The comedic cheat sheet that helped tag Tactical Breach Wizards

It all commenced with one amusing tale. What if the Name of Duty transformed into a realm filled with wizards? Suspicious Developments’ artistic director Tom Francis can hardly recall where the amusing tale began, yet it inspired him and his team to carve out the concept for one of 2024’s remarkable successes: Tactical Breach Wizards. 

The amusing tale was combined with a simple notion—what if there was an XCOM alternative that was easier for casual gamers to engage with?—to shape the fundamental design philosophy behind Tactical Breach Wizards. A game that achieved 98% positive feedback on Steam and doubled the earnings of Suspicious Developments’ previous title.

Francis shared a brief discussion regarding the variety of “cheats” he often employed to transform one amusing tale into a 15-hour tactical adventure during the Game Developers Conference. 

Cheats for humor

The core concept for Tactical Breach Wizards was so straightforward that Francis and his team combined the terms “tactical” and “wizardry” to develop character abilities. It was a process—and their initial “cheat”—which they dubbed their amusing tale engine, a mechanism that quickly generated jokes with ease. They conceived and illustrated characters like a “Riot Priest” that could hilariously interact with the characters in their game alongside other whimsical creations like the Traffic Warlock and the Necro Medic. 

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Francis’s cheats elaborated on how numerous well-known writing techniques functioned for Tactical Breach Wizards. Techniques such as dialogue trees focusing on the player’s sense of humor first, moment-to-moment text that helped comedic timing land appropriately, character-based humor that served as both jokes and context, and the notion that humor should be presented with minimal friction. Avoid investing excessive effort into a single amusing tale—or divert your player unnecessarily—to ensure they are not stalled indefinitely.

Francis illustrated one amusing tale, where two players were positioned against a wall preparing to breach a room, as one character begins making derogatory comments about someone she noticed inside. The character on the other side of the door could hear her, and a speech bubble appeared as he remarked, “Wow, Jen.”

“We gained immense value from that with very little effort,” Francis mentioned. “It doesn’t matter if it flopped, because we didn’t exert much effort to get there.”

Engaging beyond the amusing tale

While Tactical Breach Wizards may seem like a game based on an amusing tale, Francis stressed that you can’t stop there. Some games that rely solely on humor exist and perform well, but others that aim to evoke empathy and emotion must delve deeper for success with players. This led to another cheat, emphasizing that parody doesn’t excuse mimicking a genre’s shortcomings. 

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“I enjoy military action games, but their perspectives don’t resonate with mine,” Francis stated, noting that he couldn’t place his game within a different genre since it wouldn’t fit the concept of Tactical Breach Wizards. “We wanted a Tom Clancy-like universe featuring wizards, so we aimed for it to appear like a Tom Clancy universe.”

Francis believed that most military games share the notion that “killing people is cool, as long as they are outsiders,” and wanted to give players something significantly different. Tactical Breach Wizards does not center around a national military combating foreign adversaries or terrorists; instead, it features a group of criminals battling against a theocracy. It focused on uplifting narratives. 

Narrating a yarn with cheats

The method of choosing how to tell a story in a game is just as intricate, if not more intricate than any story you choose to share in a game. Games provide a multitude of tools to convey a story to the player, which is why Francis presented a third and final approach to cheats during this discussion that included the idea that humor and magic allow for incredible creative freedom and two effective ways to convey context and dialogue to players: breach conversations and conspiracy boards. 

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A unique type of mission exists throughout Tactical Breach Wizards called a nightmare dream, and it is exactly what you imagine. Each character has a dream mission where they converse with and engage in combat alongside an alternate version of themselves. It gives players profound insight into that character’s thoughts and emotions that wouldn’t be possible in any other mission within the game. There’s no reason for those players not to express those emotions elsewhere. 

“A glimpse into each character’s innermost life goes a long way,” Francis noted, admitting that the very idea of a nightmare dream seemed absurd to him. It was acceptable because magic allows developers the freedom to explore almost any ludicrous concept.

After dissecting several writing techniques that he and his team utilized to elaborate on Tactical Breach Wizards, Francis also discussed two production design approaches that streamlined the execution of that writing significantly.

The first was the primary setting for the game—breaches. Throughout the game, characters follow a consistent mission and dialogue structure: they line up right outside a door, exchange a bit of banter, and then breach the room. This takes place numerous times.