It all started with one joke. What if Call of Duty was filled with wizards? Suspicious Developments creative director Tom Francis barely even remembers where the joke originally started, but it helped him and his team build out the foundation for one of 2024's success stories: Tactical Breach Wizards.The joke was combined with a simple ideawhat if there was an XCOM alternative that was easier to parse so that casual players could jump in smoothly?to create the core design philosophy behind Tactical Breach Wizards. A game that earned 98% positive reviews on Steam and doubled the revenue of Suspicious Developments' previous game.Francis held a short talk about the variety of "cheats" he used to turn one joke into a 15 hour tactical adventure at the Game Developers Conference.Cheats for jokesThe core premise for Tactical Breach Wizards was so simple that Francis and team put their brains together and combined "tactical" and "wizardry" words to create ideas for characters. It was a processand their first "cheat"they called their joke engine, or a system that came up with jokes quickly and easily. They came up with and illustrated characters like a "Riot Priest" that would eventually become full on characters in their game alongside the likes of the Traffic Warlock and the Necro Medic.Related:Francis's cheats detailed how several well known writing methods worked for Tactical Breach Wizards. Methods like dialogue trees that put the player's sense of humor first, word-by-word text that helped timed-based jokes hit in stride, character-based comedy that doubled as both jokes and context, and the idea that jokes should be told with the lowest amount of friction possible. Don't put a ton of work into a single jokeor take your player on a detourto avoid letting them down in a big way.Francis detailed one joke, in which two players are hugging a wall as they prepare to breach a room, where one character starts trash talking someone that she noticed inside. The character on the other side of the door could hear her and a speech bubble popped up as he said, "wow, Jen."We got a ton of value out of that out of very little cost," Francis said. "It doesn't matter if it bombed, because we didn't take much effort to get there."Moving beyond the jokeWhile Tactical Breach Wizards may be a game built off a joke, Francis emphasized that you can't stop there. Some games that have nothing but jokes exist and do well, but others that want to inspire empathy and emotion have to dig deeper to work with the player. This led to another cheat, including the idea that parody doesn't give a license to repeat a genre's mistakes.Related:"I like military action games, but their views don't align with mine," Francis said, adding that he couldn't set his game within a different genre, because it wouldn't align with the premise of Tactical Breach Wizards. "We wanted a Tom Clancy-like universe with wizards, so we needed it to look like a Tom Clancy universe."Francis felt that the majority of military games shared the idea that "killing people is cool, as long as they are foreigners," and wanted to give players something vastly different. Tactical Breach Wizards doesn't revolve around a national military fighting foreign enemies or terrorists, it has a group of criminals fighting a theocracy. It focused on punching up.Telling a story with cheatsThe process of choosing how to tell a story in a game is just as complicated, if not far more complicated, then whatever story you choose to tell in a game. Games offer a massive variety of tools to deliver a story to the player, which is why Francis provided a third and final set of cheats during this talk that included the idea that comedy and magic can let you get away with nearly anything and two methods to effectively deliver context and dialogue to players: breach conversations and conspiracy boards.Related:A special type of mission exists throughout Tactical Breach Wizards called an anxiety dream, and it is exactly what you think it is. Each character has a dream mission where they talk to and fight alongside another version of themselves. It gives the player deep insight into that character's thoughts and feelings that wouldn't be possible in any other mission in the game. There would be no reason for those players to share those feelings elsewhere."A glimpse of each character's private life goes a long way," Francis said, as he admitted that the mere idea of an anxiety dream felt ludicrous to him. It was accepted because magic gives developers a license to get away with almost any ridiculous idea.After breaking down many of the writing methods that he and his team used to flesh out Tactical Breach Wizards, Francis also detailed two production design ideas that made the delivery of that writing much smoother.The first was the main setting for the game, breaches. Throughout the game characters follow the same mission and dialogue structure: they line up right outside a door, share a bit of dialogue, and then breach the room. That happens several times within a single mission, giving characters multiple opportunities to share quick and witty bits of dialogue. It's a major reason why many players found the game's jokes natural and funny.Francis ended his talk by showcasing the Tactical Breach Wizards conspiracy board, which laid out the game's plot like an evidence board with pins and string in a police station. It was a simple way for the players to recap the story, cement the ideas the story presented, and reinforce that the story was taking place in a larger world. He encouraged the developers of any game with a story to have a similar mechanic that would help visual learners keep track of what was happening while they were playing.