brainfruit studio presents...
A city-council simulator for six players and unlimited spectators. Occasionally playable online.
Preamble
Tide Breakers has a canonical, in-person format that involves custom key controllers, a closed-circuit audio system, and tangible faction cosmetics. It debuted at the 2024 No Quarter Exhibition, with some of the resulting spectacle captured in the above video.
The game is technically also playable without all that, via a shared link and some legwork. If you want to host a game yourself, we recommend following these steps:
- Gather at least six people, or more if you want the live-event dynamic of spectators who rotate in next session.
- Create a new game room (this will open in a new tab).
- This is a public URL that anyyone can access! You'll note the room ID in the link.
- Fire up the group audio chat, a la Discord.
- Everyone should join the chat and go to that link independently; you'll all see the same title screen (the logo, five characters, and a "Lock to Begin" message)
- Let's play the game!
Factions
Tide Breakers has five factions, represented by the characters above. Everyone must choose a faction to play. The human/alligator hybrid character, Some of Many, is played by two players simultaneously.
Talk amongst yourselves in audio chat until everyone has chosen a unique faction. To assume your roles as faction leaders and start the game, we'll go over controls.
Controls
We mentioned custom key controllers, and here's where they become relevant. This is a three-button game:
To play the game without custom controllers, it is regrettably necessary to learn the faction-specific key mappings we have assigned to each of these buttons for each character in the game. That mapping for each character looks like this:
So that's the big limitation of this approach currently — everyone is playing on the same giant keyboard, so you need to agree on a low-stakes honor system not to mess with each other's inputs. Assign everyone their keys — both Some of Many players are simply assigned the same keys.
Now, you are finally ready to serve on the city council of the great city of Buabu!
How to Actually Play
When every player has pressed the "lock" button in the "center" of their trio, the game will begin.
- You will be presented with a series of choices — use your left button to switch your vote to the left choice, your right button to switch to the right choice, and the center button to lock in your vote.
- Votes that have consequences for your faction's popularity are indicated with icons.
- The most popular faction representative will serve as council chair, and their vote will count twice.
- In the event of a tie vote, you will go to a tie-breaking round, where each faction can use a limited stock of "tie-breaks" to add weight to their vote.
- When everyone has exhausted all of their tie-breaks, all supplies will replenish.
- Every second that you play, the sea will rise a bit. The game ends when it has overtaken the Teal Wall, or … well, you'll have to see.
- There are other things you'll discover as you play, but this should be enough to get you started. Have fun! Buabu believes!
Get In Touch
We're happy to run a session for you if you'd like to have one of us there to facilitate, or if the web app is currently down and you've read this far anyway.
Contact rob @ brainfruit.studio and we can schedule it!