A tower defense where you choose the enemies that come for you.
Hex-grid tower defense deckbuilder roguelite. Every card places a building, every rank is paid for in enemies killed or taken alive, and between waves you pick which enemy type joins the army marching on you. Thirty waves, ten lives, one tower per run you can crown.
Steam page and free demo Jump to assets
Fact sheet
- Title
- Break of Dawn
- Developer
- Kalyx Games (solo developer)
- Publisher
- Kalyx Games, self-published
- Genre
- Hex-grid tower defense deckbuilder roguelite
- Engine
- Godot 4
- Platform
- Windows, on Steam
- Release
- Coming soon (2026). Date to be announced once the store build clears review.
- Price
- To be announced
- Demo
- Free on the Steam page, no key needed. Covers the first two acts, 20 of the game's 30 waves.
- Languages
- English, French, Italian, German, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Simplified Chinese
- Input
- Mouse and keyboard
- Minimum spec
- Windows 10 64-bit, dual-core 2.0 GHz, 4 GB RAM, any Vulkan 1.0 GPU (integrated graphics from 2016 on), 500 MB
- Steam
- store.steampowered.com/app/5040830/Break_Of_Dawn
- Discord
- discord.gg/84srCy74tR
- X
- @KalyxGames
- Press contact
- kalyxgamestudio@gmail.com, replies within a day
- Similar to
- Isle of Arrows, Rogue Tower and Emberward on the tower side; Slay the Spire and Balatro on the deck side
Description
One sentence
A hex-grid tower defense deckbuilder where you choose which enemies join the army marching on you, and every tower rank is paid for in enemies killed or taken alive.
Short
A hex-grid tower defense deck builder. Every card places a building, every rank is paid for in enemies taken alive or destroyed in battle, and between waves you pick which enemy type joins the army marching on you. Thirty waves, ten lives, and one tower per run that you can crown.
Long
The New Dawn is marching on your portal. You are the cult that has to keep it open.
Break of Dawn is a tower defense where the whole army comes out of a deck. Every card places a building on the hex board, and the shop you buy from is your own deck laid face up. Buying is drawing.
Souls come from kills. Sacrifices come from bodies dragged off the road into a pit, and Sacrifices are what pay for ranks. An Acolyte cannot grab a healthy enemy, so you have to hurt a target and then stop shooting it: the two things you want from everything walking past you are in direct conflict.
Between waves you take one of two roads. The safe road runs the wave as written. The hard road brings 50% more bodies at 50% more health, halves your income, and pays a rare tower only if you clear it without losing a single life. Either way, the road you take drafts an enemy type into this act's roster, and every tenth wave fields the entire roster at once behind a boss. You are building the horde that comes for you.
Towers rank up to five, but the last rank is board to board only: two of the same tower, both fully upgraded, fused for 110 Sacrifices. Crowning renames the tower, changes what it does, and seals that card for the rest of the run. One crowned tower of a type, per run, and you cannot take it back.
Ten lives. Lose them all and the run does not end: the map grows a new segment behind your portal, your lives refill, your board and deck survive, and you re-fight the wave that beat you with more room to work in. Three times.
What is in it
- 19 buildings across four damage types, each with a nine-slot upgrade tree and its own art and name at every rank
- Between waves, a safe road or a hard road; either one drafts an enemy type into the act's roster, and every tenth wave fields the whole roster behind a boss
- Souls from kills, Sacrifices from captures; Sacrifices pay for ranks, so you have to wound enemies and then let them live
- One crowned tower per run: two fully upgraded copies fused into a fifth rank that changes what the tower does
- Four cults to play, including one whose smaller deck starts every card at rank two
- Molten ground only three towers can build on, and that pays them more the deeper in they sit
- Wave modifiers from wave eleven: twice as many at half health, nothing capturable, and worse
- A board generated per run, seeded down to where the lava falls; losing all ten lives grows the map instead of ending the run
- Every tower is modelled in 3D and rendered down to pixel art on a fixed palette
Video
A trailer is in production. Until it lands, here is 60 seconds of uncut gameplay from a development build, captured at 1080p60 and downscaled for the web. No audio on this clip.
GIFs and short clips
Four to eight seconds each. GIFs are 720 wide and under 8 MB so they embed anywhere; the MP4 next to each one is the same moment at 1920x1080, 60 fps.
Screenshots
1920x1080. Click any image for the full-size file. The first one is the hook: the enemy pick between waves.
Logos and key art
Everything pixel art is supplied at its native size plus integer upscales. If you scale it yourself, use nearest-neighbour; bilinear scaling turns it to mush.
Download everything
Screenshots (zip, 21 MB) · GIFs (zip, 19 MB) · Logos, key art and the Steam screenshots (zip, 8 MB). The MP4 clips are linked individually above.
Kalyx Games
Kalyx Games is a one-person studio run by Ben. Break of Dawn is its first Steam release, built in Godot 4. The name is a spelling of calyx, the husk a bud breaks out of, which is where the dawn motif in the crest and the title comes from.
The art pipeline is the studio's own: every tower is built as a 3D model, rendered from the game's fixed camera angle and downsampled onto a locked palette with one-pixel outlines, so every building and every rank shares one light and one line weight. Happy to walk through it with images.
The pitch in one line: you are building the horde that comes for you.
Angles that have come up: the enemy draft as a tower defense where the player designs the wave; capture-or-kill as a targeting problem instead of a damage race; a run that grows the map when you lose instead of ending.
Permissions and keys
- Videos and streams of Break of Dawn may be monetised on any platform.
- Everything in this kit may be used for coverage of Break of Dawn.
- The demo is free on Steam and needs no key.
- Full-game keys go out to press by email at launch, and to Steam curators through Curator Connect. Ask at kalyxgamestudio@gmail.com.
- Questions, interviews, a build ahead of release: same address, replies within a day.