Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Chris Bam Harrison

Everyone wants to feel smart, right?

Subset Games’ FTL follow up has been taking the world by storm, and it’s for good reason; On the surface Into the Breach is a cute, retro tactics game. Once you get past the cutesy graphics and simple gameplay loop, you’ll quickly find it’s a game layered in complex, interesting mechanics that create the sort of tactical depth you’d expect from small-scale strategy games like XCOM or Final Fantasy Tactics.

Good user experiences makes you feel something, and that’s exactly what Into the Breach does every time you play it. Let’s take a look at why these systems are so effective:

Choose your difficulty. Then choose it again. And again.

When you start Into the Breach, you choose a difficulty — Easy, Medium, Hard. Really, though, that’s not the last time you’ll decide how challenging the game is.

When you choose a territory to defend, you are effectively choosing your difficulty once more. Territories that grant only one resource will be easy, two will be harder, and three generally include some sort of boss monster to fight.

Highly technical infographic.

But wait, there’s more! Territories have various modifiers that, when compared to your team, effect difficulty again. For example: a map with tidal waves coming through won’t pose much threat to a team with flying mechs. A team that uses many fire weapons are likely to set a forest zone ablaze.

Tidal Wave maps are great fun if you’ve got flying units.

Allowing the player to choose their difficulty at any stage of the game makes the outcome feel as though it is the culmination of your choices; defeat is a failure of your own making, whereas victory is the reward for your smart choices.

Making Sacrifices

Like any good tactics game, Into the Breach will eventually put the player in a situation where they have to choose between two less desirable outcomes.

The primary objective through most of Into the Breach is to stop the enemy from destroying buildings. Most of the time, you’ll do this by knocking the enemy so their attacks miss, or destroying them before they can attack. This isn’t always a viable option, however.

So the second most common way to avoid damage to your buildings is to put something in the way. No big deal, right? Well, it is when your mechs are on low health.

In this scenario, the tidal wave will kill the bug before it shoots anyway. But you get the idea!

Losing a mech near the end of the match isn’t too much of a big deal — you’ll get it back at the end of the battle. The pilot, however, is dead for good.

Likewise, losing a few buildings when you’ve got lots of energy isn’t a big deal, but if you’re low on energy, or near the end of your campaign, you’ll want to protect the buildings as best you can.

Losing a pilot is a long term problem, you may never get a replacement during your campaign. Losing energy is much easier to recover from, but if you lose all your energy then it’s game over.

There’s similar choices to be made when it comes to your mission objectives. You might have been sent to protect a supply train, and doing so will grant you important resources. Do you let the train take a hit, knowing you’ll lose out on your rewards, or do you defend it with your last health hoping that the loss of a pilot will be outweighed with whatever prize awaits you when you’ve successfully defended the island.

Complex scenarios grant complex solutions

Each time you attempt Into the Breach, you’re asked to choose a squadron of mechs to take into battle. Each of these squads have a variety of abilities that change the way you play.

The mechs you choose drastically change how complex the game becomes. These are the abilities the default squad carries:

This team has relatively simple mechanics — you can push people, push people, or…push people. And you’ll do some damage along the way. It’s a straightforward mechanic that will lead to simple tactics — keep the enemy out of danger areas, and deal direct damage.

Right at the other end of the scale, you’ve got mech squads like this:

We’ve only got one unit that can reposition enemies in this squad, so our previous tactic of manipulating the enemies position is probably the out the window. Looks like two of our units are going to take damage every time they fire, too, so we’ll have to manage mech health carefully.

It’s a much more challenging squad to manage, but it has the possibility to be far more rewarding.

Perfect Information

The last thing I want to touch on is a great point I read in a Reddit thread, of all places. I highly recommend reading that link, but I’ll paraphrase a few key points below regardless.

Most tactics games try to manage how much information the player has in order to create surprise. The XCOM series is a good example: you might know what enemies are likely to show up, but you don’t know where or how many until they’re taking potshots at your valiant troops.

This leads to player choices that are dictated by the unknown; ‘I’ll move my units only half way up the field, and wait, because I don’t know what’s there’. If you’re rushing headlong into the fog of war, it’s likely you’ll be punished for it.

Into the Breach takes a different approach, and provides you with perfect information at every point. You see the outcome of your actions before you’ve committed to them. It’s part of why the game feels more like Chess, and less like XCOM.

This also makes the game feel akin to modern puzzle games. Each turn in a battle feels like a logic puzzle to complete, where a number of possible solutions are present, but some are better than others. And actually, that’s pretty much how people are treating it:

@austin_walker OH OKAY I thought this solution depended on Kwan’s special but I found the same tactics can win even if the Laser Mech is trapped: Prospero D3->B4, Prospero AA D4 to weaken digger & break F4 rock, Kwan E5->F5, Kwan missile barrage, and Chen zaps F7 leaving only 2 & 5 alive

— @palmliker

You can’t have these conversations in a game like XCOM, because an observer has the same limited information that the player does. And, because XCOM doesn’t have a chess-like annotation system that the players have made up.

That annotation system got so popular, by the way, that Subset Games has added optional annotation markers to the game:

Looks like @subsetgames has added grid notation directly to Into the Breach, and this makes me very happy.

— @austin_walker

This low-fi way to share screenshots and crowd source solutions is something that I’ve never seen in a tactics game before, and it’s been really brilliant looking at people’s boards and trying to figure out the solution.

In Conclusion

I think there’s a lot we can learn as UX designers from how Into the Breach respects its players. Many games, especially in the strategy/tactics genre, do a bad job of respecting the players’ intelligence. Into the Breach doesn’t give you an overbearing tutorial, or constant tooltips to help you along. Instead, it trusts you to pay attention and learn how the game works.

Because you’re left to figure the game out yourself, you feel smart when you do. After all, it’s a hard, unforgiving game. If you’re being successful, you must be smart. This effect is multiplied when the player is given the option to choose harder missions, or bring more complex tools, and then still succeed despite their self-chosen handicaps.

I’d love to see this sort of player trust in other genre’s. Drop me in an MMO without explaining combat. Give me a platformer that does’t tell me I can wall jump until I do it by accident (actually, Celeste does this with a few mechanics, and it’s rad).

I highly recommend you check out Into the Breach. If you like any sort of puzzle solving game, I think there’s probably something here for you.

Subset Games | Into the Breach

Further Reading

There’s been a lot written about Into the Breach, but I really enjoyed this article over on Waypoint that goes into further detail around the annotated boards:

‘Into the Breach’ Solved a Big Problem: How to Show Off Your Strategies

If you’re more of a UI guy than a UX guy, you’ll love this article on the making of Into the Breach’s UI:

Into the Breach’s interface was a nightmare to make and the key to its greatness

As always, thanks for reading!

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Into the Breach’s UX makes you feel smart was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Into the Breach’s UX makes you feel smart

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