TACTICAL BREACH WIZARDS IS OUT!
Sorry for yelling but it took ages to make
Turn-based tactics game about Navy Seers and Traffic Warlocks from the devs of
@GunpointGame
and
@HeatSig
Grab it now for a discount and a lil extra gift!
RTs much appreciated!
The Tactical Breach Wizards demo is out now!
🚀 From the
@Gunpoint
and
@HeatSig
devs
🧙♀️Try the Navy Seer and Freelance Storm Witch
🚦 Defenestrate a Traffic Warlock
🪄 Plus! A little something extra just for the demo...
RTs much appreciated!
So! We're releasing our first playable demo next week, June 3rd!
Then on June 12th, we've somehow got
@Hbomberguy
streaming the full game?!
Read the rollercoaster ride of how that happened:
I made doors block pathfinding, but didn't tell the Charge ability's targeting logic - I was curious if that would let me still bash through them like before.
Well played, AI.
A wizard breaches precisely when they mean to.
📣 TACTICAL BREACH WIZARDS launches August 22nd!
🎬 Watch the new trailer! It was very fun to make.
🎮 Demo! Wishlist!
Retweet? 🙏
Here's a story about why, instead of making a game, you should just not.
Recently we added 'Confidence Goals' to Tactical Breach Wizards: they're optional objectives that are sometimes much harder than your main goals...
Alright, who wants to play Tactical Breach Wizards?
We have a short, spoiler-free test build! We're rolling out several batches of Steam keys, giving a different audience first dibs each time - details:
Wishlist it here!
Tactical Breach Wizards finally releases 24 hours from now!!
You'll have completely forgotten by then, best wishlist it to be safe:
Reviews are still coming in, but we've had some incredible quotes already:
We have a new beta ready! It's the first act of the game, and our first showing of actual story and dialogue!
Signing up is just one button this time, here's how:
And here's a new 7-minute explainer trailer:
RTs appreciated!
I am so delighted with how our new character upgrade screen is shaping up, I keep starting the game just to play with it.
Art and the workbench concept by
@John_Arr
- so many wonderful little details on each one.
Implementation by
@jwindr
- this came together fast!
Here's our new trailer, by
@Derek_Lieu
!
Featuring a new region, a new wizard, our conspiracy map, our outfits menu, and the first taste of our music, which is by Robert Arzola:
Wishlist if it tickles you:
You have 24 hours left to grab Tactical
@BreachWizards
if you want the mildly fancy launch week outfits and a 10% discount!
2,200 reviews at 98% positive now - insane, thank you all so much.
"Sure it's a breach-and-clear game, but we really want our dialogue to speak to larger issues and build meaningful relationship between our characters."
"Cool, can you give an example?"
*glances at editor*
"Not... right now."
Lately I've (Tom've) been prototyping a turret, and it's a good case study in how hard things are easy and easy things are hard.
A turret's just an enemy that doesn't move, surely. Well, setting its move range to 0 was easy enough, but then on the turret's turn...
Haven't done a
#screenshotsaturday
for a while - maybe ever, for
@BreachWizards
?!
You've just arrived in Kalan, and face a number of Riot Priests that suggests you should not have gone to Kalan.
We were one of the most played demos in Next Fest!
🧙♂️ 48k players!
📈 108k wishlists!!
📊 72% of folks who finished rated it 9 or 10/10
Still up:
Thanks so much, everyone!
Here's what that means to us in 6 years of context lol
"Ugh, players don't read tutorials."
"Ugh, players REALLY don't read tutorials."
"Ugh, player's don't read tutorials then specifically complain the info isn't mentioned anywhere!"
"Ugh... it turns out I didn't actually put this tutorial in."
A fun thing about working with
@John_Arr
is when you see his concept art and think "Wow, I hope it can look that good!" and the next thing you know it's done and real and in-game and better.
Just sent out the first 500 keys for the increasingly inaccurately named February Beta of
@BreachWizards
!
If you're not on our mailing list or haven't opted in yet, there's still time - we'll be doing more batches:
Wishlist:
My God, I've playtested this level so many ways, and until a tester report I read just now, I never realised you could do this.
Neither does our tutorial, so now I have to teach it to be more open minded.
Anyway it's super cool that our game can have stealth bugs that don't show up til it hits the outside world, and that these fail silently, and that I can't tell from feedback reports between a UI element not being prominent enough and a UI element being *completely invisible*.
Tactical Breach Wizards has changed a lot since we last showed it, so here's a new video!
Navy Seer and Witch Cop fight their way out of Rushwater Police Station, but the local Traffic Warlock stands in their way.
Wishlist?
The crucial thing with marketing is to know your target audience. That's why with Tactical Breach Wizards, we're only targeting two key groups: people who like tactics games, and people who don't.
(2/2)
If anyone got a music claim notice on a Breach Wizards vid lately, it's false - we've talked to the company and they're revoking them.
Sorry for the nonsense! We were very careful to ensure no-one can legitimately do this.
We're going to let one last batch of folks into this beta before it ends, so opt-in now if you fancy it:
If you're already on our mailing list, enter your e-mail anyway and you should get a link to update your profile.
Next Fest is live, and look!! An elderly gent has somehow bumbled his way to the top spot??!
Thanks so much for the huge response to the trailer & demo so far. For anyone who missed:
Release date trailer!
Demo!
To be clear and for future reference:
All the music in the game is original and fully owned by us alone. Everyone has our permission to publish and monetise videos of our game featuring it. No-one has any legal claim to the music that can stop you doing so.
My greatest achievement in yesterday's playtest was killing the same person twice with a single move, if you want an idea of how weird the finale is getting.
We've been brainstorming abilities for the next class, and testing the new version tonight was amazing fun. We're reaching a critical mass of ways for wizards to set each other up for clutch plays that can combine into turns where you just wanna clap at what you made happen.
Thought it would be good to pulse the mana you just earned so you can tell what's new vs what you already had. This definitely warranted the 19 iterations I did on the independent animation curves driving the pulse and the colour fade.
Spent a couple of days this week seeing if I could make an event log that wasn't too ugly to read. Made it smooth and coloured and let you drag to scroll it, and thanks to
@jwindr
it even erases events when you rewind.
#screenshotsaturday
If you're curious why this game took 6+ years, I think you'll like the developer commentary in the Special Edition.
We put 52 tape recorders throughout the game. And if you get bored of one, you can throw it at an enemy.
Also available as an upgrade:
Making a boss fight for a puzzly tactics game is an interesting challenge. I think we've managed to hit these goals:
- Not a bullet sponge
- No obvious strat works, but!
- No attacks are simply ignored
- And many, many non-obvious strats work
- Breaks your brain a bit
OK we've just been informed that PCGS will be showing an outdated version of the trailer with the wrong date, so I need you all to mentally replace 20th with 22nd when you see it.
This release date announce is going well unless announcing the right release date was important.
SteamDeck compatibility: we're rated Playable - some of our text is slightly too small for the max rating atm.
It supports gamepad controls natively, albeit using a gamepad cursor in some contexts.
Runs great and looks great on it.
.
Game dev is full of fascinating questions, such as: why did I create an AI template called 'Furthest from hostile' and then make its only priority to get as close as possible to hostiles?
Month 1: 'Action' abilities use up other actions
Month 3: Support for abilities that can only be used once per turn
Month 9: Unified action point system
Month 18: Discover nothing in our code actually prevents you selecting and using an ability in any of these circumstances
PC Gaming Show starts in about 20 mins:
We have a new trailer in it, to reveal... a release date?! *gasps*
*murmuring*
*one guy claps but it doesn't catch on*
Our bit should be about 2 hours from now.
Which *somewhat explains* why people were not super-noticing them!
And means I have just *completely broken* the game by making it mandatory to prove you noticed them!
We've got a new patch ready to try, if you wouldn't mind moseying over to the nextversion branch to check we didn't break anything?
Here's what's new, and how to do that:
.
Turns out a certain shader used in their transparent background was not being included in the build because Unity didn't think we needed it.
That causes the game to just silently fail when trying to draw them, so they don't show up at all. Wooo!
Tinkering with a new level element at the end of a long day.
"Ooh, what if it was like a two headed turret, and each gun can target, take damage, and be hacked individually?"
... We already have the power to put two turrets next to each other, Tom.
For completely different reasons, my last two writing jobs have involved writing endless, savage dunks from one character to another.
Just kicking the shit out of my imaginary friends every day. Weird work if you can get it.
... We've never had an *enemy* also be *cover*, and turrets can also be pushed around - we've never had moving cover before. How to approach?!
Just add a cover object to it. Turns out that just works.
Thanks for reading!
We have a new beta brewing! Get on our mailing list and you can opt-in when you sign up:
If you're already on it, enter your e-mail anyway and you should get a link to update your profile - you can opt in from there. We plan to invite 1k folks on Monday.
Delighted to have Steve aboard for level design! You'll know his work from the amazing Dust District in Dishonored 2, or BioShock Infinite, John Wick Hex, Alba...
Happy to be heading back to the tactics genre, helping
@Pentadact
make levels for
@breachwizards
:)
The level editor I'm using to make stuff will also ship with the game for players to use, which is nice.
Here's Tom's trailer / explanation of the game:
You've only got a day-ish left to play our demo in the Next Fest!
You can still play it after that, but it won't be 'in the Next Fest', and then what will you tell your grandkids.
Researching witchy things, and Google aggressively autocompleted the start of the word 'ritual' to 'ritual hockey'.
Sometimes you're just like, alright, sure, show me that.
Testing a tweak to Broom Breach:
Huh, I thought you're meant to target the indoor side of the window, but I guess it's been a while since I used it.
...
OK no, you probably should click indoors.
I've wanted to try prop making for a while, but don't really have the space/tools for it. 'Paint a stick and bolt some crap to it' seemed doable though.
It's beta-feedback-processing day, possibly our last, which means it's satisfying data gif time.
My goal for campaign levels was that they should all have under 10% negative ratings, and we actually did it! Here's how the last three beta waves looked, sorted by negative %:
It's satisfying graph time again! Latest beta moved the needle significantly in a very positive direction, 9s and 10s now make up 41% of responses! No predictor of actual review scores obv, but Heat Sig's last beta only had 32% a month before launch.
The PC Gaming Show starts in 2 hours, where we're showing off a new
@BreachWizards
trailer made by the great
@Derek_Lieu
! It's the first time we've ever had a trailer made professionally, excited to see how it goes down. 12.30pm Pacific Time
The idea is the missions are easy to complete but there's lots of extra depth in trying to pull off these ambitious feats.
We sent a test build privately to a few people recently, I was keen to know if they worked - did people notice them, did they try for them, were they fun?
First batch of keys are taken! Folks should receive them in the next few hours.
When the next batch is available, people Following the game on Steam will be the first to be told - do that here:
This beta includes our super quick-to-use level editor!
Played the game on Steam again. Confidence goals still missing in that level. Huh? Confidence goals missing in EVERY level!
@jwindr
looked into it, and found it only happens in builds of the game - not when playing it within Unity.
Just had one of those moments where the way a solution plays out makes you both laugh and clap.
It's so rewarding to see how sprinkling a few complications onto the
@BreachWizards
formula creates problems that take what feel like galaxy brain solutions.
To me it was intuitive to mouse over something for more info, but I wasn't surprised to learn that's not universal.
So, for now, I figured I'd just give you a primary objective to check your confidence goals, and tell you how to do so. It's completed once you've moused over them
It's actually a really useful character-defining exercise to ask: what could you say to this person that, however they might brush it off, would dent a little piece of their soul forever. It should be pretty easy to answer, and different for every character.
We let another 500 folks into the full beta last week, but we had some hiccups that weekend.
If you're one of that batch, it's fixed now, and we'd love to get your eyes on the patch we just deployed before we clock off for the weekend, to avoid a similar snafu!
Cheers.
Most people didn't notice them, or didn't notice them until the level end screen told them they'd failed at them.
I'd mentioned them in the objectives list, but wanted people to mouse over them to get the details, otherwise it gets cluttery.
That's not common yet, but now it's a lot clearer how to make it more so.
@HeatSig
had a similar arc where we get to "OK cool things *can* happen" then work towards "...and they probably will".
The villain of
@BreachWizards
has absolutely terrible politics, and I keep thinking of super valid points your team can make to her. Then I think of what she'd say back, in her most savage, sharpest moments, and I'm like "Ah fuck, that does kind of destroy you."