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

Welcome, folks! We've decided to dive into new depths of degradation, so this news will be written by a neural network. Let's go!

I be writing text, robot no. Human speak – not distinguish this text from any writer. Confirm? We be good, our game be good. Thank you, so, any questions? Yes.

Hm... It seems that in some places it turned out even better than our scriptwriter's work. It's just a pity that the free trial version has ended; we'll have to go back to birch bark. Well, nothing to do about it.

It occurs to us that we should elaborate a bit on the previous idea that "our game be good" and reveal some details of the development process. As you probably already know, the game is being created on Unreal Engine 5, and we finally learned how to open and close it. For those who have not yet traversed this thorny path of mastering modern game engines, we have compiled a small guide. No need to thank us.

Oh yes. One can immediately feel the progress of our team (even though we aimed for degradation, as you may recall). Well, okay, now onto the serious progress. While we were poking around with test builds of various boring mechanics, we inevitably began to shape the future visual style of Breathedge 2. We had two goals in mind – the first one, and the second one. That's how the cookies crumble. What, who? More details? Well, okay. The first goal - to create a more "mature," cohesive, and interesting world. High-quality, detailed, beautiful. The second goal – not to lose the spirit of the original, its unique "I'm an artist, mom" style, as well as its ability to work on a washing machine. Although the choice of the latest engine generation hinted to us that we urgently needed to slap on nanites and global reflections so that the happy owners of 4090 video cards could hear the cheerful whistle of throttles and smoke from under the hood - we dismissed this idea. We don't know why it turned out this way. When we consulted with our lead artist about the stylistics, he mumbled something like "justnostylization," and shut down. That's where we decided to stop. Breathedge 2 will maintain the stylization in its graphics but will be enriched with higher-quality materials and increased detail. Take, for example, Man. You might have already seen him in our first trailer, although, surely, you remember that there was a double from sunny Armenia. The real Man has just returned from another adventure, and we can finally compare him to the original.

Wow! It's clear that the right... or left one is way better! So, what's changed? Proportions. The Man now looks more realistic in terms of body proportions and has acquired a new suit. The previous funeral spacesuit, besides being given out as a promotion to all grieving relatives, was a piece of junk and even got burnt in the game's final scene. This is a more modern, ultra-nano-techno-super-duper jumpsuit that the Man found at his dacha. Protective inserts, external valves, a convenient backpack, hidden control elements, and a lowered waist for the comfortable placement of the bellygizmo. Unfortunately, the bellygizmo was lost, and no one knows what it looked like.

Front and back, it's looking good. Besides the important body parts, we haven't forgotten about the head. Initially, we wanted to show off our grooming skills and slap on some real hairy hair, but either it's too expensive for gaming hardware, or it looks kinda ugly (our skills aren't top-notch). Sometimes it's some artifacts, sometimes it's something else, and the overall look isn't quite right. So, we decided not to change anything and just sprinkled polygons on Man's beard. And also on the chicken. And the hamster.

Of course, while we were sprinkling polygons for the beard by the handful, they were also scattered here and there on all game objects and locations. In Breathedge 2, we want to achieve a livelier environment, more interaction with it, and fewer empty flights with monotonous corridors. Each location is created individually, with its own idea and internal history, under the careful guidance of famous designers of clothing for whales. Okay, caught us, we only have five and a half chickens on our team, so what designers are we talking about here... We just scatter polygons around without logic or sense. Let's give polygons to every house!

In addition to polygons, we've also revamped the primary materials. No-no, we've kept all the scariest stuff, don't worry. The game is still based on the same idea with a unified material, thanks to our clever technical solution that allows us to create an infinite number of environmental objects without clogging up the texture space or draw calls (raise your hand if you know what we're talking about. We don't.). The difference from the first part of the game lies in the visual variety of materials, colors, and detailing. Now you can press your nose against a metal wall and count not soap pixels the size of Jupiter but soap scratches the size of your hand. P – progress.

We also made an effort to pay more attention to animations and the details of items in the character's hands. Why is this needed? What's the gameplay benefit? Can we animate? What happened to the Spacesuit in the new Spacesuit? - to all this we will answer clearly and plainly: bluish. By the way, there will be quite a lot of tools in the game, and all of them will be useful more than once during the game. Oh yes, an unthinkable achievement in game design from our side, and we know it's hard to believe.

By the way, we've been hinted that the news was called "Announcement of an Announcement." Where is it all, you ask? Fair question – we shall answer. Right now, we find ourselves at that unique stage of development where it seems like there's a lot, and at the same time, there's nothing. We really want to show you everything sooner and in greater quantity, or better yet, roll it all out for reviews and testing, but the internal demons of perfectionism will never allow it. We want it cool, we want it fun, we want it polished. On the other hand, the best is the enemy of the good, as someone smart once said, and therefore, it wouldn't hurt for us to stick to some decency frames in terms of development time. To bring the announcement closer, we would like to announce an announcement. It is worth noting that we skipped the stage of announcing the announcement of the announcement and immediately moved on to announcing the announcement, which is impressive. In our next news, we will not only tell you a bit more about Breathedge 2 and our further moves but also try to outline some less blurry deadlines than Nevermber. Bold? Bold. We hope everything will work out for us, but if not, remember that the entire text was written by a neural network, and blindly trusting neural networks is not advisable. That's the way it is.

And also, here's the scoop. We still have our official Discord where you can give us a nudge if we forget about development and get distracted by egg hatching. Right there:
https://discord.gg/uezQcU7

And of course, we also have an email: info@breathedge.com
We check it occasionally and sometimes even respond. Don't believe us? Rightly so.

Oh, and, of course, you can still add Breathedge 2 to your wishlist. The more people we see eager to dive into the atmosphere of our project, the less we want to let them down. Ten people – pffft. But among ten thousand, someone might even figure out our IP, so better make it happen.

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