations, environments, graphics, voice acting, localization, sounds, gameplay, bad jokes, bugs and so on. This is a full-fledged start of the game, with all splash screens and missions, which will also be on the release version, but without some technical details, customizations and mechanics. Among other things, we reserve the right to redo everything in the demo if we/you/they don't like something. Bold, we know.

As mentioned above, the demo will be released with no prepayment or SMS, you won't even need to search for the torrent. Why do you need it? Well, uh... kinda to play around, to see whether you're actually interested in the project, or maybe you're interested in beating us with sticks to make us work better. Why do we need it? First of all, the same reason you do - to check the project's performance, gather your feedback and fix what can be fixed before we make a hundred thousand chapters of the game with another unique mechanics of pointless backtracking. Secondly - it will help us reach a large number of new players, and something to do with marketing, promotion, other incomprehensible words that they tried to explain to us, but we traditionally plugged our ears and said “la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la” (there is no logical error here, we've reread it a hundred times).

When exactly is it coming out? Well, we're always bad with dates - chickens don't count very well. We will try to release the demo in the fourth quarter of this year. We can postpone the demo to next year, but we don't want to do it so badly that we'll probably make it in time. Our artist even took one hand out of his pocket, that's how much we want to make it in time!

Due to the fact that we announced as much as an entire demo, we'd like to throw in some spoilers. Some things will be in the demo, some won't, but either way - picture-e-e-s!!!

The first thing we would like to repeat is that the second game's space will be a bit livelier. If the first game was dedicated to the survival of the Man under the supervision of the Spacesuit, the sequel tells about the fate of a whole bunch of people, robots and other creatures, willingly or unwillingly involved in the global intergalactic conflict. For example, we can meet this marvelous creature in the game. It looks like a cute hamster, but don't be fooled - there is a bloodthirsty parasite hiding under the guise of a cutie patootie.

Or these guys, Bolyk and Lolyk. Great examples of old-fashioned fuel robotics. The lads are a little out of it, but that happens to everyone, especially if you're an unemployed robot. They look like cute hamsters, but don't be fooled - under the guise of cuties patooties... wait, we've read this somewhere before. Ah, whatever.

In addition to all sorts of hamsters, Breathedge 2 will be marked by the presence of real, alive, low poly people. Don't ask where we find them and how we put them in the game, it's a secret of all developers. Here, for example, is Tiny. We'll meet him in the game early, very early, or even too early. Why? Well... it's necessary! He looks like our lead scriptwriter, by the way, but much older.

So people, okay, what about the environment? Just like the first part of the game, Breathedge 2 will be more about open space, yet with a major difference. If the first game was rather chamber-like and took place in one scenery, around the crashed liner, Breathedge 2 will allow you to hang around completely different corners of the galaxy. For example, at the beginning of the game we'll land at the “Terminal” station of the interstellar train, not far from the city with the telling name “Outskirt”. Choo-choo, space lovers!

And of course, you'll be able to find all sorts of useful, interesting and very necessary (lie) items to add to the collection of junk in your bottomless backpack, always and everywhere. Here we didn't deviate from the traditions of the first part, gave our writers a portion of fermented barley and got a lot of wonderful ideas, which our artists kindly transferred to digital canvases. Like these ones:

Oh yeah, smelling usefulness right off the screen! Lovely.

Well, that's it! See you later and... What? We promised two announcements? But mo-o-om, it's so late already! Okay...

In all seriousness, we have a big announcement dedicated to RedRuins studio and its team. As you know, we are an independent and very small team of henhouse natives. After the release of Breathedge, coincidentally enough, everyone around us fell on hard times, including us. We dropped out of the development process a bit, solved emerging issues, enjoyed your feedback, saved up our gold coins and experimented, thought and planned a lot. The first sign that we came to our senses was the announcement of the sequel to Breathedge. We really wanted to finish Man's story, and we made the decision that we would do it. The second sign that we've come to our senses is this announcement, with which we'd like to introduce you to our new game Canyons.

There you go, bang-bang kaboom, just the way we love it. But what is it, how did we get into this abyss of parallel projects, how does it work, and does it threaten Breathedge 2? Well, first things first.
Canyons is a cooperative post-apocalyptic extraction shooter for up to 4 players with the world generation, where we have to survive in an endless network of harsh canyons. Huge ships on wheels, cars, guns, zombies (well, not really, but let's call them zombies for now) and other joys of life.
The core of the game is very straightforward - fill your pockets with useful stuff, fill your Crawler with even more useful stuff, grab your friends and go exploring the canyons. The deeper you go in the exploration, the more the environment changes, and new opponents, new resources, tasks and unique events appear. If it gets difficult - you go back, level up and get back into the battle. If you don't want to go back - well, the reward loves the risky, but death is punishable. Easier than explaining what Breathedge is all about, to be honest. Incidentally, the two games are connected by a special bond, but we won't even hint at how exactly that will manifest itself just yet.

We want to create a dynamic, upbeat and maximally enjoyable gameplay for playing with friends. It won't be a serious dramatic tale about the fate of ragamuffins, but rather a roguelike action game with a portion of traditional madness from our team (yes, we give the writers fermented barley here too, but slightly less). And, of course, we have big plans to master co-op, which we are asked about so often that we don't even know where to hide.

A reasonable question may arise, about the difficulty of running two projects at the same time. We won't lie - you're right, it is quite difficult, especially for five and a half hens. What does that mean? Right again, our coop is getting bigger. The RedRuins team is getting bigger! But still, why not let all the newly arrived chickens in on Breathedge 2 and release it a hundred thousand times faster? And this is where we come to one of the biggest bottlenecks of both the first and second installments of Breathedge. Breathedge is a radically auteur project that is very hard to develop faster. Yeah, it looks like a pretty traditional survival game about scavenging, but its main feature is the author's humor. All these strange everyday objects, silly dialogs, lore, references, unexpected events and characters are mostly fruits of imagination of the lead scriptwriter, who is actively assisted by the entire core team. Hence, since the first game, there has been a problem that part of the team gets ahead in the realization of ideas, sitting there for a long time with no tasks, and can't grow. In Breathedge 2 we managed to change the situation a little bit (oh yes, now the lead writer is not alone and we've got talented people who can write cool stuff), but this bottleneck still remains and it can't be avoided, otherwise Breathedge will lose its crappy face. So why not redirect the idle forces to something useful? That's where the idea of a parallel project was born, less demanding to the story, but more demanding to the technical part. The main core of the team that developed Breathedge is doing its best to create a sequel, while curating our newly arrived talents. When Breathedge 2 lacks specialists - we have a considerably bloated team of assistants, but when the lead scriptwriter is on a bender - the whole team is not staring at the wall, but building up Canyons. Somehow we've been living like this as of late, and so far we're loving it, to be honest. This approach allows us not only to try a new genre, setting, co-op and to please you with something interesting, but even to speed up the development of Breathedge 2 a bit, as the number of people who understand the world of the game and its laws grows bigger.

You can read all the details about the new Canyons project on its official Steam page. Yes, we’ll write development updates there as well, no smarter than these ones, promise. We have a link too. Don't forget to add Canyons to your wishlist if you like the concept. If you don't like it - still don't forget, it's nice and useful for us, and for you... for you it's nice and useful for us! In short, good for everyone.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2708860/Canyons/

Well, that's it for sure now. Yeah. By the way, if you didn't understand anything, welcome to our Discord, where you can ask questions of our friendly community and us. We'll leave the link down below. Over there, yeah, just below, join us!

https://discord.gg/uezQcU7

And yes, as usual, for urgent and scary questions, if you don't feel like writing on Discord, feel free to email us at info@breathedge.com.
And of course, adding Canyons to your wishlist doesn't cancel out adding Breathedge 2 to your wishlist! By all means add it, even if you already have. We don't know how, but we're sure there's a way. Probably.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2412960/Breathedge_2

Jun 7, 2024

Canyons. Announcement

Canyons - Redruins Softworks

Greetings, friends, comrades and unfamiliar strangers! Since this is the first update on the Canyons project, we'd like to first introduce ourselves and tell you a little bit about important chickens like us.

Okay, you caught us, we're not that important, and many people probably know us from our previous project, but in case they don't... We're an uber-nano-mega-technological, ambitious and talented team of geniuses with the cool name RedRuins Softworks, which translates from Latin as “The Magnificent Team of Magnificent Greatlings”, or something like that. And we're not chickens, that's a joke, yeah, honest. We've been messing around on the backside of the industry for so long that we don't even remember the date of our first mud pies, but with the current staff and name we self-organized around 2017, with the idea of creating our own project - a survival game set in space. That's how the studio got its first game, Breathedge. Now we are actively developing its sequel, you won't guess the title... attention, no peeking - Breathedge 2! Oh yes, we spent the longest time coming up with it, and didn't sleep for nights. And the cherry on top of our team's cake is this beautiful, freshly announced project under the codename Canyons!

As you've probably already guessed, we're very good at two things: not being chickens and coming up with original names for new projects. Hardly anyone could even guess that the game Canyons would be about canyons, right? That's how unpredictable we are. But let's dive a little deeper into these very canyons.

So. Canyons is a cooperative (up to four players) PVE extraction shooter with world generation in a post-apocalyptic setting. You will have to conquer endless and diverse canyons in search of resources, technologies, friends, enemies and all sorts of adventures on your Crawler.

We'd like to reveal a little bit of gameplay details right away. In short, the core of the game will be: smack-slap -> stomp-stomp -> vroom-vroom -> vzoo-ee-ee -> vroom-vroom-vro-oo-om -> ra-ta-ta-ta -> whooop -> A-A-A-A-A-A-A!!! Yeah. What? Too short? Okay, okay, let's fix it:

We'll be playing in a harsh and scorched world where one can only survive in deep canyons. How can one not die of boredom in a canyon? I mean, there's a wall, a wall, nothing behind and nothing in front? Easy, especially if the blood of great ancestors-Captains flows in the veins, and it's boiling in us! Blind draw could have given us a game with a cactus or a wild chicken as heroes, but, thank fate, it gave us a game about the tough guys who dream of more than endless hiding from cannibals, monsters and storms in dank caves.

So the blood is boiling, but what's there to do? We're gonna have a lot to do. Canyons are a dangerous place, and not just because of the inadequate inhabitants. There are powerful dust storms, scorching solar flares, epidemics, monster migrations and other good things. At the same time, canyons never stand still, they are always changing. How does that happen? Well, who the hell knows? Maybe you'll be the one to find out. All we can tell you is that the game actively uses the generation system. Each expedition to the canyon will be unique. You will constantly encounter new routes, enemies, events and other activities. Down with repetition!

If canyons are so dangerous, why go into them? If you're a cactus, there's really no reason, but if you're full of ambition and desire to know this world, you'll have to take a walk, because it's there, beneath the sand and rocks, that the wreckage of bygone times is buried, when, according to legends, the planet was filled to the brim with water.

As you know, to walk somewhere, you need to be somewhere. Like home. Every self-respecting survivor has a cozy corner, and every Captain has a cove. We will not be an exception. Developing your settlement is an important part of surviving in this world. Build houses, shipyards, garages and smokehouses for zombie sausages. Dig wells, repair your vehicles and create a real paradise cove that will attract new ragamuffins... settlers, we mean.

The most important part of the game will be those very expeditions into the canyons, but they wouldn't be possible, if you didn't have amazing vehicles - Crawlers. These are huge machines, assembled from the remains of the former civilization. Giant ships on wheels, capable of transporting your mortal body wherever you want to go, along with supplies, friends, cars, and all sorts of harpoons and crossbows. The Crawler is the heart of your expeditions. You can get a lot of useful and even more useless trash in your crazy forays. No, of course, no one will make you sort it, but you are always welcome to bring it home and upgrade yourself. The Crawler will protect you from a lot of trouble, and it will help you return to the bay with all this junk, but you have to take care of it too. The deeper you go through the canyons, the more valuable the rewards will be, but the risks increase. Opponents become stronger, angrier and more unpredictable. Many people will want to smash your machine, but the death of the Crawler will mean the failure of the expedition, and you'll lose everything (well, or almost everything). Don't let the fanatics bomb your marvel of technology, develop it, equip it, decorate it with beautiful kitties and bows, paint it pink... Wait, who scribbled this? Who touched the copywriter's keyboard?! They won't confess... Okay, where were we? Oh, yeah, equip it with spikes, saws, bombs and enemy skulls.

Besides fun adventures and useful loot for settlement development, expeditions allow you to develop your character. We try not to restrict the style of the game, and give you the opportunity to become both a psychopathic clown-killer and a pacifist who doesn't take up arms. The character has many useful skills, and if you don't want to develop the art of dissecting zombie flesh with a machete, you can learn medicine or cooking. Most likely you won't be able to heal zombies, they will eat you, but you can cook them with garlic. You can also heal the one who will bring you their stinking carcasses. In addition to the style of the game, the development of the character in one or the other way will allow you to fully feel the morality (we have no idea how to call it, now it's called that in the project, maybe you have some ideas?). The point is that the game will throw a lot of small and seemingly insignificant moral dilemmas - kill or spare, eat or not, catch up, help, run over, and so on. Depending on your decision, your character and the attitudes of those around you will change. If you like to gather sufferers under your wing - you will be loved by sufferers and their sympathizers. And if you will run them over on your tank - the enthusiasts of similar pastimes will gladly cooperate with you.

We've said the word zombie about a hundred million times here. Are there going to be zombies in the game? Of course not, of course not, obviously not. It's a realistic game, not some kind of dead people fantasy. We'll have half-dead people. The canyon dwellers call them zombies, but that's not really true. There are a lot of them, they're disorganized, aggressive and stupid, but they're not necessarily zombies, are they? All in all, there will be plenty of interesting creatures in the canyons besides these guys, but they're probably worth paying attention to in a future separate update.

And lastly, we'd like to write something as big, beautiful and salty as the ocean. According to legends, it was the world's ocean that took up most of the canyon planet. Endless, deep and full of life. In those days, the world was ruled by the greatest Captains who sailed their ships through these marvelous waters. We are only a pitiful reflection of them, the remnants of the cowardly, doomed people who have forgotten the deck beneath their feet and the sound of the giant waves. What has happened to the planet? Where did the big water go? Why did the world crack like a parched puddle? Where did the sandstorms come from and why are the canyons constantly changing? The world holds many mysteries, and only the bravest will reveal its secrets. Go for it! Maybe dreams of salt winds and summer storms aren't really dreams after all, eh?

That's about it. It was nice to meet those we haven't met yet, and we are always happy to see our good old players. We hope that together with all of you we can create another great and interesting project with blackjack and Crawlers. We'll be very happy to receive your ideas, first impressions, feedback saying that everything is bullshit and other joyful moments of development. Of course, we read comments under the updates, but if you want more, we'd love to invite you to our Discord, where you can poke us, Breathedge players, or become a pioneer on the Canyons channels.

https://discord.gg/uezQcU7

Also, we have an official email, where we gladly accept everything that is not accepted on Discord. If you have questions, answers, requests and suggestions, you can write to us there. We will read it, for sure.

info@breathedge.com

And of course, add Canyons to your wishlist! It's a noble endeavor that doesn't require much energy, but gives us a good kickstart. Without your wishlists, we are like seals lost in the woods - ridiculous. With your wishlists, we look like proud pot-bellied lions lost in the woods - beautiful. We'll be waiting!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2708860/Canyons/

Jun 7, 2024

No More Room in Hell 2 Announced at Summer Game Fest 2024!

No More Room in Hell - NMRiH Team

Prepare yourself for the terrifying 8 player co-op action horror experience of No More Room in Hell 2 - coming Halloween 2024 from Torn Banner Studios.

View the announcement trailer, first revealed during Summer Game Fest 2024:

No More Room in Hell 2 is an intense permadeath co-op journey into the eerie darkness of zombie-infested zones. As an emergency responder you must survive, scavenge, stockpile and fulfill your mission - then repeat, each time in an ever-changing experience.

No More Room in Hell 2’s original developer, Lever Games, was acquired by Torn Banner, the studio behind Chivalry 1 & 2, and the original “Age of Chivalry” mod. Led by a core team of veterans from Torn Banner and Lever Games, the majority of the previous No More Room in Hell 2 team continues to work at the studio on the sequel.

A commercial release in the same world as the 2011 award-winning Source mod, players start isolated in the dark, find their friends, and try to survive in a dynamic, endlessly replayable zombie apocalypse. With enemies and map locations inspired by classic horror cinema, No More Room in Hell 2 will instill terror into players while offering fresh, tactical gameplay, high-stakes permadeath, and intricate combat design that rewards teamwork and grit.

Find your way to your teammates with proximity voice chat and grow together in power. Each match, you’ll go from spawning in the darkness with a flashlight, to forming a fully stocked 8-player co-op squad with assault rifles and explosives. An ever-present threat remains: if a responder dies, all of their progress is lost.

“No More Room in Hell 2 continues the dark, grounded aesthetic and intense action horror approach of the original game while expanding its vision dramatically,” said Steve Piggott, CEO and creative director at Torn Banner Studios. “We’re excited to be the new shepherds of a franchise we adored as fans and we’re thrilled to take up the mission of capturing the iconic horror of classic zombie cinema. We want to blow people away with our first co-op game, pushing Torn Banner’s skill in multiplayer action to a whole new level.”

Powered by Unreal Engine 5, No More Room in Hell 2 is a co-op game with consequences coming to early access on PC via Steam and Epic Games Store this Halloween.

We look forward to sharing more with our community over the next month with more details coming during the PC Gaming Show on June 9th, a Torn Banner Studios Twitch livestream on June 11th, plus multiple blogs exploring details of No More Room in Hell 2.

Join our Discord to stay connected with the NMR2 community and to interact with our community team!

Watch yourselves out there, Responders