The Black Pepper Crew

Released: Jul 24, 2023
Platforms
Last updated: 13 Sep 2026, 08:33 GMT

Updates & announcements

14 posts

08 Jun 2026Developer post
New Playable Class: The Builder!
The second official update is here! There are many new additions, updates, and bug fixes, but the most important changes are: 1. The Builder The Builder is a character that uses Materials to perform special abilities. Currently, there are two special abilities: Punching Bot: Requ
The second official update is here! There are many new additions, updates, and bug fixes, but the most important changes are:
1. The Builder
The Builder is a character that uses Materials to perform special abilities. Currently, there are two special abilities:
Punching Bot: Requires 3 materials and spawns a friendly robot with 3 HP. The robot can fly and has a Punch ability with knockback that deals 1 damage. This robot can be spawned as many times as desired and lasts for the entire combat encounter.
Patch Up: Requires 2 materials and restores 1 armor to a damaged armor item during combat.
But how do I get Materials?
Builders have a passive ability called Dismantle. A character with Dismantle gains 1 material for each adjacent object at the start of each turn. Materials also persist throughout all combat encounters during a mission.
2. Stackable Items!
Consumable items can now be stacked! How does this work? Simply drag a consumable item on top of another item of the same type and they will stack, as long as there is room within the stack capacity.
Each item has a different stack capacity!
Stacked items can be used as many times as there are items in the stack (once per turn). Keep in mind that depleted items are discarded!
3. New Party Constraint: One Class per Party
After a lot of playtesting, I realized that the game is more fun when the party contains a variety of classes. I know that having a party of four Boxers is fun! But that fun tends to fade after a few combat encounters. By mixing things up, each mission feels fresher and more interesting.
Now that the game has 7 playable classes (with 2 more currently in development!), there are many more possibilities!
Changelog
These are the remaining changes in this update:
Bug fixes:
Removed the delay when the Move action auto-triggers. Action buttons now appear instantly.
Fixed the Bug Report screen becoming blocked after a second report.
Fixed Dragon Slash dealing 1 extra damage when buffed.
Fixed Overwatch not triggering correctly when enemies moved away from the Sharpshooter.
Fixed pill and drink animations playing incorrectly when using an item ability on a friendly unit instead of the item's owner.
Additions:
Added some missing sounds.
Added Steam Cloud support.
Added the total amount of money earned through mugging to the loot screen.
Added 3 new tracks to the house band at The Black Pepper Crew Jazz Club.
New Item: "Targeting Monocle" — Adds "Careful Aim", which negates all negative effects and damage from abilities targeting friendly units.
Updates:
Upgraded the game engine to Godot 3.6.2 to improve stability.
Buffed the Mug passive on Thief attacks and the Fancy Coat.
Changed poison abilities to affect only the movement abilities of their targets.
Rebalanced all poison abilities.
Improved the poison status effect by adding animations, particles, and UI messages.
Buffed Tornado Slash to also apply knockback, pushing targets back by 1 space.
Improved the party-building screen UI by adding comparison tooltips for units.
Improved character tooltips to display character and ability icons.
Updated the debrief screen to show the items the party is bringing back from the backpack and equipped items as well. All items are returned to the inventory. On mission start characters will not have anything equipped.
Thanks for playing, and see you in the next update!
Quiji
Original post
18 Jan 2026Developer post
First Content Update!
For the past two and a half years, I’ve been working on TBPC since its release in 2023, unable to make the first official update. Progress has been difficult because this is a one-man effort, and I have both a family and a day job, which significantly limits development time. How
For the past two and a half years, I’ve been working on TBPC since its release in 2023, unable to make the first official update. Progress has been difficult because this is a one-man effort, and I have both a family and a day job, which significantly limits development time.
However, I’m committed to finishing this game, and I’ll do my best to provide updates more frequently. There’s still a long road ahead, but I’m excited about the new content I’ll be adding to the game.
Sorry for the long delay, and thank you for your patience. Please enjoy the new content!
Changelog
Bug fixes:
The game crashed sometimes in the city generation. This was fixed and the system that generated the city components was improved!
Vera's combo prompt used to stay open if then "End Turn" button was pressed while inputing combo options. This could crash the game if "Cancel" is pressed but is now fixed.
Bug and Feedbag reporting was broken. Moved the ticket system to another app and is now back online.
Additions:
The Sharpshooter: A new class to play with! Use abilities like Snipe, and take reaction shots on the enemy's turn!
New High Profile Mission: Nando's Construction site.
New Low Profile Mission: Arcade.
New enemy pack: 4 new enemies!
New Items (16): Battery, Smoke Bomb, Ragged Coat, Raincoat, Fancy Coat, Poison Grenade, Poison Dart, Toxic Shuriken, Coffee, Plot Armor, Climbing Boots, Banana Peel, Goo Bomb, Scrappy Wallet, The Big Bang and Scary Drug.
New Music tracks: All easy and medium missions will have their own area specific tracks plus boss theme arrangements to avoid repetition. The Park, Warehouse and Arcade missions will play new tracks to play along to!
Added variations to all rooms on all the missions.
Steady feet perk: Unaffected by knockback, pull, swap, double swap and recoil. Objects that were previously unaffected (like trees, columns, etc..) can be hit, allowing for more strategic options.
Added the park city location to the mission selection screen.
There is a new mode to automatically open the movement action when selecting a unit. It can be activated/deactivated on the settings menu!
When placing characters on the board, the character's move range will be displayed to help make better positioning desicions.
Updates:
Item tooltip shows the ability icon when showing a consumable item's info.
Improved the "ghost" feature that attempts to improve readiblity on the board by changing the opacity of objects. Know each object has a "sliced" version that will appear to improve readibility.
Upgraded the game engine to Godot 3.6.1 to improve the game's stability.
Improved and added more alerts. Buffs, debuffs, armor broken and other in-game statuses will show a new alert while in combat.
Changed the way traps work. Now traps have a bigger range and will only trigger on enemies. They will also trigger if the enemy passes over or steps on them, interrupting the performing ability.
Improved UI for abilities that require a confirmation prompt. Abilities that target all spaces in a range and combo abilities will display important information!
Added more icons for perks and abilities on different UI and tooltips.
Improved mission week roll system to avoid generating the same location for the generated missions.
The visual effects on the city were changed to improve performance.
Improved the Ronin class by adding/improving animations, visual effects, sound effects and improving her abilities.
Added several pending sound effects.
Added civilian and hazard intel to the mission confirmation screen. This way you will know there might be non enemy characters and/or hazardous obstacles in the mission!
Improved the class selection logic for hirable characters to avoid too much repetition of the same class.
Changed all of the thief abilities to have the new mug mechanic.
Refactored the challenge system. This change will allow to configure the challenges for the missions more accurately.
Included objects on the Character UI. Static objects will show what stats they have as they will be more important in combat.
See you in the next update!
Quiji
Original post
01 Aug 2023Developer post
Hotfix 0.17.3.9 - August 1st, 2023
> Bug fixes: - Vera's combo chain abilities showed wrong damage on attack foresight when she was buffed. - Fixed game crash when entering the reward screen.
31 Jul 2023GamingOnLinux
The Black Pepper Crew is a promising looking tactical turn-based roguelite
Another tactical turn-based roguelite that looks promising for you is The Black Pepper Crew, now available in Early Access on Steam with Native Linux support. Read the full article here:
29 Jul 2023Developer post
Hotfix Patch v0.17.3.8 - July 29th, 2023
> Bug fixes: - Dragging an item and dropping back in its original location crashed the game. - Swapping items allowed to equip gadgets that are not equipable to certain characters. - Fixed several typos.
27 Jul 2023Developer post
Hotfix Patch v0.17.3.7 - July 27, 2023
> Bug fixes: - Consumable and armor items that were spent/utilized remained on the character's equipment. - Empty tooltips used to appear on mission selection. - Fixed several typos. - Completed missions were not appearing on the bounties list. Noew they will appear with a che
24 Jul 2023Developer post
The Hunt is on! The Black Pepper Crew is live on Early Access!
The Black Pepper Crew is finally released on Early Access!!! Take dangerous jobs on this turn based tactics roguelite. Build your party from a cast of colorful characters and take down high profile crime bosses around the city! TBPC EA contains 3 high profile missions, 30 items a
21 Jul 2023Developer post
The Black Pepper Crew Available on EA July 24th!
The time has come to prepare your gadgets and start the hunt! The Black Pepper Crew will be released on Early Access July 24th! Check out the release trailer: On the basement of The Black Pepper Jazz Club, a group of bounty hunters meet to plan their next job. Capturing criminals
19 Jun 2023Developer post
Dev Stream #2
The Black Pepper Crew Dev stream. Feel free to ask any questions on chat!
19 Jun 2023Developer post
Dev Stream #1
The Black Pepper Crew Dev stream. Feel free to ask any questions on chat!
01 Mar 2023Developer post
Demo version 0.17.0.0 is packed!
After watching several streamers play the game, lots of bugs and issues were found! This update aims to solve several of those issues. Besides bug fixes, the game has several quality of life improvements and features! What's New? A screen stretch mode setting was added to the set
After watching several streamers play the game, lots of bugs and issues were found! This update aims to solve several of those issues. Besides bug fixes, the game has several quality of life improvements and features!
What's New?

A screen stretch mode setting was added to the settings menu. Two modes are supported: Fit screen will stretch the game viewport to fit the current window size (no black bars) and keep resolution will only stretch when the resolution is maintained ensuring a pixel perfect resolution and filling the empty space with black bars.
New icons were added to the health bar and character card on the battle UI to identify the characters as allies, enemies or NPCs.
Added a custom in-game cursor.
A turn bar was added at the top of the screen. This bar shows the turn order and who is performing its turn. It also shows the enemy turn order if moused over the enemy turn icon.
Brazilian Portuguese language support.
Added a new settings option to activate/deactivate the dialogue voices.
Characters can be renamed on the Character Screen on the Crew's HQ!!
Updates

Setting changes are saved after leaving the settings screen. This prevents loosing the custom settings if the game crashes.
Combo chain attack ranges will not show spaces of targets that cannot be attacked. Ex: Targets where Vera cannot move behind. Also a new tutorial video and text that explains this situation was added to Vera's Slash tutorial.
In order to avoid friendly debuffing or enemy buffing mistakes, debuff/buff abilities won't allow the selection of unwanted targets. Attacks do allow friendly fire as is part of the challenge of using certain attacks, and it does provide certain strategic possibilities like using ally units to connect a combo chain.
Changed the settings menu to a tabbed menu to fit more settings.
Improved tooltip appear animation to be less intrusive.
Healing rewards changes its reward if the party has no one to heal (all at full health or KOed). Instead of instant healing, it prompts to choose from 2 rare healing items.
Changed the end turn and ready buttons for animated icons.
Dancing monkey's turn at the start foiled the player's plan, so the turn was moved to the end of the turn queue.
The character status bar at the top left corner shows the current state of the character's abilities, as well as the armor health besides the character's health.
Improved the look of the unit's UI elements to make it easier to identify enemies from allies. When selecting and enemy, the attack icon will appear on a different spot and a red background will appear behind the bottom UI elements. For allies the background is blue and for NPC's is green.
Updated some of the abilities stat icons to explain the abilities better. Abilities like Side Swap were often confused with Swap so they required their custom ability iconography.
Included the Retreat button on the equipment screen between rooms.
Changed Flavio's music track to start after placing the units instead that on the first attack.
The crew placement UI was improved allowing the user to select which character to place, as well as allowing right-click to remove placed characters. Also, when placing characters, the character description tooltip will appear to help the player understand which character is which (in the case the party has characters of the same class and palette colors). Enemies can be selected in this phase to, allowing to inspect their abilities and ranges.
Changed the on hover ability ranges animations to something less obtrusive to the eye.
Bug fixes

Menu buttons got stuck on mouse over state when the mouse was not there.
Holding click when closing a NPC talk bubble retriggered the NPC's dialogue.
Several tooltip related fixes:

Unnecessary tooltips popping over the item tooltip.
Tooltips not closing when parent object has been clicked.
Character for hire tooltips broke when moving to quickly between characters.
Tooltips appearing offscreen.
Tooltips having sizes bigger than content.
Fixed several language typos.
Healing reward soft locked when the last party member was knocked out and the player chose to heal all the party for one HP.
The bounty amount on the equip screen was wrong as it used deprecated code to get the bounty prize.
Pressing the end turn button before the character's action animation is completed crashed the game.
Reward screen used colors (red for failure and green for success) that did not worked with the paper background. Reorganized the layout of the screen.
There were some missing spanish translations.
The character status bar showed Bit as a character with remaining abilities when he had no energy to perform one and the others were performed already.
When buying items too quickly, they could overlap and eventually crash the game.
The shop items respawned when entering the HQ, allowing to "farm" items.
Items dropped on the loot panel disappeared.
Side Swap ability allowed to move characters/objects into an nonexistant space
Character HP/Energy/Armor did not update on bottom left corner UI when the character action dealt damage to itself.
Some UI buttons had SFX that were positional and made no sense on UI screens, making the sounds play on one speaker only.
Several other improvements are now being worked on and will be included in a new demo version which will include new content!
Original post
02 Jan 2023Developer post
Small Demo update!
This is a quick update that adds important quality of life features to the game. One of the most requested features its an undo button. Although this game is built upon the idea of "living with your mistakes", an undo button that helps avoid undesired miss-clicks or other misunde
This is a quick update that adds important quality of life features to the game.
One of the most requested features its an undo button. Although this game is built upon the idea of "living with your mistakes", an undo button that helps avoid undesired miss-clicks or other misunderstandings of the game state definitively improve the experience as it helps the player focus on what matters which is the actual strategy.
What's New?

Addition: A new UNDO feature has been added! The last move action can be undo-ed by pressing the undo button that appears on the top left of the screen. This button is available only for movement actions and will be gone if another action is performed afterwards.
Addition: Added quick keys to select party members and abilities more easily and reduce mouse clicks. Pressing TAB on combat will show/hide the prompts for each quick key.
Changes and Bug fixes

Update: Included the attack range rotated icon to the character's card and on the over head life bar to help the player understand when the attack ranged is rotated. An explanation on the perk and why is there was added in the form of a tooltip when hovering with the mouse over the icon on the character's card.
Update: Changed loot drops to be automatically grabbed at the end of combat. Also enemies won't drop loot if they are the last one standing. Re-balanced loot drops.
This was going to be the demo in preparation for the following Steam Next Fest, however we decided to push the participation of the game to the following Steam Next Fest in the middle of the year. This decision was taken to have an overall improved and polished experience, as well as some important features: Story arcs, death letters as well as more playable classes and enemy types, a new bounty mission with its unique boss, etc..
Expect more updates on the demo experience!
Original post
19 Dec 2022Developer post
Small Demo hotfix!
This is a hot-fix for a game breaking bug that contains some extra UI updates. There was a bug that crashed the game very time an object (like tables or statues) were possible targets of certain abilities. It has been fixed and now includes some extra features like more textual d
This is a hot-fix for a game breaking bug that contains some extra UI updates.
There was a bug that crashed the game very time an object (like tables or statues) were possible targets of certain abilities. It has been fixed and now includes some extra features like more textual descriptions and useful tooltips for the abilities and status effects.
What's New?

Addition: Goo Can item, which reduces an enemies movement range by 2 for 2 turns.
Addition: This Changelog archive! Now every new version of the game will have a changelog report on this menu.
Changes and Bug fixes

Bug fix: Fixed music transitions and polished music on Leo's Mission.
Bug fix: Changed the ability popup to better accommodate for textual descriptions.
Bug fix: Restored missing ability descriptions for item abilities.
Update: Improved Tongue Punch animations.
Update: Added a description icon for the ability UI that doesn't have a visual textual explanation of the ability. Mousing over the icon triggers a popup with the textual explanation.
Update: Missing throw animations for Frank, Bit and Vera.
Update: Included new status icons over character's life bar, and under the character's card. Status icons on character's card have detailed descriptions tool tips of duration of buff/de-buffs, status ailments and taunted targets.
Update: Moved stun brake animation to the end of the turn for clarity sake. This way the player will know that in the next enemy turn, the previously stunned enemy will move.
The next update will have more additions in preparations for Steam Next Fest!
Original post
09 Dec 2022Developer post
New Demo update!
Changelog demo version 0.16.0.0 Quick abilities ranges are shown on character mouse over and abilities buttons mouse over. Removed annoying floating ability tooltip on combat screen in favor of the bottom right ability UI. Removed buggy enemy area range on board in favor of the n
Changelog demo version 0.16.0.0

Quick abilities ranges are shown on character mouse over and abilities buttons mouse over.
Removed annoying floating ability tooltip on combat screen in favor of the bottom right ability UI. Removed buggy enemy area range on board in favor of the new quick range UX that appears on mouse over.
Added Crowd Control icon to Stomp Attack's ability card. Now enemy attack cards appear by default when selecting an enemy.
Added rooms variations to Flavio's mission. Added more background elements and added static trees for certain levels.
Added foreground car animations for street rooms.
Added room variations to Leo's mission. Added background elements, static semaphores and new bathroom and side entrance rooms.
Added Enemy Turn Speed menu option to have faster enemy turns.
Added New enemy class: Lackey
Created new enemy of class Lackey: Stu the long range bat.
Added the enemy roster of each mission on the mission selection and mission confirmation screens.
Added new special abilities: Side swap, Ninja Jump, Energizing Shot and Taunt
Added new attack abilities: Tongue Punch, Cannon Blast, Spear Blast, Heavy Kick and Bounce Slash.
Added new items: Plate Armor, Slick Armor, Retro Hoodie, Spear Head, Gas Compressor. All items were re-balanced.
Added Recoil: Attacking character is pushed as many cells as damage dealt. If any of this cells is occupied, the character and occupant receive 1 damage.
Added Pierce: Ranged only. The object or character behind the target receives 1 damage.
Added description tooltips for the abilities when placing the mouse over the ability name.
Original post

Updates & announcements

1. The Builder

2. Stackable Items!

3. New Party Constraint: One Class per Party

Changelog

Changelog

Bug fixes:

Additions:

Updates: