TLDR: A twitch streamer added a letter/number notation for the 8x8 grid, and the devs liked it enough to add it to the game. Credit to Waypoint's @austin_walker for calling my attention to it. https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/ywq99g/into-the-breach-solved-a-big-problem-how-to-show-off-your-strategies

Anyone want to post your difficult puzzles, now that we have a vocabulary to describe it?

It's cool, i'd rather a gif or something of the entire round? With the waiting between moves removed.

@mikemcn: yessss. Since my first finished battle this is all I wanted. I want to see how fast this battle would have really looked, compared to how slowly I played it. It would really add sooo much to the experience for me.

I'm really interested in this, but it still seems very difficult to post puzzles for people. For the most part you need to not only know the map / turn order, but also the mechs/abilities/upgrades/pilots, so you need at least 4 screenshots to really communicate all the information. I'm mostly hoping they publish or allow you to share single turn challenges in-game. Going through full games is fun, but solving a single very difficult turn is really the best the game has to offer, and typically in a run I'll only have that happen once or twice an island at most.

Frozen Synapse had a really cool feature where it could upload a shortened clip of the match to YouTube as a 30-60s clip. Here's a sample of me playing a buddy from when that game was new.

GIF export would also be great for sharing on Twitter.

Edit: and just thought of this -- if you could somehow encode a turn's data in a URL, and then let you share it like a chess puzzle.

It could probably be done, but it's a tricker than a chess puzzle. There's way more data in a single Into The Breach screen than in a chess puzzle. You would have to encode the every enemy position/type/health/next turn action, every friendly position/type/health/customizations, the entire environment (which island, all the buildings, all the building healths, all the mountains with their health, all forests, deserts, etc.), all coming environmental effects (lightning strikes, floods, fires, whatever). Like, there's a BUNCH of data in that screen, more than you maybe realize. Even compressed, it's probably at least a kilobyte or two of raw bytes (which becomes bigger when encoded), which makes for a hell of a URL.

The way to do it, rather, is to have a button in game which is like "upload this turn", which gathers all the data, uploads it to a database, then generates a shortened link which you can click on or paste into your game. However, it's a lot to ask for the Into The Breach devs to develop and host a thing like that.

@ascagnel: God, I loved Frozen Synapse. I want to get back into it at some point, especially since the sequel is apparently vapor.