Devlog 1 - Breach of Contract

Welcome to the first Devlog for our upcoming game, Breach of Contract!

WAIT! Hold on. Let’s give a bit of background before we start.

If you don’t already know who we are, we are a group of young professionals dedicated to volunteering our time to build detailed and polished games for those who love gaming. Over the past year, we have created two games, one as our first 3-month project as a team, “Astrohaulers”, and “Dig Deeper”, an internal team-building game jam project. We showcased Astrohaulers last year at the Seattle Indies Expo, where it was met with great feedback and acclaim.

With that context, let’s travel back to June 2024. We decided it was time to embark on our first commercial project and started brainstorming what kind of game we wanted to make. We each created a game pitch and shared it with the team. After all the pitches, we had some ideas that stood out, but nobody was overly enthusiastic about any particular idea.

While brainstorming, our Design lead, Brendan, thought of the creative concept of a player fighting against corporations controlled/influenced by eldritch deities. This idea was met with praise and, after discussion, was merged with Cade’s pitch for a roguelike top-down shooter.

We also determined that we wanted to include movement and a player controller while adding an element of strategy. We didn’t want the shooter to lean into the power fantasy style. We eventually summarized our thoughts into this idea:

“Breach of Contract: A high-stakes top-down shooter where strategic planning meets explosive action. Use gadgets and intel to meticulously prepare for room breaches, then execute with precision—adapt quickly when plans go awry to ensure survival.”

From there, Brendan moved towards developing our initial design ideas and documents, and Cade began laying the foundations of the technical project. After our experience trying out both Unity for Astrohaulers and Godot for Dig Deeper, we landed on using Godot for our game engine.

From there, we began to determine our initial estimated timeline for the game. Our idea was that this would be an eight-month project initially, and this basic production plan was drafted:

Coming into August, things got busy.  We were hustling and bustling towards putting the finishing touches on Astrohaulers for the Seattle Indies Expo. Astrohaulers was originally scoped as a testing ground for our team, which was more successful than we expected. This includes growing and building our team to help with Astrohaulers and preparing for Breach of Contract. This was a great time of growth and development for us as a studio, but this put Breach of Contract slightly on the back burner.

After the event, a prototype was our first priority for Breach of Contract. It was important to start testing from day one, and we had to make sure our game idea was fun and engaging at the core. Although our early documentation was a bit messy, we created sketches of the base idea of the game and wrote out feature ideas. The initial designs included a player controller, a camera controller, different enemy AI (and types), destructible walls, different weapons, and abilities.

The core gameplay loop starts with the player in the “planning phase”. The initial idea of the planning phase included the player choosing weapons and equipment based on their observations of the room environment before entering. Once chosen, they would enter the “action phase”, break into the room, and execute enemy AI using the variety of tools they had chosen.

During this time, we also developed the creative side of Breach of Contract. As mentioned earlier, the idea of the story is that the player fights within corporations influenced/controlled by eldritch deities. We were beginning to develop story and thematic ideas and building guide foundations for music and art for the game.

By mid-September, we had finished our first build of the game!

This initial build included:

• A controllable player that could move in two dimensions

• Basic enemy AI types that would target or target and move towards the player.

• The beginnings of a planning phase, where the player could analyze the environment and develop a plan of action

• Two gun types: a shotgun and a semi-automatic gun

• An environment with walls the player would navigate through 

This became the foundation we would continue growing and iterating upon in the coming months. We can’t wait to share more about the history of Breach of Contract. Thanks for reading, and watch for more updates on our socials soon!