Fixed a bug that would prevent completing levels after changing scenes while Commentary is playing.
Fixed an issue that could cause WIZTAC outfits not to show in the Outfits menu, shortly after launch.
Wizard responsibly, where practical.
Tactical Breach Wizards is OUT! New trailer suggests you buy it
The developers behind Gunpoint and Heat Signature have suddenly, with only 6.8 years of forewarning, released their next game.
Tactical Breach Wizards is a turn-based tactics game in which you lead a team of renegade wizards in kevlar, as they unravel a modern conspiracy plot and/or find the most stylish way to punch a Traffic Warlock through a 4th story window.
It's a single player, story-driven campaign about 15 hours long, and it costs $20 - $18 this week.
Fans of wizards and not reading things will be excited to hear this sentence is about to end, plunging you into a launch trailer:
Fans of wizards and not watching the launch trailer will be shocked to learn of several mildly persuasive bribes being offered to those who buy the game in launch week, which ends August 29th.
Mostly exists to make you feel a vague sense of urgency about the whole thing.
🚀 Another 10% off if you buy it with (or already own) Cobalt Core
If you're not familiar, Cobalt Core is an excellent roguelike deck builder with a sense of humour very much in line with our own. (This bundle technically lasts for 2 weeks.)
🧙♂️ The WIZ-TAC outfits set
Buying the game this week also automatically adds an extra pack of semi-exciting outfits to dress your little wizards in. These are purely cosmetic, and by no means the fanciest outfits in the game, they're just a little thank you for supporting us when we need it most.
If your vague sense of urgency has now risen to uncomfortably moderate levels, allow us to deflate it by clarifying that these outfits will always be available as part of the Special Edition, which also includes in-game developer commentary, the soundtrack and an overly ambitious demo we never released.
But surely members of the press have opinions on all these wizards?
Maybe, let's check!
[center]"Hilarious, quietly radical strategy game is the best since XCOM 2"[/center] ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Guardian
"An instant genre classic... one of the most enjoyable tactics games I’ve ever played" Rock Paper Shotgun
"Excellent turn-based tactical combat wrapped up in a joyful, tightly-written story [...] my 22 hours with it were spent utterly spellbound." PC Gamer
"A blueprint for how tactics games should be designed" Shacknews
"Between its ridiculous cast and premise, a sleek sense of style, and a mystery I actually want to unravel... not to mention its incredible wit, Tactical Breach Wizards is absolutely one of the best games I’ve played this year." Kotaku
"Deftly blends deep tactical gameplay that rewards experimentation with sharply-written dialogue and characters bursting with personality" GameSpot
Wow, let's all just click the buy button without overthinking it
Fixed a bug that would prevent Breaching doors after quitting the game during a level transition.
Made it more clear when scrolling to previous Dialog bubbles is blocking progression.
Added a Reset Scroll button to Dialog UI.
Wizard responsibly, where practical.
New trailer and a release date: August 22nd
Suspicious Developments, the decreasingly efficient developers of Gunpoint and Heat Signature, today announced that their turn-based tactics game Tactical Breach Wizards will release on Steam August 22nd - a swift 6.8 years since the project began.
The date was revealed in a low growl during a new trailer for the game, debuting in the PC Gaming Show, which borrows Hollywood voice talent to lend the game's flimsy premise an air of legitimacy. The trailer profiles key members of your team, including and limited to: the Navy Seer, the Freelance Storm Witch, the Necromedic and the Rebel Riot Priest.
Realising they were now describing in text what they spent considerable effort rendering in video, Suspicious Developments cut themselves short and just embedded it:
There's a demo!
Viewers who find themselves roused by these wizards and their unexpectedly modern antics may act on their urges immediately, as the first playable demo recently launched in the Steam Next Fest.
Unroused viewers may prefer to step warily back from these robed figures and continue to read words about them from a safe distance. The company will arrange these words below:
About the full game
Tactical Breach Wizards is a turn-based tactics game in which you lead a team of renegade wizards in kevlar, as they unravel a modern conspiracy plot and/or find the most stylish way to punch a Traffic Warlock through a 4th story window.
It's a single player, story-driven campaign of about 8-10 hours, in which you:
Combo spells for satisfying results
Each of your wizards has a unique set of abilities, from a straightforward lightning bolt to transforming into a rabid dog. They're designed to be fun by themselves, but combine in more ways than even we can figure out.
Experiment freely, rewind your mistakes
We let you freely rewind your turn, which means you can try every wild idea you have. It might work beautifully, fail spectacularly, or screw up in a way that gives you new ideas. Either way, you play it out in-game instead of scratching your head.
Fight the (various) power(s)
Your team are a motley crew of misfits on the wrong side of the law, fighting against the Rushwater PD and their Traffic Warlock, a religious dictatorship and their Riot Priests, and a private military corporation meddling with magic to enhance their troops.
Upgrade your spellbook
Every ability for every wizard has a set of unique perks to unlock as they level up, tailoring their powers to your playstyle, and enabling even more ridiculous ways they can combo with each other.
Unravel a conspiracy, stop a war
As the enemy plot thickens, key players and their relationships are added to your conspiracy map to keep track of the important bits. You can delve deeper into the details, arrange them in a way that makes sense to you, and keep a visual overview of what's going on.
Tactical Breach Wizards is the third and (probably) final game in the tenuously connected Defenestration Trilogy, following on from Gunpoint and Heat Signature only in the sense that people can and will be propelled through windows by your actions. You can, and arguably must, wishlist it now.
Demo patch: Flashbacks and Credits
Thanks to all who jumped to the nextversion branch to try our new patch. All looks good, so it's now live for everyone! Just a lil one:
Patch Notes (2024-06-05-2-Demo)
Did you know you can re-play earlier levels with your current perks? Well you couldn't, because it caused a black screen. Fixed that.
Our credits were a) spilling off the screen due to Unity adding extra line breaks to them every time the file was saved, and b) ugly as sin. We've made them nice now, they even have tabs!
Fixed a volume issue and an animation desync on our main titles, after the prologue.
Using Chain Shock would create a redundant rewind state where nothing had actually changed. Now it doesn't!
We made the Wishlist button on the end screen look 400% more clickable, cos it is clickable.
The difficulty options menu layout would glitch sometimes. We decided it shouldn't.
Wizard responsibly, where practical.
Our demo is out! Try the next patch if you're brave?
In a rare case of us doing a thing exactly when we said we would,* we did indeed release our demo on June 3rd. Now we have a patch for it that we'd love for you to try, so we can check it works before we force it on everyone. Here's how to access it:
Right click the demo in your Library and go to Properties > Betas
Click the dropdown list and choose 'nextversion'
The game should update, and you'll see patch notes in-game to confirm it
As always, you can hit Esc any time in game to report a bug or give us some feedback.
Patch Notes
Here's what we hope we've fixed:
Fixed a volume issue and an animation desync on our main titles, after the prologue.
Did you know you can re-play earlier levels with your current perks? Well you couldn't, because it caused a black screen. Fixed that.
Our credits were a) spilling off the screen due to Unity adding extra line breaks to them every time the file was saved, and b) ugly as sin. We've made them nice now, they even have tabs!
Using Chain Shock would create a redundant rewind state where nothing had actually changed. Now it doesn't!
We made the Wishlist button on the end screen look 400% more clickable, cos it is clickable.
* Dates
While we're here, sure, let's clarify this. Generally if we do a news post announcing the date of something, with an actual date, you can expect us to hit that - we only really do it if the thing itself is basically ready.
But when we casually refer to something as 'The February beta' or 'a two year project', then yes, you can laugh in our faces, due to our track record with such things.
June 12th: Hbomberguy plays Tactical Breach Wizards
The first playable demo of Tactical Breach Wizards will be in the June Next Fest, sneaking out a little early on June 3rd. Then at 10am Pacific on June 12th, special guest hbomberguy will be livestreaming the full game on our store page, continuing on from roughly where the demo leaves off.
Tom, designer, writing this, hi, will also be on stream to answer his & your questions, and desperately try not to backseat-game.
If anyone's not familiar, Harry makes meticulously-researched deep dive videos on games-adjacent stories that you think you're not going to watch all of but then somehow you have and you don't regret it.
Obviously, a collaboration of this magnitude has been years in the making, and some day Ben Affleck will direct a movie dramatising the untold story. But briefly, it was like:
Him: Can I play your game? Me: Sure. Me: Actually, can we stream that? Him: Sure.
(I actually quite liked Air, for what that's worth.)
First playable demo launches June 3rd
Tactical Breach Wizards will be in the June Next Fest, which starts on the 10th. So why is our demo releasing at 10am Pacific on June 3rd? Because a good breach (launch) takes your enemies (customers) by surprise, and nothing's more surprising than your door exploding a full week before your door was scheduled to explode.
Given that, why are we telling you a week in advance? Sorry, but you already used up your one question in the intro. We have quotas for a reason, it wouldn't be fair to the others to let your agenda dominate this announcement.
Demo features
The first 3-ish of 21-ish missions in the full game
A little something extra at the end that's demo-exclusive
Takes around 1.5 to 2 hours to play
When the full game comes out later this year, your progress will carry over if you like
If you'd like to be notified when the demo comes out, why not Follow the game on our store page? Does that change what kind of updates you see even if you've already Wishlisted it? No-one knows, and we're not going to check because it's in our interests to pressure you to express enthusiasm for the game on every axis you can.
And that's four questions now, we've called security.
An update on betas
This being May, you might reasonably assume that if you didn't hear back about the "February" Beta yet, you didn't get in. But that's small brain thinking. Not only has the February Beta (launched in March) not ended, multiple other betas are being juggled recklessly around.
What's going on, you ask? You will regret you asked. Because it takes slightly longer to explain than anyone's interest level in this topic really warrants.
'February' Beta
500 people admitted, 2,500 more will be let in
Really, this is an ongoing beta that'll last until we think the game is ready. However, we admit people in batches, and we're doing that very slowly so far. The point of batching is to fix stuff, then get fresh eyes on the fixes. But we've had very little time to fix stuff reported by the first 500 people we let into this beta in March, so it hasn't made sense to let in the next batch yet.
If you wanna be in on a future batch, you need to be on our mailing list and check the appropriate box.
The Feb beta comes in two parts: you get the first 3 acts of the game right away, then if you give us feedback on those, we invite you in to the full beta featuring the final act.
Why have we been busy? Because of the...
Demo Beta
For Reasons, we need a demo ready by a certain deadline, so we've been scrambling to make that and get it tested fast. If you played the Gunpoint demo way back in the day, you know we like to add something a little extra on the end, so it wasn't as simple as just truncating the game. We've done two rounds of testing here:
Demo 1 test We let in 1,500 mailing list members who'd signed up to test the full game, and bribed them to test the demo first, by pledging to jump them straight into the full version of the February beta if they gave us feedback. Lots of them did!
Unfortunately, this feedback revealed that my wildly high-concept idea for the 'something extra' was confusing and frustrating a great many players, so we had to rethink.
Demo 2 test For this, I re-opened our old Steam Playtest - that's the thing where you were able to sign up on our store page and get let in automatically, rather than having to redeem a Steam key. So around 3,000 people who played the game a few years ago suddenly got access to the demo beta, and a few of them even noticed and played it.
Now that we've checked it didn't completely break, and early feedback on the new 'something extra' is great, I've let in another 1,000 new folks who signed up for that long ago, so we'll see where that gets us. If it all goes well, there won't be any further demo testing.
We won't be using Steam Playtest for anything else - we're not ready to give the full game to 4,000 people, and you can't remove testers you let in via the public Playtest signup system, so it's sort of a dead end for us now.
What's Next?
If you're on our mailing list and opted in to the beta, you're still in the running to be included in a future batch of the Feb Beta - no action needed. It might be a while before we get to you, though, since the demo 1 testers who gave us feedback will form the next batch of folks we let in.
If you don't get in, the above mentioned Reasons mean it shouldn't be too long before you get to play a chunk of the game anyhow, and maybe a little something extra.
New beta underway, still time to get in
We've just sent out the first 500 keys for the increasingly inaccurately named February Beta!
If you're not on our mailing list or haven't opted in yet, there's still time. We plan to send out 2,500 more keys, in batches, over the next month or so.
Just sign up and make sure to check the relevant boxes. If you're already on there, we won't add you twice.
The full game is ready to test now, but we're doing things a little differently this time. If you get an invite, you'll first get access to the first 75% of the campaign. We'll then wait to see who fills in their feedback forms on what they've played, and periodically invite those folks into a beta that includes the game's final act.
Most testers don't give feedback, so we just wanna make sure we don't give the full game to too many people without getting what we need in return.
