Breakhack: Fight, Die, Repeat

The game is perfectly fun, if you like roguelikes. It has some of the familiar elements — monsters move when you move, you descend through a procedural dungeon, there’s bosses you can fight, the dungeon itself can throw tricks at you… it’s a fun little game, $0.99 on Steam, and you really can’t go wrong at that price, though the developer has made the source code available freely on GitHub, if you don’t mind compiling it yourself.

I cannot remember how, when or why I bought it. I’m glad I did, though. I played it a few hours when I bought it four years ago, and just now while I was browsing my library.

The really interesting story is how this game came to be.

Detail of map from a Breakhack level

Every programmer dreams of sitting down, writing a game, and just putting it out there just to say they have done it. But how many actually go ahead and do that? For something substantial, I mean? The games I’ve written and actually finished are few and not really special. I want to do more, but…

BreakHack developer LiquidityC lived the dream. From the GitHib README:

Randomly generated maps/rooms. Leveling system, permadeath, multiple classes. Casual and fun for 10-20 minutes during a break from regular work/play.

I wanted to practice C and I’m comfortable using SDL2. The assets are graciously taken from the web. More info in the README in the assets folder.

If you do contribute something you should be aware that if your PR is merged into the master code-base your code will eventually make it out with the Steam version of the game. I don’t make any revenue from those sales so don’t expect any other compensation than a “I have code on Steam” feeling. Which is quite nice and also why I decided to release on Steam.

Death to the Mage!

I’m not exactly sure what killed me in that shot. I think I fell into a pit.

Anyway — I don’t want to build this game up too much. It’s simple, it is fun, you’ll pull it out now and again for a few minutes and maybe hit some of the bosses or reach the dungeon’s twentieth level. I’m just so happy to see people not so different from me actually living the dream.

It’s inspirational!

3 thoughts on “Breakhack: Fight, Die, Repeat”

    • I had a LIKE plugin but nobody used it and I had to paid money for it so I was paying to be depressed that nobody liked what I wrote so I got rid of it…

      But THANK YOU <3

  1. Hey. Thanks for the acknowledgement. I can add that I got lucky with Breakhack. All the little bits and pieces that the game needed sort of just fell into place as I was developing. Which is different from the 50+ retired projects I have lying around.

    The game was originally $5 but once I earned back my investment into steam for costs of publishing I decided to make it free. Free wasn’t as simple though. You had to email steam staff and it was a whole thing. So I just pulled the slider as far down as it would go. Hence the 99 cent price tag.

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