Y
ou might have imagined, as I did, that the
making of Into the Breach was
punctuated by home screenings of Kaiju
films—the Japanese monster movies
defined by the image of Godzilla
stomping through a metropolis. The game’s Vek even
bear a resemblance to Godzilla’s co-stars in the latest
round of remakes: Lumbering insects that loom over
the tallest tower blocks. Ask Subset Games, though,
and they’ll put an enormous foot through that theory.“I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than a few minutes of a
proper Kaiju film other than Pacific Rim,” says co-designer
Justin Ma. “And I thoroughly disliked that movie.”
The world of Into the Breach came about not as a tribute
to giant monster fiction, but as justification for the
mechanics Subset was honing. Yes, from its first concept,
this was about defending a city using a giant mech. But as
development wore on, the BattleTech-style systems for
managing heat, power, and weight that programmer and
co-designer Matthew Davis envisaged were streamlined.
The influences that won out were those of small-scale
tactics games like Fire Emblem and XCOM—as well as the
puzzle-like battlegrounds of Hoplite and Desktop Dungeons.
“They are both so tightly made, and it seemed like an
interesting design challenge,” Davis says. “It turned out to
be even harder than we thought, which is why it took
nearly five years to make Into the Breach.”The game was shaped as much by what the studio cut as
what it built. For a long time, Subset had plans for pilots
driven slowly mad by time travel, in the mode of Darkest
Dungeon and Eldritch Horror. “I would regularly try to
sneak in elements from the board games I was playing,”
Davis says. “Though most of that was ultimately cut.”
That ruthless, mechanics-first approach is how Into the
Breach was whittled down to its taut and rewarding core.
Subset confined the game to a series of islands in order to
restrict its play area. “The fact that the sea levels had risen
and wiped out most of humanity before the game even
started was just more convenient layering on why these
specific islands would be so important,” Davis says.
Yet the decision let Chris Avellone write an optimistic
apocalypse—one in which humanity has faced off climate
change and AI and found a balance. “It’s anti-inspiration,”
Avellone says. “You take what’s been done before and try to
find a new spin. With Pinnacle, the idea was to create a
corporation of robots that worked with humanity, but
worked on securing robot autonomy as well.”JUST IN TIME
Pilot stories were inspired by Davis and Ma’s mechanics,
too. By the time Avellone wrote their dialogue, the
designers had created special combat abilities, and artist
Polina Hristova had drawn their portraits. Avellone’s job
was to join the dots and find a character arc.
“Isaac Jones’ temporal anxiety took a nod from Chidi’sBREACH BIRTH
How INTO THE BREACH turned tiny tactics into weird fiction
PAPERBACKS The books Justin Ma read while making Into the Breach
indecisiveness in The Good Place,” he
says. “Gana’s combat programs were a
nod to the combat routines Baymax
downloads in Big Hero 6.”
All of this world-building had to fit
into tiny word counts. Thankfully,
Avellone had prior experience with
Fallout: New Vegas’ dialogue editor.
“While it may seem unromantic,
game writing can be a pragmatic
process,” Avellone says. “What may
seem a creative result can actually be
due to a variety of constraints.”
For anybody who’s ever stared at
the board of Into the Breach for
minutes on end, to find a life-saving
solution, creatively empowering
constraints are all too familiar.THE FIFTH
SEASON
Every few centuries,
the people of the
Stillness endure a
period of climate
disaster.THE EXPANSE
The popular novel
series concerns a
colonized Solar
System, with all the
political intrigue
that entails.CHILDREN OF
TIME
The last humans alive
discover a planet of
evolved, and much
more civilized,
spiders.ALL YOU NEED IS
KILL
This story about a
soldier who perfects
his skills through
time travel became a
Tom Cruise movie.SIX WAKES
A clone wakes up on a
starship to discover
her most recent self
murdered. A strange
sort of whodunnit.
In space.INSPIRATIONS AND CONNECTIONS IN GAMES
Positive
Influence