With roguelike deckbuilders continuing to flood the market, it’s refreshing to see a developer cut through the noise and deliver a genuinely unique take on the formula.
That was my first thought when I laid eyes on Mechborn — a deckbuilder where the mech you pilot is your deck. Developed by Turtle Juice, the game combines influences of 90s anime and Greek mythology, and it replaces the traditional hand system with a moving conveyor belt.
Ahead of its launch in Q4 2026, we recently caught up with Ernani Rocha, Lead Designer at Turtle Juice, and Lucas Java, Lead Artist and principal world-builder, to discuss Mechborn’s artistic inspirations, its innovative conveyor belt system, and the different mech models with their fully interchangeable components.
RL: For readers who may not be familiar, can you tell us what Mechborn is and what sets it apart from other mech games?
Mechborn already stands out by its genre alone. Mechs and card games don’t usually hang out together, and pushing that mix into a deckbuilder space makes it even rarer.
Another big difference is how much we care about pilots. In most mech games, the robot gets all the mechanical love and the pilot is basically a seat with a name. In Mechborn, pilots actually matter. They shape how you play, how your deck evolves, and how your mech performs. We spent a lot of time making sure the person inside the machine is just as important as the machine itself.
RL: The Steam page mentions 12 unlockable Mechborn pilots. How do these pilots differ in terms of playstyle, abilities, and strategy?
Think of the pilots as the carriers of special skills. Each one comes with four active skills that directly change how you play your cards and approach combat. They’re not just flavour, they define your strategy. Oftentimes changing the tide of a battle itself.
Every pilot is built around a clear archetype, so different playstyles naturally click with different players. For example, the pilot available in our current Itch.io pre-alpha demo, Yumi Yukino, is all about conveyor belt and battlefield control. Her abilities don’t deal damage at all. Instead, she repositions cards in ways that enable brutal combos, sometimes taking down elite Kaiju in just two turns.
On the other end of the spectrum, Amina Obi is pure fire. She sets up attacks, applies burn, and turns aggression into a very efficient solution. Simple? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
Beyond that, the real depth comes from how pilots and mechs synergise, opening up very different builds and strategies depending on who you choose to bring into the cockpit.
RL: In your first dev diary, you spoke about different mech models and interchangeable components. How does this customisation system impact gameplay and long-term strategy?
At the start of a run, you choose both your Mech and your Pilot. At some point we did the maths and realised… that alone doesn’t actually give you that many combinations. And if there’s one thing mech players love, it’s customising their machine.
That’s when we landed on a simple idea: your mech is your deck. Catchy, right? Totally unplanned, but we’re keeping it.
Each mech is made of four parts Head, Arms, Torso, and Legs and each part contributes cards to your starting deck. So when you swap parts, you’re not just changing stats or visuals, you’re fundamentally changing how your deck plays from turn one.
We currently have three Mechs planned for launch, the first of which – Boreas – can be played right now in our pre–alpha on itch.io. Each one will have three full sets, and each set includes those four parts. That means you can mix and match between twelve different parts to shape your starting deck, as long as they belong to the same Mech.
Long-term, this makes early decisions matter a lot. Your build identity starts before the first fight, and every run feels more intentional because of it.
Honestly, this is one of the features I’m most excited to see players react to. I don’t recall anyone doing mech customisation exactly this way, and seeing people realise their deck is literally their machine should be a fun moment.
RL: Mechborn replaces the traditional hand system with a ‘Conveyor Belt’. What led you to move away from the standard deckbuilder formula?
It all started with a single comment we received about two years ago, very early in development.
“My biggest flag at this point is that this very much feels like StS with a different coat of paint, and that probably isn’t enough to make the game inherently appealing”.
I won’t lie, that one hurt. But it also stuck. I knew immediately that this was the kind of feedback you either ignore… or turn into fuel. We chose the second option.
It was a Saturday. I called Lucas, our Art Director, and we started throwing ideas around. By the end of that same day, the concept of the Conveyor Belt was on the table. Less than a week later, it was working and already being tested.
The moment we knew it was something special was when testers started smiling. You could literally see the eureka moments when they understood how the system worked. That’s when it clicked for us too.
Long story short, Mechborn is built on a steady diet of very direct, sometimes brutal player feedback. That comment was one of the most defining ones, and the Conveyor Belt exists because of it.
RL: The game features three continents to explore and a fuel management system. How do these continents differ and how does resource management factor into the overall strategy?
This also connects directly to that earlier comparison with Slay the Spire. Once we locked in the Conveyor Belt, it felt wrong to keep the same node based map structure everyone else was using. It works, people have played it a million times before… which is exactly why we didn’t want it.
I grew up playing Rome Total War and reading way too many history books, so the idea of conquering and securing territory naturally crept in. Instead of hopping between nodes, we wanted the map to feel like an actual place you move through, control, and survive in.
As you progress, each continent becomes more hostile and harder to traverse. On the second continent, for example, you’ll face mountain regions where fuel costs are doubled. By the third continent, the threats are even higher and bad planning gets very expensive very fast.
The goal is to make players think not only about combat, but everything around it. Routes, refuelling, credits, fuel management. The fight doesn’t start when the battle begins, it starts on the map.
Honestly, one of my favourite things is watching streamers play and hearing them debate paths, panic over fuel, or realise halfway through a route that they messed up. In the best possible way.
I believe our job as designers in this genre is to make players feel smart in more than one dimension. Not just in combat, but in planning, logistics, and long-term decisions. So far, this new map system is doing exactly that.
RL: The game has a very unique visual style. What were your main artistic influences, and how did you land on this particular look and feel?
Talking about the main influences is a bit hard. I love mecha and sci-fi, so there was so much that influenced me that it’s difficult to pinpoint just one thing. Broadly speaking, though, our main influences come from anime, sci-fi series, and movies, especially the mech and giant monster series we grew up with.
The journey to this visual style was longer than one might expect. We started the project in a completely different direction, it was an entirely different game, pixel art, and not even a card game. During the transition to a 2D card game (not even 3D yet), two things remained: we wanted to keep it as a mech game and preserve the relationship between pilot and mech.
At that point, our influences narrowed down to series like Gundam Wing, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Escaflowne, and even Rayearth. We wanted that sense of awe you get from anime, but expressed in a slightly more comic-like style. As the story evolved, the Greek mythology influence came in like a roundhouse kick and became the main guide for how the mechs should be designed.
Then, in January 2025, we pivoted again, this time to 3D. In the beginning, we experimented with a bunch of possible visual directions and other influences, but we still wanted to show our love for the anime we grew up with, which led us to the cel-shaded look. Right now, we’re refining it further and playing more with lighting, but in the end, the visuals are our love letter to anime and mecha.
RL: Mechborn blends ’90s mech anime with Greek mythology. How did those two influences come together creatively?
At the beginning of our transition to a card game, we wanted to give the mechs more identity — to ground them in something beyond pure mechanics and make them thematically stronger. I had several conversations with Ernani about possible directions, and at one point we even considered a Genndy Tartakovsky style like in Samurai Jack or Clone Wars. But thematically still felt lacking and the anime we grew up with kept pulling us back.
During one of those conversations, we talked about how some IPs, like Saint Seiya, used Greek mythology as a structural foundation for the story and armor designs, and that’s when it clicked. We were trying to create a love letter to the anime we grew up with, and Saint Seiya, although not about mechs, was huge in Brazil and influenced us deeply (I mean, I still have an Aioria Cloth Myth on my shelf. That tells you everything).
We also both love Greek mythology, so we asked ourselves: why not incorporate it into the story? Kind of like early Stargate, where ancient civilizations were reinterpreted as the Goa’uld, that idea became the jumpstart for embracing the fact that we were building something rooted in our love for ’90s anime and Greek mythology.
After admittedly some rough drafts, it clicked again: the mechs became counterparts to the gods. That gave us a clear thematic direction and even informed gameplay decisions, ultimately transforming our first flying mech into the Greek God of the North Wind. At the same time, the story evolved to introduce the Hyperians as an ancient race of Greek-inspired warrior race allied with humanity, subtly weaving Greek mythology into the foundation of the world.
RL: Looking ahead, is there any possibility of a console release in the future?
Absolutely, we plan to bring MECHBORN to PC (Steam), Xbox Series S / X & Windows, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 1 & 2.
RL: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions! Now to save you scrolling back up for the link, head this way for the Steam page for Mechborn.
