Breachout

You are not the good guys.

Breachout is a real-time-with-pause tactics game in the style of Door Kickers, played by an openly corrupt SWAT team. Every job is two jobs: the warrant the department signed, and everything in the building worth carrying out of it. The department pays almost nothing. The art on the wall pays for the squad.

Plan it, then watch it go wrong

A raid opens paused, on a plan of the building. Rooms that could hold threats are marked in red — the game rolls who is inside and where they stand fresh every time, so a map you have learned is still a place you do not know. Lay waypoints, choose how each door opens (quietly, a kick, a breaching charge, a lockpick, a flashbang through the gap), hold officers on go codes so a stack moves as one, then press space and watch twenty seconds decide the next hour.

Everything sees what is in front of it and nothing sees through walls. Facing decides gunfights. A witness who gets away is worse than a guard who shoots at you.

Noise is the clock

There is no mission timer. There is a HEAT bar, and gunfire, kicked doors, bodies found and people screaming push it from QUIET through ALERT and ALARM to LOCKDOWN. Thirty seconds into Lockdown the backup units arrive: they shoot anyone still standing and arrest the wounded. An arrested officer is gone for good, the same as a dead one. The take is sitting in the back room. The bar is at seventy. Your call.

Then get out

Loot has weight. A man carrying it moves slower, and an arms crate or a gallery canvas takes both hands, so whoever carries it cannot shoot. Only what leaves the building counts — through the unmarked van, a sewer grate you need the keys for, a harbour patrol boat, or a helicopter you call in and then have to survive waiting for.

At the debrief you decide, on a slider, how much of the take goes into evidence and how much goes into your pocket. Declared loot pays nothing and cools Internal Affairs. Pocketed loot pays the squad. Suspicion at 100 ends the career, and so does running out of officers and money.

The career

• Permanent death and permanent arrest. Officers who die or get taken do not come back. You hire replacements off a recruitment board, each with their own aim, nerve, reaction time, carry weight and traits.
• Everything costs money. Weapons, ammunition, body armour, flashbangs, breaching charges, zip ties, repairs. Survivors bring their kit home; the dead take theirs with them.
• Two ways to play a save. Endless, or Retirement — bank a million dollars and walk away before Internal Affairs gets there.
• An after-action replay of every raid, played back from the orders you gave, and a seed you can keep to run the same building again.

Five buildings, two of them six-man jobs

A dockside warehouse, a canal street pawn shop, a harbour art gallery, and two larger maps that run named missions with a squad of six: the Ironside Arms Depot, where the crates need both hands, and the Saltmarsh Shipyard, where the smuggler you have to take alive could be in any of three places.

The arsenal

Rifles, SMGs (Vector, MP5, P90) and shotguns (M1014, SPAS-12, AA-12), each with a choice of standard, armour-piercing or hollow-point ammunition — and armour in light, medium and heavy, which wears out, carries its damage between raids and costs real money to repair. The shield enemy will ruin a squad that brought the wrong ammunition.

What is in the download

Windows only, 64-bit. Unzip it anywhere and double-click breachout.exe — nothing to install, no launcher, and your careers are saved in the folder beside the game, so the whole thing runs off a USB stick. PLAY.txt is the manual.

Mouse and keyboard. Made with C++ and SDL3; the maps were built in LevelEdit++.

Made with Claude

The code, the generated art and the design document were written with Claude Code. The art is drawn by scripts in tools/ rather than by an image model — every sprite is flat vector shapes the game tints at runtime.

It wants your feedback

The balance has been tuned against a scripted bot playing thousands of raids, which is not the same thing as being fun. If a map is unfair, a weapon is useless, or the heat bar rises faster than you can think, say so in the comments and it gets fixed.

First devlog post (optional, at launch)

Title: Breachout 1.0: serve the warrant, rob the place, get out

Breachout is out. It is a Door Kickers-style real-time tactics game where the
squad is openly corrupt: you serve the warrant the department signed, and you
carry out everything else in the building that is worth money.

In this first release:

- Five hand-made maps with randomised threats, two of them six-officer missions
- Permanent death and arrest, a recruitment board, and a career that ends when
  Internal Affairs reaches 100
- Rifles, SMGs and shotguns with armour-piercing and hollow-point loads, and
  light/medium/heavy armour that wears out between raids
- A declare-or-pocket debrief, a heat chart of the raid, and a full replay

What I most want to know: does the heat bar give you enough time to think, and
is the shield enemy fair now that armour-piercing and slugs punch through it?
Comments are open.