Tactical Breach Wizards News

Update: patch is now live for everyone. Feel free to stay on the nextversion branch if you're happy to get changes early!

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.

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
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.
  

[h3]* Dates[/h3]
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. Test change.

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.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1043810/Tactical_Breach_Wizards/

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.)

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.

[h3]Demo features[/h3]

• 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.

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.

[h3]'February' Beta[/h3]
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...



[h3]Demo Beta[/h3]

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.



[h3]What's Next?[/h3]

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.

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.

Cheers!

Tom