LET'S TALK ABOUT RELEASE DATES
How We're Pacing The Release | Development Details | Hardware Survey
Back
in July 2022
we wrote that we wanted to put some form of Brigador Killers out in 2023. We have recently decided that the game will come out first as a build on Itch.io in the coming months. Assuming that period on Itch goes well, BK will then come to Early Access on Steam in 2024, and then eventually 1.0 with post-release support.
The Itch page is up though there are no builds of the game to get your hands on just yet.
You can take a look at it here
. Price is still TBD.
WHY WE’RE DOING THIS
We’ll limit the list of reasons to four broad points. First, expectations. As indie developers go, we’re old and remember what Early Access on Steam
used
to be like and what the public accepted as early access. If we were to repeat with BK on this storefront now what we did with Brigador back in 2015, we’re confident a lot of people on here would be disappointed because the game simply won’t be at the expected quality level of an “early access game” in 2023.
Second, risk. When a game is released on Steam, the platform puts your game in front of a
lot
of customers every second – but only for a limited time. Also, Steam is still the most widely used platform for PC gaming. We want to make sure we can make the biggest splash possible.
Third, scale. When BK is released to the public, dull yet highly important things like bug reports will shoot up. We already know that keeping Brigador functional on current operating systems like Windows 10 has been bumpy, and with Windows 11 we expect more of the same for both Brigador and BK. By exposing BK to a smaller pool of players first, the hope is that we can prevent ourselves from being overwhelmed by the number of people with technical issues, as well as the occasional player that is
somehow able to run our game on a government-issue laptop from the early 2000s running Windows 8.1
.
Fourth, burnout. We appreciate the hype from a lot of you for BK but please also understand that we don’t want to destroy ourselves in the process of making it. Brigador already went through that process in 2016 with its initial release, and it’s not an exaggeration that it took years to undo the damage that it caused.
Brigador Killers is not only meant to be a sequel to Brigador but also internally is the end result of a lot of lessons learned – and what we learned with the first game was we enjoyed the community feedback, which Itch will help us with.
We realize Itch isn’t going to be for everyone, and that’s okay. It’ll still come to Steam and GOG regardless.
ANSWERING THE QUESTION OF “IF I BUY IT ON ITCH FIRST, WILL YOU GIVE ME A STEAM KEY FOR IT LATER?”
Yes.
Itch even has that functionality built in
. When the game is ready for Steam, Itch owners will get their Steam key.
WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING WITH BK
On the programming end of things,
lua scripting
has been added into the engine. This is going to significantly increase what we’ll be able to do with the overall gameplay of BK. If you’re familiar with Brigador, everything about the in-level maps in that game is decided the moment a level loads. That means a level will always have the same layout of buildings, the same spawns in set locations, the same music, and so on. We now have the ability to change a lot of that, though we’ll save an explainer post on this topic for later.
Design wise, with the new systems like morale and infantry movement, the amount of game data that needs to be audited is substantial. To give you an idea, here’s a glimpse at the current list of values that can be configured
just for the morale system
, and that these are things that can be set
per
AI-controlled unit.
Because there’s so much data to deal with, things like the armor & pierce system
mentioned in the August 2022 post
are going to be pared down from eight tiers. As much fun as it is to have a broad range of numbers to play with, BK is ultimately
not
going to be a hyper-detailed MilSim like the Arma series.
In terms of visuals,
our lead artist Jack recently put up a twitter thread
explaining how to signal to the player which wheeled vehicles are going to be drivable and which ones are not. Consider these two as an example:
Which one do you think you can drive as the player? If you chose the one on the left but not the right, congratulations – but pause for a moment and consider why. The obvious go-to is that the roof has been taken off, but also note that where the driver would usually sit is now occupied by an optical array, meaning there’s no space for a human to sit. The intention is that this wordlessly tells the player that, although this is identifiable as a vehicle, it is not intended for you. In addition, it serves as a tease for the loreheads out there to speculate as to the function of the vehicle on the right and what implications that has for the Brigador universe.
We are surveying our userbase to see what kinds of computer hardware and software they are using to play Brigador with. Participation in the survey is anonymous. The information gathered isn’t very exciting but it will be
incredibly
helpful to us as it will tell us what benchmark to aim for with BK.
Click here to take the survey
and get your response in
before March 31st 2023
.
BRIGADOR KILLERS IS A BLOODY MESS
Aiming Rework | Infantry Animations | Gibs & Squibs
One of the major advances that we made the past month was changing how the aiming works in the game’s engine for Brigador Killers along with some new animations. We’ve recorded some footage of the new aiming system in action and put together this post as an explainer for what you’re about to watch. A reminder as always: what you see below is not indicative of the final product, and there’s plenty still left to do… but it’s starting to get
much
closer to the game we want to make.
Combat Glide (0:00)
We briefly talked
about an earlier version of this system in November's post
. By holding down right mouse button, which is the current bind for “Ready Weapon” and moving with WASD we can see the player-controlled Dave do a Combat Glide. The yellow dot at Dave’s feet indicates his current orientation, while the green dot is where the mouse cursor is in screen space that the player has line of sight to. While Dave can spin around in a circle while stood up, crouched down his “upper” can only rotate so far in either direction until he reaches a maximum turning radius.
Dave moves over to a white panel van to then demonstrate what happens if something gets in the way of the player’s free aiming. As the aim sweeps across the van, the green point changes position and a second red dot appears. This red dot is to indicate where the mouse cursor is, but that the player does not have direct LOS to that point and is instead getting “caught” on the van’s hitbox.
The player then shoots the white van with a gun that’s slightly overtuned.
Lock Target (0:56)
When not aiming like in Combat Glide, the purple dot on screen is currently an indicator of where the player’s cursor is. Lock Target is a new form of aim that automatically locks on to the hitbox of an NPC that is closest to the player’s cursor when the player presses whatever Lock Target is bound to. In this case it’s bound to the side button of a mouse.
Once locked on, the player can freely move around the targeted NPC and maintain aim until the NPC is either destroyed in some manner or the player decides to aim at something else. The player practices on some dummy NPC units that also shoot out some new blood squibs when shot. The NPCs don’t fall to the ground like the enemy Daves will later because animations have not yet been set up for them. The player-controlled Dave, who is currently invisible to enemy NPCs, shows off the tracking of this new form of aiming by locking on to a few wandering Daves and following them around before unloading a shotgun a few times.
The ability to lock the aim is an important addition to the Brigador aim scheme for a couple of reasons: for some Brigador players, the combination of manual aiming with maneuvering and tactical awareness required too high a cognitive load. Being able to slow the game down alleviated that, but could still be frustrating as a single-stop solution. Lock Target provides another option for players while making both controller play far more viable and adding a major accessibility option for impaired players. Returning Brigador players may choose to eschew aim locking entirely, and that's fine. The idea isn't to require a certain style of play, but rather to open the door to as wide an array of playstyles as possible.
Level Aim (2:52)
Some context is required before explaining the footage of this section: one of the biggest things that we wanted to have with infantry-scale combat was the ability to crouch behind walls and shoot over them, but there were problems with doing this. The main one was due to the legacy of Brigador’s own method of aiming, in that the player’s arc of fire usually shot downwards into the ground from the position of a vehicle’s weapon mount point. That meant that crouching a unit also lowered the position of a vehicle’s weapon and thus the height at which the fire would emanate. This meant that weapon fire could easily “catch” on the top of environmental props, but it wasn’t really a problem in Brigador because of the general scale of things and most props being easy to destroy. However, in BK the props are sturdier and we’re trying to do infantry-scale combat.
That’s why this footage starts with the player Dave crouching by a barrier and appearing to shoot at the red sports car, but doing no damage to it even though the green aim dot is clearly over the car. When Dave stands up to take a shot, the shots connect because the rifle bursts are no longer “catching” on the top of the barrier and can connect with the vehicle.
At the 3:24 mark, the area is refreshed and the player crouches down to shoot at the same car... except now the shots connect. The sharp eyed will notice the aim lines have changed ever so slightly – this is what happens when the Level Aim button is held down, and in this footage is bound to a second side button on the mouse. When used in conjunction with Ready Weapon with right mouse button, it allows the player to shoot at a flat angle, parallel to the ground. So even while crouched, the player can shoot over and make their hits land.
Player Dave also returns to the group of standing NPCs we saw earlier to show off Level Aim while crouched, and shoots at a couple of wandering Daves from behind a barrier.
Flop, Drop & Prone (4:45)
In addition to new aiming, several new behaviors have been added to make enemy infantry more “alive” and animations to go with them. The first is “Prone”, which is when an NPC Dave drops to a chest-down position in response to a frag grenade being thrown nearby. The main effect of this prone behavior is to give the enemy infantry a defense bonus as well as the player a sense of agency. After taking enough damage, one of the Daves flees, before being dealt enough damage to enter a “bleed out” state that eventually kills the NPC after a specific amount of time.
Player Dave then proceeds to show off other Daves flopping over on their back or dropping to their front due to small arms fire. It’s something that needs to be fine tuned, but what we want to do with this system is similar to the
pain state of monsters in Doom
, wherein the player is able to briefly stun mobs of enemies by doing enough damage.
Death Animations & Gibs (6:29)
We also decided the past month that the Daves needed to better demonstrate when they’re incapacitated. In addition to blood squibs from being shot at, enemy Daves now fall over dead in various positions. Also, corpses can be gibbed by the player with explosives like grenades and generally make a mess of things.
The graphic content of BK is something we are able to configure. For instance, corpses can be made to immediately fadeout on death. So, if screens full of blood and limbs is a bit much then you’ll be able to turn such things off.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider
wishlisting and following Brigador Killers
on Steam to get the latest news in your Steam library feed.
A LOOK AT SOME OF THE NEW LEVEL-MAKING FEATURES FOR BRIGADOR KILLERS
This one goes out to #maps-and-modding
For May’s update on Brigador Killers we’ve decided to talk about something many of Brigador’s modders will be familiar with: the debug panel.
For those not familiar, if you press F1 at any time in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition an overlay window appears that looks something like this.
In BK, the debug panel has had some work done to it…
…so we’re going to highlight three of its new features.
[For those wondering, yes, this is
Dear ImGui
by Omar “ocornut” Cornut, which is used by
a lot of other game developers
in their games though it’s typically not made accessible in the public versions of those games.]
Our usual caveat as ever: what you see is still a work in progress and not everything in this article’s screenshots are necessarily representative of the final product. If you're having trouble viewing the screenshots, try right clicking the image and opening it in a new tab (
click here to view this post in your browser
).
Tile contents tooltip
Let’s say for instance we’ve laid out a level and need to edit the features of a particular structure (or “prop”) like this fenced-off enclosure in a Brigador Killers test map.
If this were our previous game and we didn’t know what the prop’s .json file was, we would typically refer to the version of the same level in
Tiled
, which is the editor we use to make levels in both Brigador and Brigador Killers. Over there we click the prop and it’ll show us its file path…
…And from there it’s just a matter of alt-tabbing back into the game to look up the same file path in the pack file tab, and then inspecting it via the data editor tab and we can set about configuring the prop to our needs.
Simple enough, but it can be a bit clunky, particularly if you have to work with multiple rotations of the same prop in order to, say, make sure the strength of a structure is unified across all variants of that asset. This could get a bit complicated when it came to what we call “prop stacking”, which is placing
two
props in the same tile but using different layers in the editor.
[Sidenote: this hasn’t historically been a huge problem for us, though it is one of those time wasters in game development that might seem tiny, but adds up as more and more assets get added to the game.]
The
Tile contents tooltip
provides a solution. By enabling it, a small tooltip window will appear whenever our mouse cursor moves over any prop in a level.
This window tells us what props are occupying that tile, what the prop path is
and
allows us to immediately look up the asset in the data editor by hitting End on our keyboard, which cuts out all that of alt-tabbing and manual typing mentioned above.
In addition, if we in fact have stacked two props on the same tile, the tooltip will still tell us! Let’s direct our tooltip’s attention to this set of light poles inside a topiary…
Mousing over with our tooltip and using the arrow keys will let us toggle between the props on that tile, showing us the details for both the topiary
and
the light pole.
From a development standpoint, this will save a huge amount of time because of the increased volume of props that we’re making for BK. Keen-eyed modders might also have noticed the green text that appears in the top right of the screenshot, which informs the user whether the moused-over tile is walkable or not.
Patrol routes
In the Mech debug tab, two new radio buttons have been added:
In order to make use of it we select a mech (“mech” here means any NPC that has some kind of active AI state unlike a vehicle like a panel van), indicated by the green triangle underneath the placeholder Dave-with-a-cophead. If units are currently moving about we can pause the action with devmode enabled. With time frozen we can click the desired patrol origin and end point for the chosen mech
- Select patrol origin
- Select patrol endpoint
within
the game.
Inside the game we are limited to just a start and end point.
Outside
of the game we can set more complicated patrol routes via Tiled. If we click
Force patrol AI state
and unpause the game, our newly assigned mech will dutifully bounce between both points in the level, visualized here by the orange debug lines.
Unfortunately we can’t force this new patrol information permanently within the game. It has to be done outside of the game in Tiled, where we have to manually specify the patrol behavior for a placed unit. However, having the patrol feature immediately testable within the game let’s us:
As you might expect, this is going to allow us to create more interesting combat encounters, particularly in light of the third feature.
- See whether the mech can patrol to and from that point or not
- Get the coordinates for those two points that we can take over to the Tiled version
Civilian socializing
This one’s complicated, and this screenshot is probably not going to help either, but bear with us.
What you’re looking at is the debug draw of the
social paths
. Put simply, civilians have new
socialize
AI states. In the case of the above, the green hemispheres indicate areas of “socializing”, while the white lines indicate civilians searching for such areas and the path they’re taking to get to one.
When a mech enters the social state, it will randomly pick another mech, internally called its "friend". The friend's current position will be chosen as a meeting point (or green hemisphere) and it too will enter the socialization state. Futher mechs that enter a socialization state and choose either of the currently "socializing" mechs as a "friend" will converge to that meeting point. After an amount of time passes, these civilians will search for another place to socialize. In the process of writing out this post, we had left the level running a bit too long in the background and 99% of the test level civilians ended up all grouped together.
Civilians dynamically moving around in such a manner goes a long way to making levels seem more alive
but it’s not the only thing
. Not featured here is the ability to make props that are “socially interesting” and
not just to civilians
. Other on-foot NPCs like cops are also capable of the social AI state.
What does this potentially mean from a gameplay design standpoint? One possibility is it means we can place entities in levels that will draw the attention of NPCs and cause them to gather in particular spots. Maybe it’s a fast food restaurant, maybe it’s a police checkpoint, or maybe it’s something the player can use to create a diversion within a level…
Whatever form it ends up taking, we know we’re excited to see what our community of established modders gets up to with these features alone.
Did you know that
Stellar Jockeys has a merchandise store
? If you’d like to help fund our development, consider purchasing a pin, t-shirt or even an
SNC Skull & Laurel Zippo™ lighter
.
REIMAGINING THE SPACERS
What increasing the sprite resolution means for Brigador Killers
A while ago
we revealed that one of the big visual differences between Brigador Killers and the previous game is the increased output resolution of sprites. This increase in fidelity means you the player will get a closer look at exported models in-game. If you'd like a longer read on the topic of how these models become sprites then
consider reading this other article from Brigador's news hub
.
Getting a closer look means we get to focus on the infantry scale of things. In that spirit, we're going to run you through how an all-new spacer suit for Brigador Killers goes from concept to final sprite render.
The first step is what's called the
mood board
. This is the conceptual framework where the artist references the mood, texture and detailing that we want to evoke with the spacer power suit.
Step two is the adapt or "
kitbash
" stage. Seeing as we've already developed a powersuit for Clade Vocc (not pictured), in 3DSMax, we extrapolate a suit design to help suggest how mainline spacers are still related, though considerably drifted away from in both culture and military doctrine.
The third step is the paintover in photoshop. With a basic suit layout in hand, we think about how we are going to change and treat the design. Returning briefly to the mood board's astronaut references, we decide on a cloth-covered suit. At this stage the helmet is unsatisfactory, but that will get revised later.
Once we have arrived at a satisfactory model of the suit, the finished design is then broken down into components for
baking
down and then texturing in Substance Painter. The final sprite render shown in the bottom right corner of the above image is done in Blender. Here is the finished suit as a render (
click here to open a full size version in your browser
).
As a bonus, a scene was composed using the model of this new spacer powersuit, which was used as the header image for this article. You can get a
wallpaper sized version by clicking here
, with deference to American digital painter Craig Mullins
for this piece
.
This post was based on one of our monthly newsletters that was sent out back in March 2022.
Click here if you’d like to check out our newsletter archive
.
Designing a SWAT Vehicle From The Wheels Up
Or, How An Inside-Out Approach Helps In Art Production
Courtesy of our lead artist, August's post is a look into the design of an armored vehicle belonging to NOSPOL, which is one of the enemy factions you'll be facing off against in Brigador Killers. Without further ado...
Brigador Killers deals in part with the question of militarized police and police violence. How to approach this in the design and presentation of the world of Mar Nosso and its inhabitants? It is not enough to present to the player an MRAP [Editor's note:
M
ine-
R
esistant
A
mbush
P
rotected vehicle] with police badging. While obscene, absurd, it is also perfectly ordinary to Americans. We are inured to it.
So, the initial point of departure for the SWAT vehicle was to go back to the source: the Los Angeles Police Department and their SWAT Team. This department’s escalation of weapons, tactics, and equipment would I believe set the template for militarized police presence in America for years to come.
Which brought me to the
Cadillac Gauge V100/Commando
:
While iconic and fitting for the technical restrictions of our engine (wheeled vehicles can only have four wheels), we run into a similar problem as the MRAP: too many associations, many of them positive. The player can’t “see it with new eyes,” which to us is one of the crucial aspects of good science fiction.
So we’ll shift to an older, and much more loaded point of departure: German wartime armored cars.
British soldiers inspecting a captured Sd.Kfz. 222, North Africa, 1941
(Wikipedia)
While the associations vary, the baggage is unquestionable. WW2 German hardware should be unambiguous enough of a reference. Not so simple! German wartime hardware is the background radiation of popular cultural designs in film and videogames for decades, everything from
Star Wars
to
Killzone
. These design elements are powerful, but so much so they can easily overwhelm your own design intention and muddy your intended comment.
Another particular difficulty with referencing German wartime designs is that one can end up on footing to that of say,
Jin Roh
– where the loving depiction of German wartime arms and armor could be read as uncritical devotion. This is not what we mean to suggest with NOSPOL, the corrupt and gang-ridden police force you face in Brigador Killers.
Early on, I switched from the Cadillac Gauge basis to this idea of roughly approximating the Sd.Kfz 222. I wanted to echo the angular hull shapes, but the overall design shouldn’t map too closely to any original wartime design. Rather, I wanted to design my own vehicle to invoke, rather than recreate a wartime vehicle explicitly that might distract or muddy the player’s read for the vehicle.
Again, let’s have the player see it “with fresh eyes”. There are myriad other pitfalls with fascist police force design. Travel too far in a given direction and you retread others’ work, like
Viktor Antonov’s brilliant Combine APC design
for example was something I wanted to avoid.
The best way to do this was to design the vehicle in a way that made sense to how NOSPOL might commission the vehicle in the setting: a retrofit from an existing truck chassis.
I had this Russian tanker truck model on hand.
Perfect!
“
But it’s Russian, not German, how is that helping your association?
” Good question. Just as with the Loyalist military gear was largely but not
exclusively
Russian in origin, we don’t want any one single source. When the viewer sees a design that is by turns subtly heterogenous in character it’s my theory that it aids in, to introduce a metaphor, slower digestion.
An obvious design is like a piece of candy–it can be very sweet, but it’s gone and eaten quickly without a second thought and without a lasting impression. We want this design to be somewhat… chewier. More complex flavor notes. We want the taster to think about what flavors strike the palate.
So we begin from a Russian truck chassis to execute a German influenced armored hull design to talk about American militarized police.
Simple enough
, right?
Let’s chop off the back wheels and introduce a magenta box to remind us of the package space required by the engine. Whatever else goes on in the design, we’re going to need ample clearance to house the engine.
While we’re at it, I quite like those big, high clearance front fenders. Let’s turn them around and put them over the rear wheels.
Now we’re getting somewhere. We haven’t really had to design anything yet, actually–but by using a real world truck, notice how confident and realistic the scale read is. Provided we keep it consistent with our chassis here, the scale read will be more or less an automatic bonus, and will keep our work from getting too outlandish.
[Side note: one such problem that science fiction designs from scratch will run into is that when designing a ground car the designer fails to take into account the legal width limits for road legal vehicles. While military machines can be bigger, they are also still expected to travel on the confines of established road infrastructure. Get those dimensions dialed in first and you’ll get a lot “for free”.]
All we need to do now is start fitting an angular hull on top of this chassis, while still keeping in mind our other core requirements. How many people can it hold? Where does the driver sit? Does the armored car actually have a front and back driver, as some armored cars did? What engine limitations for a sprite-based and isometric game do we need to cater to?
In the interest of time we’re not going to walk through the rest of the design in detail, but with the major hull shape established, much of the rest would be about adding the hull detailing consistent with armored vehicles, stowage, searchlights, etc. Once we’ve got our goal in mind for this design there’s not a lot of quibbling over different shapes and thumbnailing different looks–one of the great pleasures of independent game development is that we can dispense with a lot of tiresome Art Director behavior most of the time.
Here’s the finished render of the armored car, in two flavors. First we see it as it will first appear to the player:
Beyond the police colors, something that always distinguishes overenthusiastic purchase of surplus military equipment by police departments in America and the former military service these vehicles saw is plainly their role. In the military, an armored vehicle is maintained but often subject to a lot of wear and tear. Once an MRAP is back home in America, emblazoned in SWAT livery, it seldom has to “work”. Its purpose is intimidation and peacocking for the department by and large. This is the initial guise I wanted to see the SWAT armored car deploy in BK as. A little “underdressed” compared to its military companions, seen elsewhere in the game.
Then, as the game progresses, and the player’s fight against the Concerns and their attendant police and mercenary forces intensify, updates and changes are made. Even a SWAT vehicle is forced to “work” under something more akin to active combat conditions. It needs to keep ammunition and fuel and spare tires with it.
It might even need to get semi-improvised slat armor for the wheels, a repeated weak point for ambush attacks from the player character (or other parties?). We highlight for the player that the slat armor is definitely newer by giving it fresh, dark paint compared to the more sunfaded exterior of the main hull.
Hopefully you’ll agree that at least some of the above is more than bluster and the design principles as established are borne out in the final design, and that the up-armored variant makes it clear to the player that the fight is
escalating
. See you, killer.
LET'S LEARN ABOUT STORYLETS
A Look At The Narrative Systems For Brigador Killers
We’ve mentioned that one of the criticisms the original Brigador frequently received is along the lines of “Cool mechs,
but what else is there to do
?” If you haven’t been following
our development updates since they began
, part of what we’re doing as a response to this is adding elements of progression like acquiring unlocks within a map, rather than the previous system of spending money in a menu outside of the action. What we haven’t talked about yet is how Brigador Killers is presenting the narrative - and yes, modders will have access to these tools.
(By the way, whoever is responsible for looking after the
TVTropes page for Brigador
- your efforts have not gone unnoticed and we appreciate those of you who spent the time piecing together that game’s story.)
Brigador Killers will have narrative systems, including dialogue. They are heavily inspired by
Emily Short’s article “Storylets, You Want Them”
and Elan Ruskin’s article “Dialog” in Procedural Storytelling in Game Design (eds. Tanya X. Short, Tarn Adams), which describes the contextual dialogue systems in Left 4 Dead. The overarching system is made up of four overlapping narrative systems: storylets, predicates, the gvar (or "global variable") editor and a library of Lua functions. Note well: what we’re showing off is
a work in progress
, and both the systems and UI elements will change, particularly the debug panel.
WHY THESE SYSTEMS?
As Emily Short describes in her blog, there are three attributes that make up a storylet:
Why do this, and not just a “normal” dialogue system? For one thing, we didn’t
- A piece of content
- A set of conditions that determine when the storylet can play
- A set of changes that happen to the world state after the storylet is completed.
just
want a dialogue system. This system of storylets and qualities gives us far more flexibility to describe a changing world and react to the player’s actions. On Brigador, we freed the player from some level design constraints by implementing completely destructible environments; on Brigador Killers, we want to do the same thing with our storytelling.
Storylets enable us to write reactive “chunks” that respond to the player’s decisions and behaviour. Let’s say that you have intel on a Betushka that you want to steal. In a traditional model, we’d simply set a flag saying that you unlocked the Betka and dialogue trees would have variations to account for that flag. Using a storylet model not only allows us to track
whether
you steal it, but also
how
you steal it. Rather than accounting for flags within complex trees, we can (following from Left 4 Dead’s contextual systems) write reactions for various NPCs based on the “stolen Betushka” quality assigned to the player. Qualities are like a flag, but with more semantic information. Where Left 4 Dead's characters react to the world around you in an FPS, Brigador Killers’ characters will react to the story-world of the player’s actions.
Not only that, storylets and qualities can be used to affect the game state on a local, per-map level, as well as on a global, game-wide level. They are not just a means to make NPCs interactive on a map, though we can do precisely that. Let’s say we set down two NPCs that when we interact with them, a text box will appear.
If we interact with the NPC on the left, their text box is a simple introduction. If we interact with the NPC on the right instead, we can have them ask the player if they spoke to the first person.
And as a part of that chain of dialog we can have the first NPC chime in on the conversation
And if we wanted to do the same thing for both NPCs, we can do exactly that.
A system like this is appropriate for the needs of BK because we have player reactivity in mind for the design of the game. Put another way, if presented with a choice of left or right, we want the player to be able to select either one and still be able to advance, and not be required to speak to the “correct” NPC. Indeed, the player
could just as easily choose to not speak to
any
of these NPCs
. They might ignore them entirely, or the NPCs might have been spooked into running away because of a gunfight across the map, or an explosion might have killed them before giving the player the chance to talk to them. We can factor all of this in with such a narrative system. Better still, we can continuously add new content to this system without breaking existing “chunks”.
Here’s how a basic dialogue box is created in the game. In the game’s debug panel we click the
Show Dialogue Editor
button in the Main tab.
This opens up another window called the node editor, which looks like this. Node graph editors have been seen elsewhere, like
Unreal Engine’s visual scripting system
. We use the
imnodes extension
to Omar Cornut’s excellent Dear IMGUI library.
When we click
Add dialogue storylet
, a box containing several fields appears on the node graph for us to fill out. A functional storylet would look like this:
Interacting with the NPC will prompt a text box to display “Hi I am Tester 1”. If we want an interaction to display a
sequence
of text boxes, the node graph editor would look like this.
So if we want the text boxes to go “Hi I am Tester 1” and then “Did you speak to Tester 2 yet?”, we add the name of that
second
storylet to the
response
field of the first one. When we do that, the interaction will produce two text boxes in sequence on screen.
Lastly, in order to assign these speakers, we need to use
Tiled
- the open source program we use to make maps - to give these NPCs names in their properties, because this is how the storylets system knows who is a speaker, even if multiple versions of the same NPC are populating a map.
But it’s trivial to display text on screen after hitting an interact key next to an entity. How do we make things more interesting?
COMPLEXITY THROUGH CONDITIONS
The three other narrative systems are predicates, the gvar editor and Lua functions. You might have spied the
Show Predicates Window
button in an earlier screenshot. Clicking it shows us the window.
What is a predicate, you ask? A predicate is just an expression that evaluates to true or false.
What appears is a list of all existing predicates currently in the game. This window also serves as the predicate editor. Predicates can be considered the
conditions
that can be applied to a dialogue storylet in order for the dialog storylet to “play”. For example, if the player has done a specific action, like having talked to another NPC or completed an objective, this can be queried through a predicate.
Let’s say one NPC can have two storylets with the same predicate but with two forms: one of those forms says
gvar.rescued_norman == true
and the other says
gvar.rescued_norman == false
. This “gvar” part is a
g
lobal
var
iable which is a thing tracking the overall state or “world quality” of the game. If the player has rescued Norman, then the first storylet will play because the predicate has determined based on the gvar that Norman was rescued. If the player left Norman to his fate, then the second storylet will play.
gvar
NPC storylet text
Rescued
"Thanks for rescuing Norman”
Not Rescued
“You didn’t rescue Norman?”
Before you ask, yes,
predicates can be nested within other predicates
and we can make the Norman example more complicated. Maybe we have a gvar like
gvar.alive_norman
which is tracking whether Norman is alive or dead, not just whether the player rescued Norman or not. In this case we can have four potential predicate outcomes.
gvar
Alive
Not Alive
Rescued
"Thanks for rescuing Norman”
"At least you tried”
Not Rescued
“You didn’t rescue Norman?”
"You didn't even bother”
These gvars can be a simple true/false statement, or take on the form of a number or a string. The gvar editor within the game lets us decide what form these things take. It’s also not limited to NPCs either. This system lets us express complex situations by responding to simple tests. It’s easier to keep track of, for designers, and easier to reason about, for programmers and modders.
ONE MAP, MANY OUTCOMES
When a level loads up, the game engine checks the gvars and mvars (or
m
ap
var
iables) for what to load within that level. When we make maps in Tiled, we can populate that map with whatever we want it to display according to the current quality state of the game (instead of having to make
multiple versions of the same map
to accommodate different outcomes which would be extremely tedious for our level designers). Any entity, like a building prop or an armored vehicle containing a full squad of tac-suited mercenaries, could appear, so long as they have been placed in Tiled and have been given the necessary labeling.
Last of the four narrative systems are Lua functions. Lua functions either modify the game state or are bound to game code. They can be applied to storylets to generate an outcome of some kind. For example, when a certain enemy spawns and initiates dialogue, we can use Lua callbacks to play a particular music track or sound cue. They can pause or unpause the game, spawn units, set or complete objectives… and eventually, much more.
Note that this is not full on scripting in the sense that we’re not putting a programming language into the game. Doing that would open the door for all kinds of malicious activity. While Lua is a programming language, what we’re putting in the game is more like a lesser version of
Papyrus, Bethesda’s in-house scripting language
. It’s a set of predefined functions that we make available to designers and modders. We’ll go into more depth on that later.
Combined, these systems massively expand our options as designers; we’re no longer limited to hard-coded objectives and mech spawns, and we gain a huge amount of flexibility and iteration speed. The tradeoff, well—we spent most of this year on these systems. What we’re hoping, though, is that we can pass on that flexibility and massively expanded set of options to the player. Players who come in to Brigador Killers expecting the limited-by-comparison playspace of Brigador are in for a pleasant surprise. Thanks for reading.
WIN SOME MINIATURES BY PAINTING MINIATURES
We are currently holding the
Olive Drab Everything
painting contest
on our discord server
. The theme is “Brigador” - do with that what you will - all we ask is that submitted minis be painted. Painted minis do not need to be official Stellar Jockeys pewter figurines – if you have kitbashed a Brigador vehicle of your own, or 3D printed a Touro you are eligible. Winners will get to choose one of the new sets of minis that are coming to our merch store later next month. The contest will be taking submissions until approximately 23:00 PST on Monday October 9 2023. Check the pinned message in the
#olive-drab-everything channel
for the full details
Lastly, our first game Brigador is currently on sale as part of the Steam SHMUP Fest. If you’d like to support our development for BK, tell a friend?
A Year In Review
Rounding up what we’ve done in 2023. Yes there are GIFs.
The past twelve months have been very busy for Stellar Jockeys on multiple fronts, so we’re going to briefly run down most of the stuff we made just for Brigador Killers alone. Before we do that…
THE RELEASE DATE
Brigador Killers will not come to Itch.io in 2023. Due to how many other things we had going on, such as the
surprisingly high demand for the Brigador pewter scale miniatures in the summer
, and all the complications that come with adding new systems to Brigador Killers’ engine,
we’re pushing the Itch.io release into early 2024
.
One of the reasons why is from our experience with the first Brigador game. During its Early Access period and subsequent reviews in 1.0 and beyond, a very frequent criticism from players can be boiled down to “Looks cool,
but what else is there to do
?”. The first time that happened with Brigador in EA, it led to months of crunch in order to bring the game more in line with player expectations. Since we don’t feel like doing that a second time, we’ve spent our energies on making things that will hopefully rephrase any potential criticism of BK to “Looks cool,
but there is too much to do
”.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of the new things that were made in the past four quarters.
Q1: AIMING REWORK, MORALE & SUPPRESSION, CLUTS AND NEW ANIMATIONS
One of the first “big” tasks for BK was to tackle the aiming system and we think we’re on to something with the rework. Our dev update at the end of March 2023 showed off the new lock on system. Here is footage from our YouTube channel in case you missed it.
For this aiming rework to not feel off, we also needed to have what we call the “bloom box” which we can enable with the debug menu.
This square represents the spread of a firearm as the players aiming reticle intersects with building props. In this example the gun’s bloom box is smaller at closer targets and bigger further away. Note that having a high-spread weapon is not necessarily a bad thing when other new systems like morale and suppression are factored in, because guns (and the bullets they fire) can affect those two systems. Detailed explainers on these things will eventually be put out but the very short version is having
a mean gun
can intimidate enemies into doing things like hitting the ground or running away.
CLUTs, or
C
olor
L
ook
U
p
T
ables are screenspace shaders. That means they can change how the color looks on your screen. Rather than try to explain at length how it works, it’s easier to just show you an example of a test CLUT at work. Apologies in advance for the flashbang.
When the player gets into a vehicle, or in the above case a wheelchair, a CLUT can be applied immediately in-engine. This will allow us to give certain loadouts a particular visual flare like night vision goggles or an infrared filter.
Lastly in the first quarter of this year various animations were completed for “Dave” such as flinch and death animations.
Implementation of such animations was not without the occasional bug, however.
Q2: PIERCE & PENETRATION, SOME NEW PROPS AND KICKING THINGS INTO OTHER THINGS
Pierce and penetration are separate systems that can overlap in a variety of ways both with each other as well as with above-mentioned morale and on-impact damage. The short version is this:
pierce dictates whether bullets can “go in”; penetration dictates whether bullets can “go through”
.
The easiest way to explain pierce is with a table. The first two columns of values below are example values – what matters is the third and fourth column.
So long as your bullets are strong enough to pierce through the impact resistances of NPCs or building props, you’ll be able to deal damage to those entities.
The penetration system is separate to pierce. If a bullet’s penetration value is
less than or equal to
the target’s penetration resistance, then the bullet is absorbed by the target entity. If a bullet’s penetration value is
higher
than the target’s penetration resistance, then a bullet will pass through the target entity. Again, another table:
You’ll probably have guessed that any time a bullet successfully passes through an entity, it loses some of its penetration value. To best demonstrate this, here’s a line of over 20 dummy NPCs with a cannon round going straight through all of them at about half game-speed.
The shot’s penetration value is high enough that it can pass through about half of the line. Once the cannon round terminates, it does additional damage via the subsequent explosive AOE, eventually leaving only the last six NPCs still standing who took a small amount of damage from the outer ring of the explosion. Did we mention that explosions
also
have pierce values?
Some new props were made in this period too.
And you could start kicking NPCs about.
Q3: DIALOG TOOLS, THE CISTERN AND OTHER ART ASSETS
While the summer faded, BK’s all-new narrative systems were introduced to the engine. A lengthy post titled
Let’s Learn About Storylets
was written back in September 2023 that covers the topic at length that we encourage you to read, especially if you’re curious to the mechanics of how games like Hades delivers its story.
On the art asset front, the first version of The Cistern was shown off in our Discord server.
The Cistern will be an important location to the player throughout BK’s campaign. Visually it draws inspiration from
Saitama’s storm sewer system in Japan
.
We also got plenty of rocks which will be very useful in dressing up outdoor areas.
And with spooky season looming, we figured a jump scare featuring Ed’s mascot “The Hundo” was in order as well.
Q4: VEHICLE EJECTION, GIBS AND SQUIBS
To close out the year, as of time of writing it is now possible in the BK engine to throw oneself from a vehicle in motion. For dramatic entries, of course.
Mind that you can also be
thrown off
a vehicle if you take too sharp a turn or too sudden an impact.
Such behavior
might
be a useful way to get around certain obstacles, particularly if those obstacles happen to be explosive. Speaking of things blowing up, we also got various gibs for props and NPCs…
…and blood squibs that may need to be toned down a little.
WHAT ELSE IS IN STORE?
More 1:144 scale pewter miniatures are coming
to our merch store
. Four new sets of miniatures will be added: one box containing 2x
Buckmasters
; one box containing 2x
Forks
; one box containing 4x
Mongooses
, 2x
Dorothys
and 2x
Pellinores
; and one box of 24x
Loyalist infantry
aka “Daves”. They’ll get their own dedicated post when they’re actually live but here’s a glimpse of an assembled Fork and Buckmaster.
All the new blister packs get new stickers too, as a treat.
Lastly, we’ll be reducing the prices of all of our merch items for the holiday season, so keep your eyes peeled on our socials or
Discord server announcements channel
if you’re looking to snap up an SNC Zippo lighter from our store at a discount.
And that’s it! Thanks for sticking with us throughout the year; there’s so much more to show you in the next.
Post-Alpha FAQ
Well, this got more attention than we expected
Before anything else, everyone at Stellar Jockeys would like to thank you for your reception earlier this month. Considering what we were up against, and how deliberately narrow we made the announcement, we were taken aback by how much attention we ended up getting for the first public build of Brigador Killers.
Wait, what? There’s a build of Brigador Killers I can play?
Yes, and we wrote
a few paragraphs to prime you on what to expect
.
Please
read it, especially if you are a complete newcomer. And yes, it’s only over on Itch for the time being.
What’s the music track that plays in the menu?
It’s called Approach and it was composed by Makeup And Vanity Set. It has been uploaded to our YouTube channel.
What’s the font for the two new splash arts?
The loading screen splash is an homage to the title cards in Katsuhiro Otomo’s "Memories" (
it’s free to watch on the Internet Archive
).
The English text is set in Arial, regular and bold, with the Japanese set in GL Tsukiji 5go. The “haze” effect is achieved by making an outer glow and a drop shadow in photoshop with the following settings:
The text color is an off-white with a hex code of
#e8f2fb
. The outer glow color is
#cdf4e9
and the drop shadow is
#dcf4ec
.
For the revised Brigador Killers logotype that can be seen on the recent Makeup And Vanity Set video posted to our YouTube.
“Brigador" is set in Cassannet bold with the color code of
#e8f2fb
. "Killers" is set in Times New Roman Bold Italic with a color code of
#db214c
. The Japanese text is set in Kozuka Gothic Pro Heavy (H) with the same color as "Killers". Here are the outer glow and drop shadow settings for for “Brigador”.
The drop shadow color is
#d2f6f6
and the outer glow is
#81b4d7
.
The outer glow on the Japanese text uses the following settings with a color code of
#ff0000
.
The two splash arts and just the logotype can be downloaded by clicking these links.
Sidenote regarding most issues
Things that have not yet been dealt with and that aren’t covered in detail here – for example “Why do the menus look the same as in Brigador?” – are typically because those things overlap with so many other parts of the game’s code or are connected to systems that haven’t yet been set in stone. In other words they’re not just “one thing”. Instead, they are multiple things often tangled up with even more things, so tackling “one thing” would in most cases mean doing
all of them at once
. This is not unique to us or to Brigador Killers, and is better known as
tech debt
. That said, there were plenty of frequent questions or observations.
Why could I possess Froggy?
There’s a flag on the data of all mech-type NPCs that, if enabled, permits the player to “enter” it as if it were a vehicle like a tank or a mech [Side note: almost all NPCs are considered “mechs” in the game engine - even the agravs]. Usually this flag is for empty vehicles, but they weren’t set properly for every NPC placed on the maps and it wasn’t intended for people to “drive” Froggy or other non-hostile NPCs either. This is also the reason why players could enter multiple NPCs like a kind of Russian nesting doll even if it made no physical sense.
Needless to say very quickly many players in our discord server reported gleefully driving around as Froggy and setting off Froggy’s flop animation, before getting their Froggy into a Fork and stomping around.
We have since changed the data on various units including Froggy to no longer permit this behavior, but it is trivial to reenable Froggy piloting for those experienced with the debug panel.
Why does the Settings menu not change the movement of the cars?
There are three categories of things that can be changed in Brigador Killers’ settings:
These three categories cover four movetypes, but behind the scenes each “mech” in the game can actually have one of
- Mech & Tank movement
- Agrav movement
- “Suit” (or infantry) movement
six
movetypes. This is most noticeable when driving any of the new wheeled vehicles, but the wheeled vehicle movetype cannot be altered via the Settings menu because there is currently no category for it.
Why was the Fort NPC repeating the same line over and over?
It was due to a bug with the storylet system not working as intended. It has since been fixed.
Why was my character stuck in a particular pose after getting out of a vehicle?
The short version is “because it’s an alpha”. The longer version is that the game’s finite state machine broke in a way that stopped things from animating properly, hence why the player character could remain seated in mid air after getting out of a car.
When can we get our hands on SJTiled?
SJTiled is the tool we use to make maps in Brigador Killers and in the Secret Alpha post it is mentioned that this tool will be made available - and that will happen. A few things need to be pointed out.
The first is that although there are plenty of props to make maps, there is little in the way of enemy spawns to make interesting combat encounters. For instance in the BK build you can acquire the Fork mech or the Betka tank, but you don't get much of a challenge with them as there is nothing equivalent in force to those vehicles to give you a challenge.
Second is that we don't want to run into a problem we had with Brigador with breaking people's maps by performing any major revisions to the game’s assets. We don't expect to do this frequently but we do want to add in some newer stuff to both SJTiled and BK first so that you can make something more interesting than on-foot gunfights before we potentially break things.
Third is the modding document alluded to in the post that helps explain some of the new features is a work in progress and will definitely be rewritten (and probably
re
-rewritten) over time.
Once SJTiled is ready to be distributed, it will be done so initially via our discord server.
I have a crash bug!
Report it to the #bk_bug_reports channel on our discord server or email it to our team account. For the time being we are keeping any feedback to as few channels as possible. It makes our jobs much easier if we can reliably reproduce the bug you’ve encountered, so detailed explanations of the problems you have encountered are greatly appreciated.
If you’d like to support our development of Brigador Killers, consider sharing the fact that our first game Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is on sale on Steam until March 4th
Dystopian By Design
How a concept for a new enemy unit evolved over the course of a decade
This month’s post comes courtesy of our lead artist who also helped write the previous posts about
the Mar Nosso SWAT vehicle
and
the spacer redesign
.
Brigador is not a transhumanist or tech utopian setting. For as much as technology serves and eases human life, it can and is used to undervalue and enslave. We want to reflect this in
Brigador Killers
with designs like the Lobo.
Early in the story we discover specialized cyborgs used as soldiers, known as Lobos. This is the Spanish word for wolf, but is also suggestive of the word “lobotomy”. These soldiers did not volunteer; the fuller scope of the why and how for the Lobos came to be is part of the story.
Some key design goals for the Lobo:
Let’s talk about these two in turn.
- Real world style design revisions over time, and
- Those design revisions depicting escalation over time
Design evolution over time
Optimal design seems intuitive or even obvious, but only in hindsight. For example: the first minivans were smaller, passenger comfort-focused versions of cargo vans, which only had a single large sliding door, so the first minivans also only had a single slide door.
Minivans initially only had a single sliding door on the passenger side
(source)
It took two generations of models in Chrysler’s case to introduce sliding doors on
both
sides, after which all the major auto manufacturers quickly followed. Obvious in hindsight, yet it took time to actually occur.
When we seek to reflect how designs change over time, we have to remember that the ultimate goal is not always in sight from the beginning. Designs evolve, clarify (or obscure and devolve!) over time. For a more realistic approach to design, we want to show iteration over time.
Top: 1st & 2nd generation minivans with no driver sliding door
(1984-1995).
Bottom: 3rd & 4th generation minivans with a sliding door
(1996-2007) (source)
Design escalation over time
This leads into our second point: technology is not value neutral; it reflects the values of its creators.
Shirley Cards tell us a lot about whom Kodak’s film stock was intended for
, and who were not considered.
In the fiction of BK, between the Mk1 and Mk2, the designers of the Lobo stopped seeing the pilot as a person, only a design problem to be eliminated. Whoever the Lobo client is, it is not the pilot. The Mk1 is a half measure of hobbling and forcing a person to drive a suit of powered armor. With the Mk2, the awful logical conclusion has been reached: the person is another component to be streamlined, optimized.
Where the Mk1 is designed around a quadruple amputee with at least some allowances for the pilot, the Mk2 Lobos are maximally dehumanizing (an armored head enclosure with life support).
A (brief) annotated visual history of the Lobo
The Lobo design began in 2012 with a design I called “Company Man” for my game Animal Memory, which is the precursor to Brigador and the origin of the world setting. The goal was an unsettling robot/cyborg type enemy. The “empty helmet with optics” motif was seized upon.
Cyclolucidites’* particular head-in-a-can design is over a decade old at this point. The following image is also from 2012 and the same time period. In a world without, or few advanced computers, human brains would substitute.
[* For true Doom murderheads of The Lore,
read up about cyclolucidism
.]
A few years later I would revisit this design circa 2015 as a sketch, adding the dress shoes which is my favorite element of the design.
In 2023 The Mk2 would be modeled. Other than being given a 20mm cannon the design is quite faithful to the 2015 concept.
Original head canister design as per 2015 concept sketch with rear wheel, suggestive of these wheeling around on their own like Star Wars mouse droids. Which I think is a little too cute.
Here is the revised canister design, which is much more like the 2012 original cyclolucidite canister sketch:
This is how the Mk2 finally looks after being animated and exported into the game engine:
Mk1 Design
Seeking to land the “design evolution over time” theme, I went back and designed a more primitive Mk1 model. Cutting off and using only the head for a cyborg is a severe move; it would take time to arrive at that. First, they would use a quadruple amputee and more primitive coercive methods of controlling the brain.
I did not particularly like the ape-like aspects of this design. While it was meant to look as though he was stooped and wizened from forced labor, it mostly just made you look at his butt. Not the design intent.
Some revisions later we arrive at the Mk1. Here it is in action in-engine:
Death flops are among the many animations made for this unit.
Notable influences on the Lobo are
Ted Backman’s
Stalker designs for Half-Life 2...
...And
The Sequester by Keith Thompson
, whose story vignettes also inspired the lore entries in Brigador.
It’s Steam Summer Sale time again, which means our first game is currently on discount for the next two weeks. If you would like to support our development, please consider telling a friend.
Man this looks great, those 3d models turned sprites have such weird fluidity, in theory its not as smooth as properly animated 3D model but somehow it feels much more smoother. I can't wait for the Killers release and second Audiobook, first one was awesome.https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/903930/view/4188991669956188766
Death flops are among the many animations made for this unit.
Locational sound emitters | Vehicles as resources | FAQ
We've shot for the moon, and we're almost there. Brigador Killers is an order of magnitude more complex than our first game: BK has cars that can handbrake around corners. You can travel freely between levels, you can talk to NPCs, and you can get in and out of vehicles. We've listened to the features you wanted and now we're close to the game of our dreams. We're just making sure that we unveil it when it's ready.
Thank you to all our fans and everyone that has shown interest in Brigador Killers. It will be worth the wait. If you’d like more details for any of these sections, check out our monthly posts (like this one) or watch our YouTube uploads (like this one).
SO WHAT HAVE WE BEEN UP TO? PROGRESS IN 2024
To catch you up, at the start of February 2024 we made the SECRET ALPHA 1 build of Brigador Killers available here on Itch.io. We updated that build a couple of times over that month to fix some issues: Windows Defender didn’t recognize the game and flagged it in a false positive, we had a few crash bugs that our dedicated players helped us discover, and our freshly-made playlist system sometimes failed to play music across level transitions. After solving those bugs and releasing fixes in March 2024, there have been no public updates, but in response to the feedback from SECRET ALPHA 1, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes:
- March also saw the addition of brutalist-themed cinema building props, the configuration of the pierce resistance values for smaller props (referred to internally as “minis”) and their hitboxes, as well as making the storylets system friendlier to modders and designers. After SECRET ALPHA 1, player questions revolved around progression and a sense of purpose, and we’ve spent the rest of 2024 addressing this feedback. More on that later.
- In April, more props were added, we streamlined our story and world progress tracking systems, and made it much less likely for the player character to unintentionally run themselves over with their own vehicle after exiting it.
- During May, many art assets were rendered out, such as scrap gibs and other debris, various street minis and the first variant of the Lobo, an early-game enemy type (pictured below).
- In June, the second variant of the Lobo was added, along with the “TV trees” and other lights you may have noticed from last month’s dioramas video.
- July was very big on the audio front. We’ve been working closely with our audio people to better take advantage of FMOD’s features. Where Brigador was straightforward in its soundscape, mostly focusing on gunfire, bullet impacts, and stompy mechs, we’re adding a lot of detail to the world of Mar Nosso. As a result, the sound bank has grown and several sound events have been added, while more are coming. New lighting (or “weather”) files for levels were also authored.
- The sound bank changes continued into August, with the addition of locational sound emitters - think a buzzing neon sign, or a leaking water pipe burbling into a storm drain. Now, designers have the ability to enrich their levels with these ambient spots. Also, we added the ability to display text comments in the game that have been placed via the map editor. Brigador Killers’ systems are much denser than the first game, which can be hard to keep track of as a map designer. We needed a clear way to signal how the levels work in-engine, both for our own use and for future modders. Finally, we’ve enabled the player to pick up and drop weapons while in infantry loadouts, which is easy to say, but required fundamental changes to the engine.
- A peek at the Lobos in-engine, an industrialized enemy type that you face early in the game
This is not the full list of things we’ve been working on, but we do want to go into detail on a few other things that are currently cooking.
REFINING THE CORE LOOP
As we mentioned above, players enjoyed SECRET ALPHA 1 but wanted to know more about their progression: how they could develop their characters’ abilities, and what challenges they would be working to overcome. We wanted to answer these desires while keeping in mind Brigador’s strong cast of vehicles, which many players have come to love. Only a subset of vehicles will return – Mar Nosso is on a different planet than the first game, after all – but we wanted to make sure to keep vehicles at the core of Brigador Killers.
One of the ways we’re doing that is to present vehicles as resources – not just a means to get around, or to shoot things with, but something you’ll want to hunt down so you can work towards a goal.
Now, what does that mean? The image above is an example – it’s a development tree that describes what you can do with a motorbike. Once you find and unlock it, you’ll be able to use blueprints and parts to turn it into more specialized variants.
Many players wanted more customization from Brigador, and ever since 2017, we’ve been keeping that in mind as we work on Brigador Killers. It would have been simple to add a looter-style progression to vehicles (“swap engines for +5% movespeed” - that kind of thing), but we wanted to really dig into what players wanted and come up with a satisfying system.
Along these lines, we’ve been working on identifying player types and giving each type options that are interesting and rewarding. In real life, someone who restores vintage cars doesn’t have the same priorities as a performance-focused hobbyist racer, even though they both work on cars in their garage. So, going back to the image above, a mobility-focused player can turn their motorbike into a Corvid Skate, and then a Rope Kid. A more combat-focused player can turn it into a Troubadour, and then a Pantry Boy, and even a Doorman.
In order to create these variants, the player needs to venture out into Mar Nosso and discover their blueprints, and then track down the parts needed to complete them. For example, a wandering SNC Ad Buddy™ might drop an agrav impeller, which is the drive unit you need to begin Corvidizing your motorbike into a Skate.
Anyone familiar with modding vehicles from our first game, kitbashing model parts, or, say an episode of The A-Team…
…will have a good notion of what we’re after.
We aren’t yet able to visualize this in-engine because what sounds like a “simple” idea (smoosh parts of vehicles onto another vehicle) is a lot of work. Brigador is a data-driven engine, which means that at its heart, mechs were described whole cloth in a JSON file. We don’t have to get into the details, but suffice to say that it was not designed to combine and change mechs like this. In 2018, when we started BK, we couldn’t even dynamically spawn units in a level. Everything that would be in the level had to already exist at level load time. Much of the code work since then has focused on making the engine more flexible and modern.
Even easy-seeming tasks like adding returning vehicles involve a ton of work: we have to import and re-render the required models at BK’s higher sprite resolution, as well as redoing their animations thanks to all the additional features we now have. These are problems we know how to solve, but they do take time.
THE SOUNDSCAPE
Another major change to the in-dev build of Brigador Killers is to the audio. Previously in Brigador, when you’d load up a level, the map would have a pair of music tracks associated with it. Once they finished playing, it wouldn’t start up again, so players were in for a quiet experience if they were on a particularly long or difficult run. Sound effects like gunfire and engine noise still played, but our implementation didn’t really allow for anything “dynamic” to happen during a level, like changing music tracks. We’ve focused on addressing these gaps from the first game in Brigador Killers. For instance, it’s much easier for us to specify the material of a ground tile. This means units can make different footstep noises when they traverse those tiles. This system existed in Brigador, but was only really used for grass tiles and railways. Now that we have infantry gameplay, footsteps are much more central to the world feeling alive, so we’ve expanded the surface audio system. Here’s a demonstration of what we mean: listen carefully to Dave’s steps as he traverses over each labeled strip.
Audio emitters can also be placed to play whatever sounds we want within a certain radius to the player. Later in the same video at the 1:59 timestamp you will see Dave teleport closer and closer to one of these emitters. It’s subtle, but notice how the volume of it increases as Dave gets closer, and the direction it plays in your headphones.
There is still plenty of work to do on the audio front, but we’re excited at the possibilities of what we can do with these fancy tools, especially in terms of making maps feel less static. Speaking of…
THE MAPS
The areas you can access in the current Itch build are, even with a vehicle, kinda time-consuming to get across. For the next public build, we expect to change the scale of the playspace, dividing these areas into smaller chunks. We also plan to add level transitions which can be unlocked or opened up via the world state, along the same lines as Dark Souls’ droppable ladders and unlockable shortcuts. The way you move around Mar Nosso will evolve and grow as you do.
THE STEAM PAGE
The images and content on the Steam page are not what BK looks like at all. Those images and GIFs are from the long-since retired build that was available to play if you saw us at PAX in 2019 or 2020. We’ll be updating the Steam page to better reflect what BK actually looks like. This might mean that certain units, like the Vocc Doll or Gravesend Pinball, are no longer showcased in the art on the store page, but don’t worry. They’ll still be in BK – they just need to go through the sprite updating and re-export process to be featured once again.
ANSWERING A FEW OTHER BURNING QUESTIONS
Why the delay?
In 2003 video games were somewhat niche, making roughly 7 billion USD in total across both console and PC according to the ESA. Jump forward two decades and in 2023 alone it’s been calculated the industry has made well over 180 billion USD. That’s way, way more than what Hollywood made in 2023. In terms of the number of games available to players, last year just on Steam over 14,000 titles were released.
At the same time, in just the past couple of years major corporations have consolidated a huge amount of talent under fewer and fewer roofs. Entire media outlets with years of experience covering the games industry have winked out of existence, to say nothing of all the recent closures of studios that put out critically-acclaimed and successful games.
What’s become apparent in the past decade is that successful indie titles tend to fall into one of the following camps:
More importantly, the indie titles mentioned have also spent years in development, often providing post-release support long after the game’s release. While Brigador Killers is taking a while to come together, it is no longer unusual for indie games to have project timelines that rival the AAA of yesteryear.
- Highly polished with a narrow scope (e.g. Hollow Knight or Celeste)
- Roguelikes blended with other genres (Hades, Noita, Slay The Spire)
- “Crunchy” world simulators and builders (Rimworld, Project Zomboid)
- Cozy (Unpacking, Stardew Valley)
As established indie developers, we also find ourselves in the unusual position of being assigned the standard bearers for innovation. This is something you would hope to see out of the bigger companies that have the resources to do so (and in some cases used to do) but R&D into all-new IPs or hardware is not common. We want to do it, but that comes with the caveat of adding more devtime, especially since we’re one of the few developers making an isometric, sprite-based game in the 2020s.
Why not just do more Brigador?
The sentiment of “Why not just make more content for the first game?” has been expressed in various ways and the short answer is we consider Brigador: Up-Armored Edition to be feature complete. We may revisit it to make sure it is still functional on future versions of Windows and Mac, or make the default controls play better on the Steam Deck, but for the time being our focus is on developing this game. Brigador is kind of in a state where adding anything new would be like trying to add a pair of socks to a suitcase that you already had to sit on to close. The things we are doing with BK that we have outlined in this post are not possible with the engine that runs Brigador. We do not yet know what the minimum spec is for Brigador Killers but if you can run the current Itch build on your computer without issue you’ll probably be okay.
I have the Itch build - when can I get my hands on SJTiled?
The version of SJTiled for Brigador Killers will eventually become available - we don’t want to run into the problem we had with Brigador where when we updated that game with new assets, we bricked everyone’s maps they’d been working on. We are adding new features to SJTiled as well that haven’t been revealed in this post.
Where can I get the Makeup And Vanity Set soundtrack?
The tracks are infrequently released to our YouTube channel. The main soundtrack is about 40 tracks long, which is roughly the same as Brigador Volumes I and II. This doesn’t include the new ambient tracks that MAVS has also composed, or other music we have requested from them. As for the run of vinyl LPs of these albums, we intend to have a few of them available on our merchandise storefront, and MAVS themselves will also be selling them on their end. Judging by how well MAVS’ vinyls tend to do, we recommend that you either sign up to our newsletter over on our site or subscribe to MAVS to hear about the vinyl release first.
Are you going to make more minis for the merch store?
Yes. A new line of scale miniature models is coming later this year.
Hey! You didn’t answer my question!
Please leave your question in the comments, or in the #brigador_killers_chat Discord channel, or even email us at team@stellarjockeys.com.
Actually, we have a question - what recent release have you been playing that truly grabbed your attention?
The challenges of putting a McMansion in a video game
Suburban tract housing has a home in Brigador Killers
We asked one of our artists for an explainer on what they’ve been working on. This time it’s Igor again,
who previously helped us write this post
, and has decided to drill down on his favorite building prop.
McMansions
, which are called "subhouses" in the game files, are one of my favorite prop sets in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition. The moment I blasted through one of them with a Banshee MG and saw it immediately collapse, I thought to myself "
Oh, they're flimsy, that makes sense!
". Working on the upgraded version of the McMansion for Brigador Killers was a challenging and occasionally painful quest that asked me to reconsider what constitutes good architecture.
New design, new problems
The subhouse as it appears in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition, divided into its constituent tiles
Subhouses, as good as they are, needed a lot of reworking to fit into BK’s design requirements. With the increased fidelity and visual scale, as well as a greater focus on infantry combat, I had to show the collision boxes a lot more respect than the previous game, effectively blocking myself from using some of the modelling techniques deployed in Brigador. Significant deviations from the tile grid had to go for a while, returning only when the code team pushed an update that allowed us to put down what are called “qprops” (as the name suggests, it’s a prop that takes up one-quarter of a standard tile in the engine).
The modularity issue also needed to be tackled. The original game's subhouses were modelled from the top down, in that they were a complete house model divided into tiles. This approach allowed for the greater utilization of half-destroyed states, where destroying one of the building tiles reveals the ruins and debris "inside" of adjacent tiles as in the image above. However, this approach significantly limited the ways tiles could be combined together.
Last, but not least, the visual scale had to be more realistic. If our player character is standing next to a building, it would be better if they could visually "fit" inside it, at least when it comes to something as spacious as the houses of the wannabe ruling elite.
Italian inspiration
The
Villa La Rotonda
, just outside Vicenza in Northern Italy, designed by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio
Since ordinary McMansions – with their seemingly nonsensical combinations of volumes – were too hard to work with from the get-go, I had to pick something simpler I could start tinkering with. The Villa La Rotonda immediately checked many boxes. A Renaissance masterpiece, I saw it has all the essential elements I could easily cut into tiles: entrance groups, corners, internals, dome... With this the basic combinatorics were born: tiles can be facade or corner, one or two storeys high, all with a front-facing sloping roof, meant to be assembled around core internal tiles.
An initial mockup of possible combinatorics
Importantly, the Villa La Rotonda also provided a general style guide. McMansions come in many different shapes and styles, but understanding that all those variations won't seamlessly click together, I had to narrow it down to just one. Italian quickly became the choice for good reason: it was thematically appropriate for Miami-inspired Mar Nosso and also worked better with more gentle roof slopes. This meant I could model my two-story pieces without occupying too much screen real estate with the jarring roof tiling.
With all the prep work done there was only one question: how do I turn a UNESCO World Heritage Site
into complete shit
?
Rules, or lack thereof
First iteration of the new McMansion in BK
There were a few hard constraints left to set due to the modularity requirement mentioned earlier. The primary color has to be uniform to call less attention to the tile grid. In addition, all sets (I made three, which are differentiated by the wall and foundation design) have to share the same floor and roof heights.
As for the rest, well… one thing I noticed while looking at IRL examples of McMansions is that there is
not a single architectural rule left unsullied
. Rhythm, composition, using your classical references correctly – you name it, it’s disrespected. This was the paradigm I had to adopt. If a particular set corner had plain rectangular windows, its corresponding facade tiles should use ornate phallus-shaped ones instead. If one particular element had to, by all the rules of good taste, align with another – misalign them, but only slightly, lest someone think it was intentional. If the set you're making looks medieval, add one (
just one
) Neoclassical tile for good measure. If the tile you've made screams "entrance group" at you, conveniently forget to add a door.
And after you’ve broken everything, make a couple of tiles that actually look normal for once, just to subvert the meta rule you've set for yourself. But even then, remember: it’s "tacky", not "
classy
". After all, we're making a mass-produced steel-frame property investment, not some aristocratic manor. This approach came in handy when I was working on side wall greebles. Sure, I want them to have pipes and AC units just like in the original subhouses, but what's the proper
nouveau riche
way to do this? It's by ignoring the back-alley aesthetic and painting all of it with the primary wall color, of course.
Final iteration of the McMansion in Brigador Killers, divided into its constituent tiles
This brief article on McMansions omits many aspects of what could be a much longer story. There are other tales such as my work on actual wall and floor constructions, or the accompanying topiaries set inspired by the album cover of
Supertramps’ Breakfast in America
, or how I discovered some of the mappers were combining unfinished McMansion assets with office buildings behind my back. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did working on them, albeit without the minor existential crisis where you question how your education led you to this point.
P.S. We are running
a very short survey
about the exact make and model of controller you use to play on your computer. We particularly want to hear from those who played Brigador on controller. Participation in this survey is anonymous, but at the end you can submit your email address to be entered into a raffle to win something from our merchandise store. You will only be emailed if you win.
This survey will run until October 31st 2024
.
