In a post from last year, we wrote about how Stellar Jockeys began as a company and what eventually led to Brigador. This time lets look at concepts for a prototype of the game that dates from around late 2013 to early 2014. At this stage in development, the ability to make 2D sprites with dynamic lighting had been established, but the overall gameplay loop and plot had not yet been settled on.

An early prototype of Brigador was inspired by the gameplay of a very old game called Choplifter! for the Apple II from 1982. The idea was the player and their units would emerge from a space elevator and attack a central station somewhere on a map.

The menu flow for this prototype was mocked up like this.

[Ed: Matador was the original early title before being renamed to Brigador]

Before launching into a mission, the player would go through loadout selection. One variant of this was also mocked up. Players who know what the loadout screens for Campaign and Freelance mode look like may notice some similarities.


The prototypes idea would be that crew choices would affect aspects of the vehicle such as how accurate certain weapon types are, reload speeds, vehicle turning speed and so on. Had we gone down this route, once you loaded into a level you would be presented with a scene like this.


The pips around the selected captain for the vehicle in the lower left were in the style of Wing Commanders shield/hull integrity readout, which would show you from what direction you had taken damage.

[previewyoutube=mfRvCSBD4q0;full][/previewyoutube]
This crew system and hull UI didnt survive past concepting but directional damage did. In Brigador, damage to the side or rear of a vehicle in most cases is much more effective than hitting the front.

Anyone who has played World of Tanks might be raising their hand right now ultimately Brigador does not seek to be a simulative experience. Instead it was made to be something youd want to get straight into and play rather than fret over your choices in a menu. The loadout screen for Freelance mode was eventually pared down to the following:

• Pilot, which decides enemy spawn difficulty and payout
  
• Vehicle, which affects payout and what weapons can be equipped
  
• Weapon hardpoints, assigned to left and right mouse button
  
• Special, which are things like the EMP, audio-kinetic pulse, smoke or active camouflage
  

The latest addition to our merchandise store is four new pewter miniature sets from Brigador at 1:144 scale. They are:

• 2x Buckmaster
  
• 2x Fork
  
• A powersuit selection of 4x Mongoose, 2x Dorothy & 2x Pellinore
  
• 24x Loyalist Infantry AKA "Daves"
  

• Carlos cannon
  
• Garigari rotary percussion drill
  
• Democlaw
  
• Bonesaw machine gun (two pairs)
  
• Temblor laser
  
• Donkey recoilless rifle
  

Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is on sale this week as part of the War Child Game Action 2023 Steam Sale along with several other titles. This years Game Action is once again bringing together the gaming industry to highlight the importance of protecting, educating, and standing up for the rights of children living in war zones. War Child work in the hardest to reach places to support those who are hardest hit, to protect, educate and stand up for the rights of children, when they need them most.

The promotion will run until August 23rd and a percentage of each copy sold will go to War Child UK to fund projects in Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Iraq, Ukraine, and Yemen.

The full list of participating games can be found here. You can read more about War Child's work here.

Even if youve already acquired a copy of Brigador, please consider telling a friend.

The latest addition to our merchandise store is three pewter minis of vehicles from Brigador: the Canmore, the Broadsword and the signature Touro at 1:144 scale. They were made by one of our community members, who makes minis as part of their day job at Mindworm Games, and ran us through the creation process that you can read below.

As this is a first run, the miniatures are being sold at introductory prices, which are:

[table]
[tr]
[th][/th]
[th]Introductory price[/th]
[th]Price after introduction period[/th]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Touro[/td]
[td]22.50 USD[/td]
[td]27.50 USD[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Broadsword[/td]
[td]20.00 USD[/td]
[td]25.00 USD[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Canmore[/td]
[td]27.50 USD[/td]
[td]32.50 USD[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]
Prices are not the same for all three miniatures due to the different amounts of pewter required. In addition, if you add all three to your cart, you'll get the whole set for 55.00 USD.

Please note that this introductory period will last until Monday July 31st, after which they will go up to their intended value. The sums indicated above also do not account for shipping.
[h2]
===
UPDATE 30/06/2023: DUE TO HIGH DEMAND RECENT ORDERS FOR PEWTER MINIATURES WILL BE DELAYED BY AT LEAST A WEEK. PLEASE GET IN TOUCH WITH US VIA TEAM(AT)STELLARJOCKEYS(DOT)COM IF YOU HAVE ANY CONCERNS ABOUT YOUR ORDER. WE THANK YOU ALL IN ADVANCE FOR YOUR PATIENCE AND UNDERSTANDING. SORRY ABOUT THE ALL CAPS.
===
[/h2]

If youd like to buy a pewter mini right now - head on over to our store. Otherwise, please enjoy the rest of the article.

[h2]FROM 3D MODEL TO 3D PRINT[/h2]
[Editors note: Our community member was provided with the original 3D vehicle model files from Brigador - they did not reproduce the entire original model themselves from scratch. In other words - what you see in these minis is pretty much what they should look like in game, no longer bound to a fixed isometric perspective. We say pretty much because there are things we can get away with in a video game where the laws of physics dont apply so some alterations have been made in order to be printed. Mostly this is filling in gaps inside the model the player would never see in-game.]

When I first get the model it's made of a bunch of individual overlapping parts. Heres the Canmore turret split in half.

[Ed: This screenshot is from Blender.]


As you can see, its not in one solid piece. I have to take all this and boolean join everything in Blender into a single mesh so that print software will slice it correctly instead of making internal voids where parts overlap. After I join everything together and add the cutouts and tabs and stuff it looks like this.


The turret is now one continuous mesh instead of a bunch of separate pieces. After that all the parts get printed out on the 3D printer into masters, which are put into a black rubber mold.

[Ed: Were not going to show a boring timelapse of the 3D print process - if youve never seen one in action, heres that scene from season 4 episode 5 of Mr. Robot where Darlene and Elliot create a 3D print of a security guards fingerprint.]

[h2]VULCANIZATION[/h2]

The mold comes in two halves. I position everything in the can like in the image above, then put the second half of the mold on top, and put it in the vulcanizer. The vulcanizer heats it up to the appropriate temp while it's under pressure to make the rubber soften and flow all around the masters to make impressions of the small details. The uncured rubber has a texture similar to bubble gum, but once it's vulcanized it's like a new tire. Here's that same mold can in the vulcanizer.


This is the small one I have at home in my shop that doesn't apply pressure to the mold can, so I have to screw it down instead. It's basically just a fancy hot plate that draws a lot of power and has a timer. The vulcanizer at the minis shop below is a press type so I can more precisely control the pressure if I needed to, but it also weighs over 500lbs so its not portable.


The Broadsword mold was put in this one at the shop. It also has the advantage of heating up the top and bottom plates so it doesn't take as long to get up to temperature and takes about an hour less to run. The molds are held at vulcanizing temperatures of 350F (approx. 176 C) at about 2000 psi for two hours. Then they cool down and I take them out.

This is the Canmore mold immediately after coming out of the vulcanizer.


I then have to pull the mold apart and remove the 3D-printed masters from it, leaving hollow cavities where they were.

[h2]SEPARATING THE MOLD & SPINCASTING PREP[/h2]

Above is the top half, and the ring in the middle is the sprue that metal will flow into. Below is the bottom half of the mold, and gates have to be cut into it with a hobby knife so the metal can get from the sprue to the actual mold cavities.


If you look closely you can see I also have to cut thin vents on the sides of the molds so that air can escape the cavity as it's being filled with metal. They are angled inwards so that metal doesn't go through them and get slung out of the mold all over the inside of the spincaster.

To cast it I dust it in talc powder for mold release and to help the metal flow, and run it in the spincaster. Here's the first run.


You can see the track isn't filled in all the way. This means that the vents need to be adjusted.

The spincaster clamps the mold shut and spins it. As you pour metal in, centrifugal force pushes the liquid metal into the cavities more effectively than just gravity casting would. The fine details would otherwise be lost without the additional force.

The Canmore tank mini takes almost a full ladle of pewter metal to cast.

[Ed: The pouring temperature from the crucible is around 620 F/ 327 C.]


After I tweak the molds to get everything casting right, I'll run them a couple of times to get sprues with attached parts.


I pull the parts off the sprue, inspect them to make sure everything has cast correctly and sort them.





Overall this run used about 20lbs (or over 9kg) of metal.

[Ed: Heres the final weights for each vehicle that were made in this initial run of 50 vehicles each.]


[table]
[tr]
[th][/th]
[th]Imperial[/th]
[th]Metric[/th]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Canmore[/td]
[td]4.4oz[/td]
[td]124.7g[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Broadsword[/td]
[td]1.6oz[/td]
[td]45.3g[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Touro[/td]
[td]2.2oz[/td]
[td]62.1g[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

[h2]BUT WE'RE NOT DONE YET[/h2]

[Ed: With all spincasted vehicles sorted, they are then placed into clear blister boxes with a foam insert. Two stickers are then applied to the packaging - one indicating the vehicle loadout, the other a foil Stellar Jockeys sticker - which are then all put into a box to be sent on to our fulfillment center.]


[Upon reaching the fulfillment center, they get barcoded, added to our inventory and are ready to be sold and processed into packages... and that's it! Thank you for reading, and many thanks to our community member for running us through the spincasting process.]

Once upon a time Stellar Jockeys first game was going to look something like this



and not this.



Upon reading that you might be wondering how, so its high time we actually made good on a post from June 2012, wherein studio CEO Hugh Monahan wrote the following in a since-dead blog:

This isn't the retrospective of some proven developer, full of knowing speeches about their path to success or platitudes of hard work and discipline. We don't have the luxury of hindsight, or the comforting knowledge that everything will work out in the end, at least not yet.

...This is about helping future studios as encumbered as we are with inexperience to succeed. This is about all the pain, patience, frustration, creativity, sacrifice, and love that go into making games.

You probably know that each game on Steam has a community hub section where players can post their own artwork. What you probably dont know is the vast majority of these types of posts for Brigador dont ever appear on Steam or other spots on the internet like our Twitter account or r/brigador they're on our discord server and we even have a hall of fame gallery channel dedicated to them called #becks_best.

Given just how many there have been over the years, we asked a few of our most frequent contributors recently whether we could showcase their various work on here. What follows is a list of community creations ranging from sketches, writings, videos, mods and scale models grouped mostly by category and author, reposted with their permission. Enjoy.

[h2]ART[/h2]

[h3]TOURO-TAN[/h3] by Zi


[h3]DOROTHY-TAN[/h3] by Zi


[h3]PRISM-KUN[/h3] by Zi

Prism-kun
Light Mechanized Vidstar Platform
Hardpoints: 1x Heavy, 4x Micro

Supple synthetic skin, the best hair a vat can produce, bleeding edge multi-micro-camera optics, and more facial muscles than the original human body for that extra sadistic expression.
I want to say the braincase is for a real brain, but I feel like if that were a thing, wed be seeing way more insane mannequins piloted by cephaloids. Probably just no expense spared for these physical models of beloved synchstars.
Looks light on its feet (if you can call them that) due to the agrav leg setup. In reality, these models are just about as armed as a Sledger. Drops any significant semblance of armor for the sake of a compact high-rating power plant. Shielding ends up fantastic, holds up to more than youd expect for someone so small.
Arm-mounted HF blades and caseless submachine guns come baked in standard, but the heavy mount is clearly modular considering the variety of footage involving unruly worshippers getting pasted by so many different weapon types. Nothing quite like seeing someone get flashed with a healthy dose of radiation.
Oh, and the skirts a heat sink for the heavy. Naturally.

Do I like it? The hell do you think?

- MB

p.s. Annotations aren't mine. Neat, though.

Dennis purchased a cup of affogato from the JUST ICE vendor and walked, carefully spooning the gelato into his mouth, wary of backsplash from pieces that fell off the tiny spoon. There was one cloud in the sky and he wished it would occlude the sun, because his hands were full and he couldn't take off his jacket without putting his ice cream down. Which would have required him to awkwardly balance the cup on the boardwalk railing, or set it down on the ground, and he didn't want to do that. The wind might knock it over.

The tac rig came through the glass wall of the Companolo outlet. It burst out through the smiling dog's head and hit the boardwalk running. There was a long machine gun in its hands and before it hit the ground it was already firing. There were no appendages in that suit, Dennis knew by looking at it. A torso and a head suspended by powered armor, mechanical legs thrashing inhumanly, robot arms bouncing at the shoulders so the elbows and hands stayed perfectly level, holding the stream of bright colored tracers on the NOSPOL plainclothesmen exiting the DEALSLAVE. In a moment it was on top of them, then over them, turning briefly at the waist to hose down a straggler without stopping.

Faber wasn't far behind. They piled out of the prowler like spiderlings from an egg sac crushed under your thumb, wrapped in armored swaddling. The flinch reaction was well beaten out of them and they didn't cower under the hail of 8mm FMJ, counting on their rigs to protect them as they lined up their shots.

The van behind them exploded. Their suits did not protect them against that. The armored phocomelus catapulted him(?)self over the edge of the boardwalk, down to the beach below. Dennis wished he had a gun, or some other way to participate.

Then he stopped wishing for that, disappointed with himself. Nothing he could do would improve this already perfect moment of catharsis.

Solo Nobre did have a few libraries. One of the best was the Vorebey Book Reliquary, which fulfilled a triple museum, mausoleum, and book-haus purpose. All quiet stone and death, like the Necropolis - I used to go there for a sleep when it was raining. Out in front of it, the Corvid moleques were usually hawking used books and samizdat, their wares laid out in blankets on the street - ready at a moment's notice to run. Later, we'd make a joke of gunning our engines when we turned that corner; watching them run, though none of us really cared to enforce anything. Inside, you could enjoy the echoes of fine heels on fine polished marble in the lobby; an enormous cross whose arms are the reliquary on the left, toward the west, and the library at the right.

I'm not much of a reader, but it wasn't that big a library, and they don't let someone like me leaf through the relics. After a while you start rereading the titles that are worth reading and thinking about all the stuff that's not in there. I hear back in the Center worlds, they have archival libraries going all the way down to the beginning of history, without lacunae. That's what happens, I guess, when your culture hasn't been repeatedly burnt to the ground and encrusted with new layers of censorship every changing of the guard. You could probably lob a balo in any direction down there and erase something priceless - culture steeped on culture, eons of memory suffocating the ability to feel anything new. Think of it. Maybe the real answer is in the middle. Some stuff's got to be forgotten, some kept. Someone has to decide.

The foot of the lobby's cross was a pre-colonial church; I have read when they picked apart the ruins after the Noite Longa, they actually found a congregation in there, bits of communion mixed with plaster still in their teeth.

- Griswold Ficke, "Brigadors of Solo Nobre"

As Solo Nobre progresses through its economic and social rationalisation, I am reminded that not everyone is in tune with our mission. For those that recognise us as what we are - liberators, bringers of prosperity and stability - the fruits of Concern investment are eagerly harvested and enjoyed, the seeds replanted so that they may grow again and tenfold. But there are some among our native business partners who do not fully understand the purpose of the Concern's system, and their particular greed must be pulled by its roots before it can spread.

In the past few months I have become acquainted with certain high-profile natives who have extensive private investments in Solo Nobre, permitted under trade agreements and licensing fees with the SNC. While they have been a useful source of information and business opportunities, I and my fellow Informatics departments have noticed a disturbing trend of irrational economic activity among the local tycoons: IP infringement, unsanctioned trade and dividend evasion, to name but a few of their sins.

We do not work for individual profit. We are part of an organisation, and our first and foremost priority must be the wellbeing and prosperity of that organisation. Going into business only for ourselves makes us all weaker - do our limbs and organs fight each other for nutrition, or do they work in concert for the health and development of the whole body? I cannot fault anyone for private enterprise, but I draw the line at business which directly impacts the Concern's profits, and among the native investors I see that kind of business running increasingly rampant.

For the centralismos that continue to keep the Concern out of their business, I remind them that one man went into business for himself, and took this entire colony with him. I hope they remember how that ended.

-Svati Vadekar, SNC Informatics Division
-Operations Director, 2nd Station

Own a Zweenie for home defense, since that's what the 4 Founders intended. Four separatists break into my house. "What in Martims beard?" As I grab my tanker cap and Zweenie rifle. Blast a searing armor-piercing laser through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my Nobrelite on the second man and fire a burst off, miss him entirely because
"Its an assault rifle
-MB"
and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the Parliament cannon mounted on my Betka loaded with canister shot, "For the NPA lads" the cluster shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off the district alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified Corvid. He bleeds out waiting on the MPs to arrive since district comms have been jammed, Just as the founders intended

That's it. I'm sick of all this "Masterwork Graser" bullshit that's going on in the War Council OpFor Threat Evaluation system right now. Black Hands deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.

I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine Black Hand from Clade Vocc for $20,000 dollars (that's about 400 of our raincoats to the SNC you are keeping up on OpFor mercenary bonus programs, right?) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 planetary cycles now. I can even cut slabs of Ed's Solid Meat Product with my Black Hand.

Spacer weaponsmiths spend years working on a single Black Hand and fold its lens up to a million times to produce the finest grasers known to mankind, in any species.

Black Hands are thrice as deadly as dirt-eater grasers and thrice as focused for that matter, too. Anything tubarao can chemically disassemble, a black hand can melt better. I'm pretty sure a black hand could easily dissolve a Citadel sporting full ERA with a simple full-spectrum pulse.

Ever wonder why colonial militaries never bothered with space forces? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined Vidstars (you are watching OpFor holovids, right?) and their black hands of destruction. Even in the Siege of Andros, colonists targeted the spacers with the black hands first because their killing power was feared and respected.

So what am I saying? Black Hands are simply the best weapon that the galaxy has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in the OFTE system. Please find enclosed a binary file attachment with the proposed changes.

- Colonel Travis Martin, NEP

BRIG'ARDCORE is a mod which aims to promote a more tense and tactical sandbox gameplay with more diverse enemies and weapons including flamethrowers, sabots, proximity mines and time bombs. Many aspects of the base game have been modified to achieve this. BRIG'ARDCORE plays best at difficulties 2-4 for light vehicles, and 5-8 for heavy vehicles. It's not even remotely fair and death can come suddenly, so long runs and campaign missions are not recommended for beginners.
FEATURES AND CHANGES:
[expand type=details]
More than 30 additional player weapons
2 additional player abilities
All vehicles in Brigador made playable
Modified enemy vehicle destruction effects (faction/unit specific gibs, turret gibs, persistent wrecks etc.)
Modified weapon firing and impact effects (dustclouds, shockwaves, smoke trails, richochets, etc.)
Increased visual range
Increased enemy visual range and engagement distance
Health greatly reduced on all player vehicles
Altered loadout on some player vehicles
Weapons as horns for some player vehicles (Prowler, Rounder, Hound, Operator)
Unique fixed primary/secondary weapons for some player vehicles (Oxybeles, Prism, Butcherbird, Hun, Roadie, Actias, Operator)
Performance and functional changes to many existing player and enemy weapons
Rolling coal and burnout horns on certain player vehicles (Fatshoe, Propter, Hannibal, Rolston)
New enemies
New enemy weapons
Altered loadouts on several enemies
New enemy actions including taunts, sick burnouts and rolling coal
Revised spawnlists for greater enemy variety at lower difficulties
New Easter Eggs
Brother Cotton Boss fight mode
and much more.[/expand]

- Billman Assault Mech: An aggressive mech with modest aux/turret armament but a reinforced ramming prow and a boost ability instead of its stomp, ideal for ramming through enemies or obstacles alike.
- Antoninus Light Mech: The NEP's overliteral answer to the Chook, a durable but somewhat sluggish twin aux light mech.
- Scuttleray Powersuit: A recon powersuit that sits somewhere between the Mog and the Pellinore, faster than the latter and better armed than the former.
- Flathead Medium Tank: An astoundingly conventional MBT, main/small armament, decent speed, decent HP, just a capable, if unremarkable machine.
- Escorpio Light Tank: A better armed and armoured Betushka variant with poor speed but a powerful and long lasting boost to allow for burst agility.
Vicar Light Tank: A Betka with a Marlowe turret. Slightly worse handling and shields, but you can run a Galinha.
- Caador Assault Gun: A boxy light SPG with a main/small armament. Durable for its size, but its fixed forward armament hurts it outside of gunnery duels and ambushes. Hit and run.
- Caesar Combat Car: A Loyalist ball-tread test bed based off an old armoured car. Fragile, but with high forward and reverse speeds and a twin aux armament it's still a capable combatant in the right hands.
- Throne Attack Agrav: A floating Monarch upper with twin aux, a devastating belly slam and deceptively high mobility, the Throne's a consummate brawler.
- Ravager Grav-tank: A Raider derived grav-tank, trading its long operational range, heavy armament and some performance for a turret and extra durability, better suited to the direct combat roles they find themselves in inside Solo Nobre.
- Viking Grav-tank: Another Raider variant, this one an intended outrider for the parent vics, with higher speed but a lighter aux/tur armament in a turret.
- Hussite Heavy Grav-tank: A massive combat vehicle intended for infantry support and assault across broken terrain, the Hussite uses a heavily modified and up-armoured Huss chassis as its basis, switching the two fixed forward Heavies for a casemate Main hardpoint in the lower hull and an Auxiliary weapon in a dorsal, fully traversable turret.

Stellar Jockeys note: The following two videos were made possible in-engine because chasiubao had been given access to a fork of the engine and could (re)write parts of the game's code as needed. This is why things like spawning in new units at runtime, faction infighting, weapon switching and various other things not achievable with the modkit are possible.

Satellite Mind is a large and fairly difficult map set in a high-end district that also just happens to contain one of the NEP's largest communications arrays. You've been contracted to destroy various NEP structures in the district because they are ruining the client's view.

This map was also very much built with powersuits in mind, and more or less functions as my love letter to the Juke, which I would very highly recommend using here (regular boring non-Juke loadouts are included too). Or, if the Juke isn't your thing, feel free to play it in Freelance with your powersuit/small vehicle of choice instead.

This zip contains two maps, Black Fairy and I'm Not In Love - both have been improved on since their original versions last year, such as a slightly larger map, a new area, changes to enemies, new enemies, and even a playable version of one of the new enemies, complete with custom sprites. Of course, this time around there are more than just Spacers lurking in the forest...

You may notice a brief download for Brigador: Up-Armored Edition if you are on Windows. This is because we have marked the Visual C++ Redistributable 2022 (also includes 2019, 2017 & 2015) on the backend for download. Previously we marked the Visual C++ Redistributable 2019 (also includes 2017 & 2015) on the backend for download.

A redistributable is a library of components required to run Windows applications developed with Microsoft Visual C++, such as the Brigador engine.

Assuming Brigador already runs fine on your computer, no action is required on your part.

No changes to Brigador: Up-Armored Edition have been made (sorry).

In this article a number of words are linked to Wikipedias glossary of computer graphics so that you can follow along without too much interruption.

[h2]A BRIEF LESSON IN COMPUTER GRAPHICS[/h2]
Often we get feedback from players who wish the camera in Brigador could be moved to see different angles of the various models of the vehicles or buildings seen in the environment. We don't wish to disappoint those players but within the game engine this isn't possible because what you are seeing rendered in the game is not a 3D model that can be rotated along any axis. Instead, what you are seeing are (more specifically, you are looking at 2D quadrilateral shapes, and what you are also looking at right now is a flat, two-dimensional screen upon which is a moving image that can create the illusion of depth through particular techniques).

Ironically, how we even make these sprites is initially by creating 3D models, typically through the process of kitbashing (this part of the process we won't go into, and we'll ignore animation rigging too, but feel free to check out this timelapse video for the Pantry Boy vehicle from several years ago that you may not have seen before) usually in 3DS Max. The part we're concerned with comes after a 3D model has been decimated, which is a process that reduces the size of the polygon mesh. Once this happens, we can give the mesh a texture map, which is the point where the model starts to more closely resemble the final product.

Before we do that we'll need UV maps first. A quick way to explain UV mapping is to imagine an animal that has been skinned: our 3D model is the animal and the skin that has been removed from it and can be laid flat is our UV map. Or if you refer to the cube below.



The program we'll use to do this to our 3D model is called Houdini.

To give our UV maps texture information what we then do is take them from Houdini along with the 3D model that was made in 3DS Max into another powerful program called Substance Painter that allows us to detail the materials of the model (for example, how rough a stone looks or how glossy a metallic surface is). We don't have footage of us working on Substance Painter but you can get a good idea of what it's capable of just by looking at this short official video that touches on a lot of what we've just written.[previewyoutube=hZlNwrw-EOo;full][/previewyoutube]At this point we have crafted the shape of our model, peeled off its skin, given it materials to make it resemble the final object, and now we have to take it into a fourth program: Blender. Why we take the textured model into Blender is to do three things. The first is lighting, which we only do a little of. Blender allows us to influence the light-matter interaction, or how 3D models are illuminated a process that is often referred to as baking. The second thing we do in addition to this is framing the 3D model from an angle of our choosing in other words we recreate the same view frustrum that the player will see when playing Brigador. The third and final major thing in the Blender step is we also get depth buffer information, which tells us how far away the model is with respect to the camera's perspective.
[h2]FROM MODELS TO SPRITES[/h2]
We said at the top that in the game you were technically looking at sprites, not 3D models. The basic reason for that is because the game engine is told to display sprites, which in turn spoofs the appearance of 3D models in an apparent isometric perspective. How we get from 3D models to sprites is via open source software a version of which comes included with the Brigador Modkit & Map Editor called SJSpritePacker. What this does is takes the original 3D model and (depending on the model's level of detail) captures up to 64 rotations of all that model's positions and animations at a particular resolution and creates not one but two sheets of sprites along with the XML data for the sheets. Below you will see the sprite sheets for the loyalist infantry NPC (AKA loy_foot_01 AKA Dave), which if you own a copy of the game you can find in the folder Brigador\assets\units\loyalists\foot.



This is where things start to get complicated. In addition, the purpose of the second sprite sheet is it provides z-depth information. The XML data that's outputted for both of these sprite sheets by SJSpritePacker is "pointer data" - this is information that tells the sprites to face the correct direction but before it can do so, it's fed into a .json file, which is the file type the game engine reads for the majority of the game's data.

Lets use another example of how we both use pointer data and slip in an optimization while were at it. Heres a gif of the Arlo agrav from Brigador at twice the usual zoom seemingly turning 360 degrees on the spot. Every single angle of this shot is its own individual sprite, but it is *not* a 3D model rotating in space despite appearances.



Within the games own data youll find rotations of the Arlo, aka spc_agrav_05. However, the sprites below only point to the right. Why? Because we mirror the left-hand side to save on those frames.




Meanwhile what the XML data itself looks like is a list of coordinates that tell which parts of the images above point to where.



Fun fact: at one point early on in development all of this data had to be manually inputted. Fortunately, our artists nowadays have scripts that export the required rotation data automatically.

[h2]WAIT, WHY DOES IT LOOK 3D THEN?[/h2]
Careful readers might be asking why did we go to all the trouble of putting together 3D models, give them detailed materials for their textures, bake in some lighting and not just use those models in the game instead? This question was asked many years ago and was finally answered around the winter of 2012. While Brigador does have a 3D look, it is not 3D. Games that are true 3D are extremely complicated because once you go 3D, now you really are in a situation where the player can view a model from every conceivable angle in a game's environment. Creating such a thing is a considerable undertaking for any studio's engineers and technical artists to deal with, who essentially have to figure out a way for models that are exported in a particular format to be understood by their game engine and also be optimal (i.e. not grind to a crawl and run at single digit FPS). In other words, everything we've talked about so far took five different programs alone: 3DS Max > Houdini > Substance Painter > Blender > SJSpritePacker and that was only for 2D sprites. So, knowing this, and with respect to the amount of time, people, money and energy it would take to make a true 3D Brigador game, hopefully it's clearer now what some of the reasoning was for Brigador's look.

So Brigador's not true 3D and yet visually the game still looks impressive - so what else is going on? Recall the sprite sheets from before that look black and white. Let's look at another one that's only ever seen at one rotation - the orbital cannon (AKA battery_01 in the game data).


The first variant of the orbital cannon you can think of as the diffuse version, while the second is the z-depth information visualized as a grayscale image (where the brightness can be considered as an indication of how close the model is to the camera). The purpose of the latter is to inform the lighting of the Brigador engine against the sprite, which you can see in the final version of the game itself.


Or in motion...



What should be apparent from the above image and the gif is there is additional lighting being displayed on the sprite itself. As it turns out, the Brigador engine is doing two specific things: deferred shading and with it dynamic lighting and this is what we've been building up to this whole time.

We encourage you to read up a little on both topics, because it's a rabbit hole of its own, though we will point out here how even for the mid-2010s, applying deferred shading and dynamic lighting to 3D models was a very expensive thing to do in terms of hardware... except we are not using 3D models in the engine! Remember: the sprites are fundamentally just two-dimensional quadrilateral shapes they are not polygons where every facet would have to be lit properly and because we are able to decouple a scene's geometry from its lighting. Also, because we have the depth information from the z-depth sprite sheet in the XML data, this allows us to put in a bunch of lights into the levels without causing major performance hits and allows the engine to apply dynamic lighting to those sprites. Or, in other words, we can do things like this such as when the effects of an EMP wear off...



Or dynamically light up the player when they fire a railgun shot with the Zeus...



*This* is where the payoff is and why so many people have asked over the years is this 3D?. This might also prompt the question of why other developers dont do this nowadays if its so visually effective. The main culprit is the games industrys pursuit of graphical fidelity in the early 2000s, which meant most people moved on from sprites in favor of full 3D.

So, in summary:

• Nothing is 3D in Brigador we make spritesheets out of 3D models instead
  
• Brigador's custom game engine draws 2D quadrilaterals on screen which are inexpensive to light
  
• Sprite z-depth information informs the lighting and helps spoof a sense of 3D despite the fixed isometric view
  

One of the lesser discussed aspects of Brigador: Up-Armored Edition but what has had a subtle impact on its reach is its localization, so were going to take a look at how Brigador was localized from a technical and linguistic standpoint, and what sort of challenges were posed by doing so.

[h2]SOME THINGS TO NOTE[/h2]

For those unfamiliar, the term localization is often used interchangeably with translation for our purposes when we refer to localization we are talking about the process of both translating a text from its source language into its target language (e.g. from English into French) AND having that translation make sense in the target language. Another way to think about this is localization is not a verbatim, or literal word-for-word process of translation it is the communication of the message of the original text using the target language. We will look at a few examples of this later on.

Second, Brigador was never conceived with localization in mind. The game runs on a custom engine and spent several years in development, first appearing as a closed alpha in 2014, then Early Access in 2015 followed by the initial 1.0 release in June 2016. That whole time it was only ever in English with a very simple menu system. Between 2016 and the 2017 Up-Armored Edition re-release, however, the game was localized into five languages: German, Russian, Japanese, French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese and several more languages would follow in subsequent years.

Third, the word count of Brigador: Up-Armored Edition sits at about fifty thousand words, which, very broadly is about 200 hours worth of work for a single translator, not counting however many hours editors would spend going over the work.

Lastly, we were extremely fortunate to be able to work with some absurdly talented translators without whom this article would not come to be.

[h2]THE TECHNICAL HURDLE(S)[/h2]

Remember how we said Brigador was never conceived with localization in mind? Here are a few important things you need to be aware of if you ever intend to localize a game that doesnt have any sort of localization:

• What fonts and alphabets are currently supported by the games engine?
  
• What are the character limits in the user interface?
  
• Is there any text that gets used in multiple places?
  

to integrate a set of translation libraries.

In more plain terms, everywhere you find text in Brigador with the notable exception of hard art assets like signage in levels or on some loading splash screens for certain locales behind the scenes all of it got ripped out of its original spot and replaced with a string. For example, instead of this equipment entrys title and body:

EMP Grenade

Launches a small yield EMP warhead at low velocity in a high arc. Detonation temporarily disables shielding and drive mechanisms of all vehicles in the blast zone. Anti-grav units with overloaded drives are known to plummet into the ground and nearby friendlies, and radio communications are also rendered inert for a duration.

Particularly effective when used in tandem with artillery or high hull impact munitions.

-Efi

In their place now sat:

abilities.special_ability_emp_01.name

and

abilities.special_ability_emp_01.description

Or visualized side by side in a spreadsheet

A lot of the text entries follow this sort of string-naming scheme and there are roughly 1200 strings that contain Brigadors ~50k word count. What we havent yet explained is why we had to go about ripping out all user interface text and replace it with these string IDs.

In most modern applications, places where text is visible to the end user dont actually contain the raw text. Instead, itll contain some kind of variable (in our case a string or, as can be seen from the screenshot an msgid or Message Identifier) and this is the thing that points to something else that contains the text we want to display. In Brigadors case that something else is what sits in the games \Brigador\assets\text directory:

Seen above are a dozen folders with language codes. Each folder contains an MO file and, unfortunately for the lore hounds out there that want to read all the games text in one go, MO files are not human readable. Fortunately, these files are Brigador readable. They are what the game points to at runtime when you launch Brigador, depending on either your operating systems current language or if you have already switched the games language to something else. To get to this point, a text goes through the following abridged steps starting from the translator:

Translator receives English source text as a document

Translator translates English source text into target language

Translator sends translation back to Stellar Jockeys as a document

Stellar Jockeys copies and pastes the translated text from the document into an alltext master spreadsheet

Alltext master spreadsheet is converted into a csv file, and then into a PO file and then into an MO file

Brigador build is compiled with new MO files included into the packfile and pushed publicly for players to enjoy
This process was repeated for every language. In other words, if we had to hit copy and paste a few hundred times for a language, we had to repeat that copying and pasting ten times more to cover all the current languages. Our producer doesnt have a picture of their old keyboard, but the Ctrl, C and V keys on it were thoroughly worn out by this process.

In addition, it was not trivial to bolt on the localization feature to Brigador because:

No groundwork existed for this feature beforehand it all had to be written fresh which was made harder by the fact that

The game engine is entirely custom written in C++, unlike established industry engines that already boast localization support such as Unreal or Unity, and

At the point of its creation our original engineers had since departed Stellar Jockeys making codebase changes more difficult
Ultimately the localization feature works. We wont dwell too much on the problems, save for answering these questions we posed at the start now that youre armed with some knowledge about the process:

What fonts and alphabets are currently supported by the game engine?

We only supported the Latin alphabet with our set of fonts at 1.0. Nowadays we support Chinese, Japanese and Korean alphabets. Most fonts that support the Latin alphabet usually support characters like diacritics which covers most European languages, even alphabets for Russian and Polish. The fonts used in Brigador are Rubik, Iroha Maru Mikamki and Noto Sans. Rubik supports Latin & Cyrillic, Iroha Maru Mikamki supports Japanese, and Noto Sans supports Simplified & Traditional Chinese and Korean.

What are the character limits in the user interface?

The bulk of Brigadors text is found in the INTEL/ACQUISITIONS lore entries which have plenty of space. Places that had space constraints like the objective counters in a level or SETTINGS menu labels were limited between 10-25 characters including spaces. To know how much space that is at most, type out twenty-five Ws on your keyboard like so:

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

(Capitalized, the letter W is the widest letter in the Latin alphabet)

Remember, this is including spaces. That short sentence you just read was 34 characters including spaces. It is not a lot of room.

Those of you that are experienced in this field might be saying something like Wait, couldnt you just resize the UI elements independently? and if our game were like a lot of other applications, the answer would be Yes, of course we could. Unfortunately, given how simple the menu system is, the localization feature is such that the chosen size for the UI text ends up being global. What that means is attempting to change the size of the text in one place affects the size of all text. Please refer to the GIF below to see this problem visualized.

For languages that are typically 10-20% longer in translation like German or Polish this entailed a lot of truncation in multiple places (usually the SETTINGS menu) because left untruncated the translated text would be illegible either due to running out of bounds or overlapping text on the line below it.

By contrast, Chinese, Korean and Japanese had the opposite problem in that they were typically very compact, which tangentially was a problem for a lot of older generation video games from Japan being localized for Western audiences because their UIs would require significant reworks in order to accommodate an English localization.

Is there any text that gets used in multiple places?

This was another headache. A common trick when creating a user interface is the reuse of the same piece of text in multiple places (for example, the word YES in a confirmation window) meaning you only ever need to create one instance of that text. While we can get away with this in English because YES means a positive response regardless of the question being asked it doesnt always work in other languages. This is because answers to particular questions can vary depending on language (in the sense that translation of the word shouldnt be YES but instead something like CONFIRM or ACCEPT in the target language). Unfortunately, we werent able to give such elements in Brigador their own separate strings, though to the best of our knowledge we largely got away with it, probably because such buttons are rarely encountered in the game.

Despite the localization work being a significant slog, lets try to end this segment on a positive note: it all ends up as text data in binary so the cost of adding localization to Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is ludicrously small, from 550 KB for Traditional Chinese on the low end to 904 KB for Russian at the high end, or about 7.4 MB in total for 50 thousand words repeated 12 different times.

[h2] THE VOICES OF BRIGADOR[/h2]

The process of translating the text was the least of our problems due to Stellar Jockeys producer already having experience in localization. This meant we knew what sort of behavior to expect from our translators and how to provide them with what they might need. With a few exceptions, most of our translators across various time zones were able to reach us via a private channel on our Discord server that wed specifically set up for them. This was where wed answer questions about Brigadors terminology and provide gameplay screenshots or footage where needed.

Projects like these typically end up with a lot of frequently asked questions so its usually a lot more efficient to have everyone in the same room rather than repeating yourself up to eleven times, and often times our translators ended up brainstorming together, even if their target languages were different.

The main task for the translators aside from coming up with cool phrase in target language for a thing was handling the lore entries in Brigador, which are mainly written by three fictional characters who are also unlockable pilots in Freelance mode: Efi (), MB (Marvin Beck), and m.p.C.C. (Cephei Chatfield) and sign off as such at the bottom of each text with a signature. Efi is a gearhead that predominantly writes the weapon descriptions in strict technical detail, MB is a breathless nerd that talks about vehicles in a laidback and sardonic manner, while m.p.C.C. is a spacer putting out dossiers on the pilots for the SNC. Despite appearing in text format only, they are individual characters in their own right, which needed to be reflected in their writing in translation.

The other big challenge boiled down to answering the question of Do we leave it as is or translate it?. This is because terms like "Touro" (literally, Bull), "Novo Exercito de Povo" (New Peoples Army), "Solo Nobre" (Noble Soil) are Portuguese in origin. We left it up to the translators to decide whether such terms be left as is, transliterated or crafted anew. There are ups and downs to whichever choice one makes, but the important thing was to communicate the notion that Novo Solo is a planet that has its own language and culture that was not Anglocentric. This question also extended to campaign mission names that are direct references to actual songs, and to weapon names with nouns like Donkey, Carlos and Otomo. Generally speaking, the further a translation was from English geographically, the more these things tended to be given targeted translations.

Lastly, each language varied in how many translators and editors worked on that language, ranging from just one for French, German and Italian, to almost a dozen on Chinese.

[h2]ANECDOTES FROM THE TRENCHES[/h2]

A number of amusing things from all languages came up during Brigadors localization. Here are a handful.

[h3]FRENCH[/h3]
The original text for Moerbeke Quarters lore description reads in English:

lol yea ve ben to the bek. best ploid n lyears lmfo 100 top ben 2 lng tho try gin soonon

^ dt, som fkin mtdor r sm sht rket th HOLE bek NO bek newer fkn l2pilot knai

-anonymous synchnet postings

To first translate this, we needed to translate what the message even is into plain English. The entry is two comments written on a message board of sorts, but written in SMS-style shorthand. Expanded into normal speech, what Moerbeke is meant to read is as an exchange between two users.

Yeah, I've been to the Moerbeke Quarter. Best I've had in years. I should go back.

About that, I just went - some goddamn pilot wrecked the WHOLE place. No Moerbeke Quarter left! He should learn to drive. Haha.

How this ended up in French was thus:

put1, ete a bek. meilleur ploid dpui D an. imfao top 100. essr 2 revenir bi1to

fpaa. 1 encul de mat a tout KC. ny retourn pa. Apren +to a piloter

- messages synchnet anonymes

We hope this clears up any confusion about what this entry was about for the French native speakers reading.

As for some of the achievement titles in French: Through a Scanner became Substance Mort which is the French title of the Philip K. Dick book; When Im On The Road, Im Indestructible became Je nai besoin de personne en Harley Davidson which is the title of a very famous song by Brigitte Bardot penned by Serge Gainsbourg, and the now-unused Your Own Supply (an achievement for killing yourself with Tubaro but was removed because we can't accurately track damage sources) became Tu payes pas le gaz (literally You dont pay for gas, which is a popular saying in French when someone farts in public).

Our French translator also noted that they didn't translate most of the faction names and left them as is, except for Spacer which became Spacien in French, because it would be more familiar to a French science fiction reading audience. Also, Spacer is the title of a somewhat embarrassing disco effort from a French pop singer back in the late 1970's:

[previewyoutube=8rwaIeMDLxI;full][/previewyoutube][h3]SPANISH[/h3]
Our Spanish translators recalled that translating the Loyalists faction name was a particular bugbear:

The most direct translation Realista was a term used during colonial times in South America and it has the implication of monarchic rule so it was both old-fashioned and misleading so that was a no-go. We then went with fieles al regimen which was closer in spirit but as you might imagine, replacing an adjective with a whole phrase presented some logistical difficulties in some sentences, which ended up extremely ungainly. There were a few scenario briefings where loyalist would appear many times and a longer phrase made the repetition very evident. We spitballed a few alternatives until a few days or so before the deadline, when we were re-reading to check everything was okay. The other translator made the comment that, if you think about it, the 'loyal' part of the term sounds kind of redundant in Spanish, especially since these are the regime's forces after all. So, we went with del regimen, which sounded much better, was as invisible as 'loyalist' in terms of lexical density and repetitions, and it fit perfectly in every single sentence. We went through the whole text again and replaced every instance of fieles al regimen with del regimen and that's how the main enemy faction in Brigador got its localized name like a week before the deadline after months of struggling with finding a good alternative."

[h3]GERMAN[/h3]
Our German translator told us:

I put big emphasis on trying to not make it sound like a translation from English, which is sadly very common in German video game translations nowadays. Leaving most terms and names in English, sentences that clearly still carry the English syntax and going for a lot of the Latin loan word equivalents instead of proper German words... I tried really hard to avoid all of that, and I think as a result the translation did end up having a very peculiar character. Also trying to differentiate the different character voices was fun. Sometimes I wondered if the result was actually good, but whenever I read back the translated text or checked stuff in-game, I found myself pretty captivated and couldn't stop reading it, so I guess at least I think it's good. I do recall a German Let's Play where the guy laughed out loud at my translation Deppenbus for the Shortbus and then called the German translation in general eccentric. I think that's a success!

[h3]ITALIAN[/h3]
Our Italian translator reminisced the following:

I loved translating the mission names! As they're all song titles, sometimes I got creative and spun them around into other music references that, while maintaining the meaning of the original title, also meant something else in Italian. 'I'll Be What I Am' became 'Son Chi Sono' (I Am Who I Am), which is a line that really stuck with me from the Italian version of Cyrano de Bergerac. Also the achievement 'Lore Boar Wants More' became 'Mike of Solo Nobre' in translation, which is a reference to someone called 'Sabaku No Maiku' or 'Mike of the Desert', who is basically Italys VaatiVidya.

[h3]JAPANESE[/h3]
Our Japanese translation was handled fantastically by a couple of workhorses from an established Japanese translation agency. We dont have any comments from them, but we did receive occasionally amazing reviews from Japanese critics, such as this one excerpt from this blog which we enjoyed via machine translation but was kindly translated properly by a twitter user:

Have you ever eaten lasagna made by an American?

What is this clump of lard shaped like the heart of a titan? The Americans call it "lasagna." It's 30% meat and 70% oil and cheese arranged like sediments from 300,000 years ago the color of disgust. The smell, the weight, the size, the sheer look of the thing should tell any sane person that it is not safe for human consumption. It's so fattening you can feel yourself gaining weight just by looking at it. Ramen shot-through with lard and chemical preservatives stands next to lasagna and hangs its head in shame, practically a health food by comparison. That's how rich it is. It goes without saying that I couldn't eat it. It is not a thing that could be eaten. The Americans looked at me sympathetically, devastated that I could not partake in this delicious thing. I did not understand until I played Brigador. Recommending someone play Brigador is like trying to explain why lasagna is actually good to a Japanese person.

[h3]CHINESE[/h3]
The first pass on Chinese that we put out was unfortunately of subpar quality, which we werent aware of until a few negative reviews appeared. Luckily, someone within our community emerged to help us fix the translations and gave everyone else involved some fascinating insights into a number of topics while they were at it.

Regarding their translation of the Johnny Five Aces entry, in Chinese J5A was renamed to (Wxng Wngpi Zhung N) or Five Star Ace Johnny. This had a couple of cultural references to boot, because in Hong Kong, the ace card in poker is called "" (a cigarette). So having four aces would be called "" (or four smokes). Meanwhile the fifth ace here calls forth imagery from a scene in the 1990 Stephen Chow action comedy God of Gamblers II.

The translation for the vehicle name "Propter" ended up something of a conundrum for some of the translators as there was no explicit idea or meaning behind the name, but instead chosen as a just-so articulation of style and how the word sounded. Our Chinese editor christened itor, approximately, Pi Tu.

This phrase carries the meaning of . The Propter is built out of classic cars, so this name should fit with its stylish appearance. Also, the way it's pronounced ("Pi Tu") should be a phonetic match to Propter.

Lastly, our Chinese editor was very proud of their work on Luis Leng who ended up with a proper Chinese name.

It gave me an idea: what if I assign him an actual Chinese name? Leng, , became the surname. As for the first name... Luis is usually translated as (Lys), but a Chinese persons name is mostly two to three characters long (one character for the surname and a two-character first name being the most common) so I needed to twist it a bit. His name ended up as (Lng L Y). I gave the same treatment to Efignia Tseng as well so that shed be called (Cng' ifi), and (ifi) would also take care of her nickname "Efi".

[h2]THERE'S A CONCLUSION?[/h2]

Despite numerous hitches were immensely proud with how the Brigador localization turned out. Its helped the game reach audiences we otherwise wouldnt have been able to if it remained as English alone and its heartened the team to know the appeal of the game is wider than we might have once thought.

For the sequel Brigador Killers (consider wishlisting and following!) we intend to work with many of the same translators again, though we will be retooling the user interface of the next game to better serve localization.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/903930/Brigador_Killers/

Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is on sale this week as part of the War Child Armistice 2022 Steam Sale along with several other titles. The promotion will run until 10:00 PST November 16th and a percentage of each copy sold will go to War Child UK to support children affected by war in Yemen, DRC, CAR, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine.

War Childs statement can be read here and the full list of participating games can be found here.

Even if youve already acquired a copy of Brigador, please consider telling a friend.



https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/

Acknowledgment to Studio ZA/UM (Disco Elysium) for inspiring this post with their own and to mobygames for cataloguing a number of old box arts.

Over the years we have received questions from various people asking where Brigador: Up-Armored Edition came from. If you really want narrow it down to a single genre, were okay with being dropped into the Cassette Futurism bucket but we think it better to give you a list of further reading.

The following is not a comprehensive inventory of every piece of media weve ever consumed, but it should give you an idea of where Brigador came from and might just introduce you to something new.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/


GAMES
Despite appearances, Brigador is not an homage to either EAs Strike Series of games or Future Cop: LAPD. We have nothing against them; weve just never played either. Here are the video games we have played, and are still available to purchase and play on modern operating systems via the magic of DOSBox.

[h2][/h2]

Enormously influential real time strategy. Sometimes we boot it up to hear the eight-minute loop of music again.
[h2]Star Control II by Toys for Bob (1994)[/h2]

Widely regarded as one of the greatest PC games of all time, Star Control II weaved its lore in with its gameplay. Brigador attempts to recreate both, and was inspired by its balance systems in that even the smallest ships could take on much larger opponents.
[h2]Crusader: No Remorse by Origin Systems (1995)[/h2]

An EA game we did play. Featured destructible environments, incredibly awkward controls (by modern standards) and live action FMV. Were still getting round to doing the last one.
TV
[h2]Miami Vice (1984)[/h2]

Legend has it Miami Vice was concepted on a memo that merely read MTV cops. Highly stylized. It was host to an absurd number of celebrity guests over its five seasons, along with some of the best music on television.

FILM
[h2]Escape From New York (1981)[/h2]

Were big fans of John Carpenter and are honored to be living in the time period as he.
[h2]Blade Runner (1982)[/h2]
[previewyoutube=GnyNW8fvRrw;full][/previewyoutube]Mood, Vangelis, worldbuilding where to start?
[h2]Dune (1984)[/h2]

Everything about the first ten minutes of Lynchs Dune left a strong impression.
[h2]Brazil (1985)[/h2]

Have you got a 27B/6?
[h2]Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986)[/h2]

Ron Cobbs work on the first film cannot be overstated and both movies are always worth a rewatch.
[h2]Patlabor 2 (1993)[/h2]

Among other things meticulous thought is given to the settings infrastructure and logistics, and how the mechs are transported and deployed. This aspect is not made explicit in Brigador, but it greatly informs the games level design.
MUSIC
Did you know John Carpenter is an accomplished electronic musician on top of directing some of the best films ever made? His music work informed the atmospherics and tone of Brigador. Heres a Spotify link to his work.

Speaking of playlists, Brigadors campaign mission names are all directly inspired by specific tunes, which weve collected into one 51-track playlist here.

BOOKS
[h2]Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham[/h2]

Essential in thinking about how policies, politics and warfare play out in space, which is something we wanted to reflect in Brigador. Divisions of space, of "real" cities and "illegitimate" squatter constructions directly influenced how Solo Nobre has very dramatic and physical borders delineating the haves and the have-nots.
[h2]Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad[/h2]

Obligatory for many games but especially so for Brigador.
[h2]Generation Kill by Evan Wright & One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick[/h2]

The Lieutenant Fick portrayed in Generation Kill by Wright ended up writing his own, very moving book dramatizing the soldier's perspective.
[h2]Odysseus in America by Jonathan Shay[/h2]

Vital in making sure that even the Brigadors had identifiably human traits.

ARTISTS
[h2]Katsuhiro tomo[/h2]
[previewyoutube=CCMLLBS2PSg;full][/previewyoutube]Best known for Akira, but for our purposes please refer to the Memories anthology from 1995, specifically "Magnetic Rose", and the A Farewell to Weapons short from 2013.

[h2]Kow Yokoyama[/h2]

Last and by no means least: the patron saint of kitbashing. The games various vehicle designs all draw heavy inspiration from Yokoyamas work. Here is a primer on Maschinen Krieger/SF3D.

Were proud to announce that the Deluxe Edition of Brigador (game + four OSTs + audiobook) is part of the Tactical Combat bundle over on Humble this month alongside several other exceptional titles. The full nine-game bundle will set you back 15 USD and a chunk of the proceeds go to charity. Details can be seen on the Humble page here.

Brigador is also on sale on Steam for the same duration, but why not go check out the bundle? For one, our Discord community has been having a blast with Intruder recently, which is also part of the collection. Chances are if youre into Brigador, you might enjoy it too.

Have an excellent summer.

- Stellar Jockeys

• Updated the community modkit to reference the proper splash art. Thanks to pillar of the community SCOREGOBLIN for catching it and providing a fix.
  

We neglected to mention in our recent Steam post that the minor update to Brigador that will change the splash art on launch will also reset your global.json file back to vanilla. This will nullify whatever mods you may have set up or other alterations you have made to the game's data. If you wish to keep your changes, you can back up a copy of your game.

The simplest way to back up a modded version of the game is to make a copy of your Brigador folder somewhere else on your computer. By default on PC this is usually

C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Brigador

If you don't know where your copy of Brigador is on your computer, then:

[h2]OBLIGATORY COMMERCIAL MESSAGING[/h2]
The deluxe edition of Brigador: Up-Armored Edition, which includes our first game, four banger OSTs by Makeup And Vanity Set and our first audiobook will be 57% off until July 7th 2022. Speaking of

[h2]ENJOY THE FIRST HALF OF OUR AUDIOBOOK[/h2]
[previewyoutube=0vQLC6ndrUA;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]
Weve uploaded the first eleven chapters of the Brigador audiobook to our YouTube channel completely for free. Listen to Private Ranulph Kinny get caught up in the violence brought about by the Brigadors in Solo Nobre. If you want the other half, well, we hear theres a sale going on somewhere

[h2]FRIENDSHIP ENDED WITH GRAVE TO THE RAVE[/h2]

Now Blood Anniversary is your new splash art. We are reverting Brigadors launch screen to the Zed Prime vs. Mongoose splash from the Blood Anniversary update. If you would like all our previous splash arts as desktop wallpapers, you can find them in this post from December.

[h2]COMMUNITY COMPILATION FIXED (AGAIN)[/h2]
Due to a change in how the games packfile handles the loading of assets for the Grave to the Rave update, we unintentionally broke some existing fan mods by inadvertently introducing a hard limit on the length of .json filenames. To be clear: modding was and is still functional, but this change meant the Community Compilation we included with the Brigador Modkit & Map Editor wouldnt work properly without manually shortening several filenames... which is exactly what happened! Thanks to the hard work of our community moderators Aniviron and SCOREGOBLIN, the Modkit DLCs Community Compilation has not only had its filenames shortened, but also revised for 2022. Expand the list below to find out what mods will be included in the new Community Compilation:

[expand type=details]
aniviron
- Ball Treads Vehicle Pack (ani_ball_treads)
{Actias, Balder, Busker, Grigori, Hadhrat, Haseki, Hatun, Paver, Rounder, Quill, Rounder, Visch}
Briggs
- Bad Vibrations Level (briggs_badvibrations)
{Bad Vibrations, NPC Packrat, NPC Beefy Killdozer
special thanks to Rifle Infantry for corvid infantry}
- Black Fairy Level Pack (briggs_blackfairy)
{Black Fairy, I'm Not In Love, NPC Ferox, NPC Gremlin, NPC Siren Head, NPC Starmaker, NPC Terraformer}
- Satellite Mind Level (briggs_satellitemind)
{Satellite Mind}
- Self Guided Tours Level (briggs_selfguidedtours)
{Self Guided Tours}
- Corvid Vehicle Pack (briggs_corvid_pack)
{Playable Packrat}
Danon (thedanyourmancouldsmelllike)
- Airburst Weapon Pack
{Hailar, Matomestre 30, Medusa, Romanov, SADBEN, Soixante}
- Danon Weapons Pack
{Ahriman, Ajax, Ande, Archimedes, Ashurbanipal, Cachorro, Deckard, Grounder, Mazdakite, Moran, Nagir, Peregrine, Polyphemus, Pounder, Ticker}
- Danon's Custom Vehicle Pack
{Brutus, Caesar II, Cancind, Clansman, Gerbil, Sorro}
huang (thehuanglong)
- Flamers (huangmods)
{Dante, Henriksen, Houlihan, Lynx, Mr. Crispy, Nando, Nero, Skeet, Toss, Zhurong}
Rifle Infantry
- Solo Nobre Ground Pounders
{Nobre Dave, Custom Infantry Spawnlist, NPC Loyalist Infantry Rebalancce, NPC Corvid Infantry, NPC Spacer Infantry}
[/expand]
The ModKit will be updated to include this compilation soon. If youre new to modding, check out the modding guide below that can introduce you to the basics, or drop by our Discord server.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2464626495

[h2]A DEV STREAM ABOUT BRIGADOR KILLERS YOU PROBABLY MISSED[/h2]
[previewyoutube=u45up4NZ0DY;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]Our gameplay designer Hugh held a four-hour long twitch stream last month, which weve uploaded as a separate VOD onto our YouTube with timestamps for your convenience. In it you will hear the opening chapter of the new Brigador Killers audiobook, a lengthy discussion on the background to Brigadors universe, and a couple of new Makeup And Vanity Set tracks from the BK OST to break things up.

[h2]WAIT, NO SERIOUSLY, WHAT ABOUT BRIGADOR KILLERS?[/h2]


First, yes, Brigador Killers is very much alive. The above splash art (wallpaper version here) is from our first BKTEST; as of time of writing were currently approaching our fourth. Slowly but surely we are getting closer towards something representing a playable beta and eventual demo for you to try out, though it is unlikely to be before the end of 2022.

Second, starting next month we will be posting monthly development updates over on the Brigador Killers news hub. If you wish to receive these updates in your library feed please follow and wishlist our next game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/903930/Brigador_Killers/

Third, as part of that initial post send us your questions about Brigador Killers. Leave them as a comment below this post and well answer them in the first BK update in July.

Finally, we only teased one BK GIF last time, so here's two. The first is of a spacer Rounder tank making a mess of a Mar Nosso police checkpoint...

...the second is of an uprezzed Betushka blowing up one of those Rounders from a recent test build.


Thank you all for reading, see you next month, and enjoy the Steam Summer Sale in the meantime.

Following an influx of recent signees to the Brigador Action Agreement, the SNC Informatics Division has been tasked with providing a brief informational pamphlet for new Contractors (hereafter referred to as Brigadors). The following selected material for said pamphlet has met the approval of the Informatics Committee in its second reading and is now ready for distribution.

===

[h2]CONTROL SCHEMES[/h2]

Brigadors are reminded that multiple movement options are available for tanks and mechs as well as agravs. At any time Brigadors can adjust the movement schemes of vehicles to one of five types. Please refer to SETTINGS > GENERAL > TANK & MECH MOVEMENT/AGRAV MOVEMENT for detailed descriptions on all five types.


[h2]EQUIPMENT UTILITY[/h2]

Specific armaments are effective against certain targets. When selecting weapons for Freelance operations, Brigadors may consider a secondary piece of equipment to quickly deal with hostile forces that have large shield pools before deploying a primary weapon. Examples: EMP Grenade, Lockdown, Disco, Broiler, Archie, Chieftain.


[h2]CLOSE QUARTERS ENCOUNTERS[/h2]

Ammunition supplies may be limited on longer operations. The majority of vehicles available to Brigadors come with a close combat component; all mechs and agravs can stomp onto hostile forces, while tanks can bull rush through them. By default, this action is bound to SPACEBAR.


[h2]COVERT ACTIONS[/h2]

Upon deploying into a mission, hostile forces are not immediately aware of the presence of Brigadors. However, dedicated spotter units may alert other hostile forces, causing them to raise their shields and negatively affect a Brigadors obligations to the Solo Nobre Concern. Spotter units can be discerned via either a blue eye icon, or an orange radio tower icon if in the process of contacting dispatch. Proper use of flanking and cover to break line of sight is advised.


[h2]DIVERSIONARY TACTICS[/h2]

Brigadors seeking to ignore covert actions entirely are advised to make use of the presence of fuel processing and distribution facilities found all over Solo Nobre. While Brigadors are reminded of their obligation to the demolition of municipal infrastructure, carefully-timed destruction of these structures may draw hostile forces away from guarding primary targets.


[h2]FRIENDLY FIRE[/h2]

Munitions fired by either hostile forces or Brigadors do not discriminate on where they land. When direct skirmishes occur with hostile forces, Brigadors may exploit the asymmetry in order to inflict casualties on lesser units during crossfire exchanges.

===

The SNC Informatics Division concludes this informational pamphlet with the suggestion of consulting further reading on the above topics in the following Guide section

- SNC Informatics Division

Graphics:

• High resolution fix for Retina devices on Monterey. Thanks to Obli on the Steam forums for your help in finding a solution.
  

• Added safeties on savegame serialization, to avoid potential platform-specific corruption
  
• Saves disabled on overmaps with only one node
  

• Fix autoturrets not initializing in campaign missions.
  

Back in our October update news post we wrote that wed set aside time for another update to our first game, Brigador. We have instead focused the rest of our 2021 energies on Brigador Killers development. As developers, we think this is the more responsible thing to do, because if were going to send Brigador off into the sunset, wed much rather it be with the boom of an Audio Kinetic Pulse than the pfft of a Smoke Launcher. We hope you understand. However, that's not all we have for you today.

[h2]BEARING GIF(T)S[/h2]
Speaking of Brigador Killers, heres a sneak peek at one of the things we've been working on for it...

Disclaimer: this is still a work in progress but its exciting for things to start to come together.

[h2]MERCH SALE UNTIL 2021 IS OVER[/h2]
Next, we have a sale on over on our merchandise store all December long. Enter promocode HOLIDAYS2021 at checkout, or just click this link to get 20% off your next order. T-shirts, lighters, busts and more are all on sale until the end of the year.

N.B. minimum order value of 8 USD required. Promotional code is active from the moment you read this until 23:59 CST, December 31st, 2021.

[h2]TAKE A TRIP DOWN SPLASH ART MEMORY LANE[/h2]
Third: a message from the rest of the devs. Please enjoy.
===
Though there will not be a December update, we wanted to say THANK YOU to all the dedicated fans and players of Brigador. People are as vocal and enthusiastic about the game as we've ever seen and it's been out for six years, which is humbling to say the least.

We figured the least we could do is gather together the surprisingly numerous splash art we've used over the years in one place, with a developer comment on each of them.

Pre-Early Access splash screen, the rarest of them all. Still had a lot to learn about splash art both from a marketing and design perspective. Always annoyed that you couldn't see all of the Touro, and the Spacers coming out across a flat plane, while accurate to the game, looks a little amateurish. Got some practice photoshopping the Touro, though.

The Early Access to 1.0 release "Road" splash. Wanted to show off the Touro's entire design and accomplished that, but the rest of the splash doesn't really tell you much about the game. A little too moody and dark, too much left to implication. Ironically, despite stringent scale control for all the in-game assets, I'm not entirely sure if the road is to scale.

We wanted to get more eyeballs on this game, so we ended up with a very colorful new splash art. While still too busy and not entirely communicative about the game, I still really like the neon and the human element the Modesto portrait brings to this splash, which is important when the game's camera is so far away from the action.

Our first major update after 1.0, the Halloween 1.12 Update that introduced players to The Auditor, Marie Locke, and Man From Volta. This and the prior version of this splash maybe goes a little too hard in the other direction (VISUAL EXCITEMENT!) but I'm happy that The Auditor got such a flashy introduction.

The Up-Armored Edition was a big win for us, both for the company but also in learning how better to show what the game is about with the splash art. Far less busy than the preceding "neon" splashes, the Up-Armored splash is the first to actually depict a scene from the game with more detail and focus on what the game's actually about. We also learned that you need to have lots of different crops/aspect ratios for splash art, and this design reflects that.

The Up-Armored Edition splash reigned for quite a long time until we realized it was time for another big update, both to improve the game and celebrate a big milestone, hence Blood Anniversary.

A big step forward both compositionally and technically, we used completely new rendering and texturing techniques to try and get people excited about coming back to Brigador with new content and new features. We saw a tremendous response as a result.

Blood Anniversary Pt 2 saw the release of the mysterious Mother's Love, a design we wanted to show off in dramatic fashion, while re-using the scene built for the Pt 1 splash. Inspired by the future war sequences of Terminator 1 and 2, naturally.

Grave To The Rave Update felt like coming full circle, as the first Halloween Update for Brigador was the first major content update the year of the 1.0 release. Wanted to celebrate with a dramatic and grimy, grindhouse-poster like depiction of Precursor James.
===
Feel free to download the splash arts in a desktop wallpaper-friendly format:

• Standing on Touro (Early Access)
  
• Touro on Road (Pre 1.0)
  
• Modesto 1.1 (2016)
  
• Auditor 1.12 (Halloween 2016)
  
• Up-Armored Edition (2017)
  
• Blood Anniversary Tease (2021)
  
• Blood Anniversary With Text (2021)
  
• Blood Anniversary No Text (2021)
  
• Mother's Love No Text (2021)
  
• Grave To The Rave With Text (2021)
  
• Grave To The Rave No Text (2021)
  

Welcome to the Grave to the Rave Update for Brigador: Up-Armored Edition on PC, Mac and Linux! Without further ado lets get into it.

[h2]NEW FREELANCE OPERATION[/h2]
It turns out a number of you really liked the auto-firing weapons on ultra class vehicles in the last update. With that in mind we ran a mapping competition via our Discord which has resulted in the Grave To The Rave operation for Freelance mode. Be warned: unlike other freelance runs, this one is configured to be tackled by Ultra-class vehicles because more enemies will spawn. Will you make it out alive?

Special thanks to Aniviron, Briggs, Cosmic Crow, SCOREGOBLIN and Commander for their efforts.

[h2]RESIGN & RESUME IN FREELANCE[/h2]
Following many requests, the game will now save your progress to disk if you resign from a Freelance run after completing one or more of the maps in that run for that specific operation. A freelance op that has its progress saved is marked with an asterisk after the name.

Please note that this is only visible in the OPERATIONS tab of Freelance mode. If youre resuming a run after some time, dont worry about replicating your exact loadout the save file keeps all that. You just have to navigate over to that last tab and click the marked run to retrieve the saved data. More details on how this feature functions can be read in the Full Changelog at the bottom of this post.

So, if youve been angling to finally take on Closed Casket Special but not had the time to do so, you can completely quit the game and resume your run at a later point.

[h2]UI COLOR CUSTOMIZATION[/h2]
A new SETTINGS menu tab has appeared titled INTERFACE COLORS

This allows you to change the RGBA value of almost all of the UI text elements (exceptions being hard assets like the images for specials) to whatever color you want. Want to just make your ammo counters brighter, or the objective messages obnoxious neon green? Be our guest.

The ability to change these colors via the global.json in the debug menu already existed weve just made a lot of them available on the front end. If you end up making your UI into a completely unreadable mess, you can restore the default color values by clicking RESTORE DEFAULTS under the GENERAL tab though please note that currently this will also restore other defaults like audio levels and monitor resolution (if things get really bad and you cant even see your UI anymore then use the debug menu check out section 4 of our modding documentation to learn how).

[h2]MOVEMENT TWEAK[/h2]
A value that affects how vehicles reverse while using one of the Absolute control methods (or twin stick style) has finally been added for all player-controlled vehicles. This means that if you have the REVERSING WITH ABSOLUTE toggle on while using your Absolute control method of choice, all vehicles will now be consistent in how they reverse.

[h2]MODKIT UPDATED (FINALLY)[/h2]
Our official set of modkit tools had been unusable since version 1.5c i.e. prior to Blood Anniversary update this has now changed. The reason for this is during Blood Anniversarys development we were frequently adding new assets to the games packfile (the unpacked version of this file is one of things thats in the modkit tools), so rather than a leapfrogging process of updating the game, then updating the modkit, then updating the game again and then updating the modkit again we shelved it until things were stable. Within the modkit you will also find an updated community compilation and a readme.txt explaining the installation process.
N.B. to Mac users - due to reasons beyond our control (see a previous update post for context), it is unlikely that Mac users will be able to mod their copy of the game.

[h2]MORE TO COME?[/h2]
This is our penultimate update to Brigador: Up-Armored Edition. We are setting aside time for one more update of similar scale for the winter holidays, after which we hope to finally consider our first game as feature-complete and focus on exclusively developing our second game Brigador Killers, which you can help us out by wishlisting.

Full Changelog
[expand type=details]
[h3]Game[/h3]

• Updated to version 1.63 Grave To The Rave for Windows, Mac & Linux
  
• Six map long non-linear ultra-class focused operation Grave to the Rave added to Freelance mode, featuring: Fallow Junction, Bereavement Zone, Soberano Base, Edy & Lazar Private Mausoleum, Mass Grave and The Last Stop Spaceport
  
• Resign & resume (save) function added to Freelance mode
  
• Resign & resume only works for one operation at a time
  
• Dying mid-run or successfully completing a run will delete the save file
  
• The operation save file is stored as a file titled sv and is found in the same folder as the games .exe e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Brigador
  
• Yes, you can back up this sv file and overwrite it if youve been having a good run but then Bad Things Happen; No, you will not be penalized by us for doing so
  
• Do not lose or delete your profile.json between resigning and resuming a run this will likely affect your ability to select the operation marked with an asterisk
  

• Forward pref ratio added to all playable vehicles allowing for consistent vehicle behavior when reversing while using Absolute control schemes
  

• New welcome screen text added
  
• New splash screen added
  
• All new interface texts localized into all 11 additional locales
  

• INTERFACE COLORS tab added to SETTINGS containing the RGBA values of most of the games UI text elements
  

• Modkit & Map Editor DLC should now be functional with Brigador version 1.63
  
• Community compilation updated
  

• Start a thread on our Technical Issues subforum (please read this pinned thread for the specific details to include in your message)
  
• Check out our #bug-reports channel on our Discord server.
  

A crash bug slipped by us, so I've reverted the update to the previous known good build, from August 10. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We'll fix the bug and put the modkit back up next week.

Vehicle Handling:

• Tweaked the forward pref ratio for all vehicles; Brigadors using SCREEN ABSOLUTE control schemes are now able to reverse. Please use this newfound power with responsibility.
  

• Revert sprite drawing changes which were causing performance hits on older systems
  
• Minor improvements to drawing player sprite
  

• Updated modkit and community compilation to v2. This should enable modding of Brigador after the Blood Anniversary changes. Please see /modkit/readme.txt for updated instructions, or visit the #maps-and-modding channel in our Discord for further help.
  

Mac Platform:
- Corrected a build tools error which led to achievements being temporarily disabled on Steam for Mac users. Thank you to members of our Discord who were instrumental in reporting the problem.

Menu Links:
- Discord invite link updated. If you had clicked the "Feedback" button and saw an "Invalid invite" link in the last day or two, please try it again.

ZED SPEAKS AGAIN:

• "Rebuke" horns (horns with a vocal component) should once again be audible.
  

• Hitting the "Randomize" option should no longer assign you easter egg content when easter egg content has been disabled. SNC Obligate Munitions tenders its apologies.
  

Achievements:

• * BLOOD ANNIVERSARY PT. 2, SMALL STAKES, ON A SWIVEL, and NO PLAN SURVIVES should now count the relevant equipment accurately & trigger correctly. We've spoken to the Auditor, who insists that it was reality which was mistaken.
  
  Note: If you've already unlocked all the relevant vehicles or weapons, you should earn these achievements the next time you play the game after updating. Please ensure that you've received the update by checking the main menu: the string at the top of the screen should read "BRIGADOR v1.62 - b15fc4e5". If it shows a different string, please make sure you are on the default branch, and restart Steam or verify the game files to trigger the update. (Verifying the files will reset the game files to a vanilla state and clear any installed mods.)
  
  
• * NOT ONE STONE target earning amount lowered to 1 million credits, rather than the previous amount of 10 million. The SNC wishes contractors to be enfranchised in any destruction strategy they wish to adopt in the name of colonial liberation. The SNC also tenders its congratulations to those Brigadors who created such extraordinary destruction over the last four years.
  

• * The console now displays a useful amount of the log history, instead of "hardly any"
  
• * Console should scroll normally again (some edge cases are still being addressed)
  

As mentioned in our previous post, The Blood Anniversary follow-up patch is now ready. Thank you to everyone who left feedback on our forums and our Discord. Before we get to what's new, we know a lot of you have also been asking for wallpapers of the new splash screens. Here are wallpapers in 2560x1440 for the Mongoose vs Zed Prime and Mother's Love.

[h3]MOTHER'S LOVE[/h3]

An all-new vehicle is available for purchase in ACQUISITIONS for use in Freelance operations. The SNC Informatics Division and its consultants are uncertain as to its origins, but underlined several times that it has multiple autofiring turrets.

[h3]VEHICLES[/h3]
Several more vehicles have been balanced for play in Freelance operations, such as Loyalist Agravs the Rook and the Schultz, and the Spacer Cataphract.

[h3]FREELANCE[/h3]
The new powersuit-focused maps added in the previous patch to Campaign mode are now available for use in Freelance, while the level layout on SCANDAL NIGHT has been revised. Wildcard spawnlists will be adjusted soon in an upcoming hotfix - apparently some of you weren't thrilled with fighting dozens of Buckmasters all armed with railguns, especially as the Auditor (who's only ever meant to encounter civilians).

[h3]BUGS[/h3]
Scroll down to see the full list of bugs in the changelog, but the major ones in brief:

• Level loading times should be much faster if you have VSYNC enabled
  
• Your profile.json that tracks your progress now backs up to a special folder (apologies again to the various users that lost progress with the last update)
  
• Scaling issue on Macs with Retina displays has been addressed
  
• Easter Egg meat guns now shoot meat as originally intended
  

• Updated to version 1.62 The Blood Anniversary
  
• The powersuit-focused Campaign missions WE USED TO WAIT, IRIAN JAYA, SCANDAL NIGHT and SURF SOLAR have been added to Freelance mode.
  
• Eleven vehicles are now available for purchase to play in Freelance mode: Schultz and Rook (Loyalist); St. Benjamin, Boris and Stepper (Corvid); Hatun, Visch, Balder, Cataphract and Lexov (Spacer), and Mother's Love (Unknown)
  
• Two vehicles now have auto-firing turrets installed: Mother's Love and Cataphract.
  
• Casings now spawn from a weapon's ejector mount
  
• Playing as the Auditor pilot no longer spawns hostile units
  
• (Coming in hotfix) Added more variations to wildcard spawns at max difficulty
  
• Detonation ranges on Seeker, Grigori, Civilian & Roadie kamikaze units increased from 2.0 to 2.6
  
• Several balance changes (please refer to change log thread for full list)
  

• Improved level loading speeds while VSYNC is enabled
  
• Added refresh rate detection for improved loading speeds on high-refresh monitors
  
• Profile.json now backs up to the bckup/ folder
  
• FPS limit can be set at launch with '--maxframerate #' as a launch option (where # is a number)
  
• High-firing arc weapons should no longer "snap back" at a certain range and explode at the player's feet
  

• Auto-firing guns now show up in the loadout preview
  

• Lighting revised to be more legible on: lighting_dark_special_01, lighting_day_special_02, lighting_sunsetrise_fog_02, lighting_sunsetrise_special_02, lighting_twilight_fog_02 and lighting_seg_scandalnight
  

• Double clicking now purchases items in Freelance mode
  

• Audio levels of the horns for the Canary, Zed Prime & Leviathan have been increased
  

• (Coming soon) Modkit & Map Editor DLC updated
  
• Dumping packfile and regenerating no longer causes crashes
  
• Increased number of guns mechs can have from 8 to 9
  
• Increased number of lights mechs can have from 16 to 32
  
• Guns are now assigned to a mech via a selector menu, rather than a raw text input, in the F1 debug panel
  

• Start a thread on our Technical Issues subforum (please read this pinned thread for the specific details to include in your message)
  
• Check out our #bug-reports channel on our Discord server.
  

Welcome to The Blood Anniversary update for Brigador: Up-Armored Edition! Today we celebrate our fifth anniversary since our 1.0 launch with new visual effects, new content and a very special week-long sale of 66% off everything that ends June 14th 10:00 Pacific Time. Whether you only just discovered us in the past year, or have been following the game all the way since its closed alpha in 2014 - thank you.

[h3]BLOOD[/h3]
Non-mechanical NPCs now meet a more obviously gruesome end



You may find that the first campaign level Awake On Foreign Shores will now feel a little different to play (this feature can be toggled on/off in SETTINGS).

[h3]CRATERS[/h3]
Several weapons will now leave impact craters on the ground tiles in levels (this feature can be toggled on/off in SETTINGS).



But wait there's more

[h3]PILOTS[/h3]
We spoke to our friends at Fractal Softworks and Consumer Softproducts, who have informed us that three new Brigadors are available for Freelance operations. Spoilers ahead, only click if you want to know before booting up.

[expand type=spoiler]
ATTENTION CITIZENS
Word of the Brigador contract has reached the Persean Sector. While their gates might not currently be functioning, the SNC has arranged... other means of transport for two pilots of note to fulfill their contractual duties.


The first is former logistics officer-turned-head of a powerful pirate dynasty, Warlord Kanta, while the second hails from the barren-bombarded world of Epiphany, Brother Livewell Cotton.

Also joining the Freelance roster...



MT Foxtrot has been given some downtime off-world by his handler in Cruelty Squad, but it seems this guy just doesn't want to take a break.

Each pilot exclusively encounters what we call "wildcard" spawns. Runs with these pilots are aimed at those looking for... variety.

Many thanks to the teams at Fractal Softworks & Consumer Softproducts for the cameos! Starsector is still in development and not on Steam, but can be bought at a discount from its own site.



Meanwhile Cruelty Squad has its own store page, is also running a discount, and will be turning 1.0 very soon.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/

We see a lot of overlap in our respective fan bases, so if you've never heard of Starsector or Cruelty Squad - check them out!

[/expand]
These guest cameo pilots will all exclusively fight wildcard spawnlists if you choose them as your pilot in Freelance mode.

[h3]CAMPAIGN[/h3]
Four optional missions have been added to Campaign mode that are powersuit-focused (completion of these missions is not required to progress the campaign).



[h3]FREELANCE[/h3]
All runs in Freelance now have a chance to spawn a "wildcard" list of enemies during play. Previously, the game would pick a faction to spawn and choose a palette of enemy vehicles for that faction, while the difficulty of that palette would be according to both your run progress and pilot choice.

Wildcard spawnlists still pick a faction, but on a particular theme. For example, a Spacer wildcard spawnlist might be a couple of boss vehicles, with a swarm of kamikaze agravs in tow, while a Corvid wildcard spawnlist would be almost all fast vehicles like tread bikes and grav bikes.

With this change we hope to introduce more variety to Freelance runs and keep players on their toes.

[h3]VEHICLES[/h3]
The Zed Prime is now available for use in Freelance mode. It is an Ultra-class agrav with twin heavy hardpoints. Please be sure to keep an eye on your ammo count when using double Otomos.



Currently, eleven more vehicles are now available for play (we will be adding more playable vehicles to the roster in a follow-up patch later this month). Meanwhile, several vehicles - like the Corvid Rat King, the Loyalist Monarch and the Spacer Usul - now have additional auto-firing turrets.



Auto-firing weapons have a separate ammo count in green and do not affect your primary and secondary weapon choices. You can toggle the auto fire function on and off by pressing V on your keyboard, which can be rebound in SETTINGS.

[h3]LORE[/h3]
The SNC Informatics Division notes the addition of new material, available for perusal in the INTEL section of ACQUISITIONS, pending the transfer of necessary funds.



[h3] LIGHTING [/h3]
Prior to 2017's Up-Armored Edition, the game had different lighting for Freelance levels. We have included the old lighting data for these levels which you can toggle to via the new USE OLD LIGHTING option in SETTINGS.



In order to apply old lighting, you will need to restart a level via the pause menu.

[h3]CHEATS & EASTER EGGS [/h3]
You can now activate various cheats via the SETTINGS menu. Please note that using these toggles will disable achievements. The Easter Eggs toggle you see in the Settings menu will become fully functional later this month in a follow up patch.

[h3]ACHIEVEMENTS[/h3]
Two new achievements have been added, which will be bestowed upon you pending completion of the new campaign missions, as well as unlocking all the new additions to ACQUISITIONS. As of time of posting, the new achievements may not yet be fully functional - we are working on addressing this.

[h3]STABILITY & PERFORMANCE[/h3]
We have made some performance improvements to the engine that should hopefully impact lower-end machines. With the assistance of our community, we have also done a more thorough benchmarking of the game's hardware requirements on PC and Linux. The game's minimum specs to get an acceptable constant 60 fps at 720p (providing you turn off VSYNC, set NORMAL DETAILS to Low and turn off both POINT SHADOWS and DIRECTIONAL SHADOWS) on Windows are now:

OS: Windows 10
Processor: Dual core CPU with Passmark score of 2900 or more
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: AMD Radeon 5770 / NVIDIA GTX 460 or better
Storage: 1 GB available space

OS: Debian 10 or Ubuntu 20.04
Processor: Dual core CPU with Passmark score of 2900 or more
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: AMD Radeon 5770 / NVIDIA GTX 460 or better
Storage: 1 GB available space

• Apple declared in mid-2018 that it has stopped supporting OpenGL which is the graphics library that Brigador relies on
  
• In 2020, Apple announced it was making a major shift from Intel processors to ARM-M1 CPUs
  

• Updated to version 1.6 The Blood Anniversary
  
• Non-mechanical NPCs now leave a bloody mess on death
  
• Several weapons now leave impact craters on ground tiles
  
• Three new unlockable pilots added to Freelance: MT Foxtrot, Warlord Kanta and Brother Livewell Cotton
  
• Four new powersuit-focused missions operations added to Campaign mode: WE USED TO WAIT, IRIAN JAYA, SCANDAL NIGHT and SURF SOLAR
  
• Eleven vehicles are now available for purchase to play in Freelance mode: Monarch, Pellinore, Leviathan, Blackjack, Coffin, Usul, Widow, Zed Prime, Longboard, Brunhilde, and Fafnir
  
• Twelve vehicles now have auto-firing turrets installed: Monarch, Leviathan, Citadel, Rat King, Julius, Blackjack, Dragon, Usul, Aetos, Widow, Brunhilde, and Fafnir.
  
• "Brigadors" unlockable lore entry added to ACQUISITIONS
  
• Several balance changes (please refer to change log thread for full list)
  

• XNA Framework Redistributable 4.0 added to address launch issues with Windows 10 computers
  
• 64 bit builds for Windows, Mac & Linux
  
• Increased performance now that prop sprites update to only update props on screen (instead of whole level)
  
• Increased performance now that mech AI collision avoidance upper bound has been lowered
  

• Splash screen on startup changed
  
• In-game UI should now scale with the UI scale setting
  
• A new method to add long text strings to the game has been added (this will be detailed in our modding guide later)
  
• New welcome screen text and three new loading screen messages added
  
• All new interface texts localized into all 11 additional locales
  
• Credits updated
  

• New AUTO FIRE TOGGLE bind available in SETTINGS > BINDS
  
• EASTER EGGS, DISABLE GRAPHIC CONTENT, DISABLE DAMAGE EFFECTS and USE OLD LIGHTING toggles added to SETTINGS
  
• INVINCIBILITY, INVISIBILITY, REDUCED ENEMY AGGRO and INFINITE AMMO cheat toggles added to SETTINGS
  

• Audio levels of particular horn noises have been tweaked
  

• Modkit & Map Editor DLC is temporarily not functional - it will be updated to work with version 1.6 in a follow up patch in the coming weeks
  
• Packfile memory allocation increased by at least 40 MB
  
• Added various spatial overrides for gib data
  

• Start a thread on our Technical Issues subforum (please read this pinned thread for the specific details to include in your message)
  
• Check out our #bug-reports channel on our Discord server.
  

ATTENTION ALL MODDERS
A detailed changelog will come with the update to Brigador: Up-Armored Edition itself, but like with our last update in December 2020, the update is going to affect both the game's assets packfile and reset the global.json to the intended state. This will nullify whatever mods you may have set up or other alterations you have made to the game's data. Click below to find out how to back up a copy of the game.

How to Back Up Brigador
[expand type=details]
The simplest way to back up a modded version of the game is to make a copy of your Brigador folder somewhere else on your computer. By default on PC this is usually

C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Brigador

If you don't know where your copy of Brigador is on your computer, then:

Were running a week-long sale on Brigador and all its content from Monday April 19, 2021 to Monday April 26, 2021. Picking up the deluxe edition of Brigador at 57% off will net you:

• 1 x Brigador: Up-Armored Edition by Stellar Jockeys
  
• 1 x audiobook tie-in written by Brad Buckmaster & read by Ryan Cooper
  
• 4 x albums of original music by Makeup & Vanity Set (available as mp3s or FLACs)
  

• Start tinkering with Brigador via the debug panel or get serious with the map editor. Heres documentation to get you started.
  
• Check out our Discord server to find a selection of fan art, uploads by modders, and catch up on the events of the latest Brigador Discord RP (thanks, @Eschaton!).
  
• Support us further by buying merch like an SNC shirt or 3D-Printed 1/6 Scale Model Busts from our shop.
  
• Sing up to our monthly newsletter to see what weve been up to and a selection of the best from the community (here's the archive)
  

Happy holidays, everyone! Just a quick reminder to you all that the Steam Winter Sale ends on January 5th at 10:00 Pacific. As per usual, Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is 55% off, while the game + OSTs + audiobook bundle is even cheaper.

Outside of Steam we have a whole bunch of discounts going on over at our merch store. In no particular order:

• Enter code HOLIDAYS2020 in all caps at checkout for 20% off all products (minimum order value of one patch required). This offer expires January 8th 2021.
  
• New 1/6 Scale Model Busts - check out the first set of Modesto Pires, Ripley Snell and The Auditor 1/6 Scale busts here. Put all three in your basket and well give you 15 USD off your order (N.B. sorry in advance but this discount will not stack with the holiday promotion in one single order).
  
• Low Profile variants are now available for the SNC shirt and patch - and there's also a new corvid patch too.
  
• For the next few days all SNC Skull & Laurel shirt sizes, shapes and colors are available for purchase. That means if you missed out on getting a Medium Red & Charcoal, or maybe you really want a few 3XLs for the winter nows your chance.
  

A small user interface update is coming to Brigador: Up-Armored Edition, but we wanted to give you all advance notice, particularly if you have been modding the game recently.

There are no gameplay changes involved with this update. The main change is the addition of a few buttons to the main menu screen that upon clicking will open your computer's default web browser.

[h2]IMPORTANT NOTE FOR ALL MODDERS[/h2]
This update will restore the game's assets packfile to its vanilla state. That means that if you have modded content installed, such as custom pilot profile pictures, then they won't load as before as they will no longer be in the assets packfile. This means you will have to run through the modkit installation process again and make the necessary changes. We strongly recommend that you back up all your modded content and changes made to global.json to avoid losing anything prior to updating the game. Many of our experienced users in our Discord server's modding channel can help you out if you need assistance.

- Stellar Jockeys

Hey everyone! It's sale time once again, which means you can get the full Deluxe Edition bundle of the game + all OSTs + audiobook at 71% off for the duration of Steam's 2020 Halloween Sale.

We've also put together some detailed Brigador Modding Documentation that we hope will be of use to aspiring modders. Please feel free to leave your questions in the Steam forum thread - we will expand on it over time (you can find the google doc version here).


(image credit: Hara)

Hey everyone! We're proud to put Brigador: Up-Armored Edition up for sale again.

Just like previous promotions, the base game is 55% off, but if you want to treat yourself then the deluxe bundle of the game including all four Makeup And Vanity Set music albums and the audiobook by Brad Buckmaster is 71% off until 10:00 PST September 28th.

We'd also like to take a moment to shout out MandaloreGaming on YouTube, who made an incredible video on the game back in June - we're still picking through the thousand or so new reviews since the review boom. If you didn't catch it, check it out and leave Mandalore a like and subscribe!

[previewyoutube=5bp3ivWv7Vs;full][/previewyoutube]

We are delighted to have been selected for the Indie Mega Booth Going Away (For Now) Sale which runs for one whole week starting today. You can buy Brigador: Up-Armored Edition at 55% off, while the Deluxe Edition Bundle that includes the OSTs and audiobook along with the game is at an even larger discount.

In addition, we'll be streaming live from our Steam page on both Friday 8th and Saturday 9th from 15:00 to 17:00 PST. Join the stream to chat with us as we head into the weekend.

Brigador is part of the "Deliciously Difficulty" category of the IMB sale. All the other categories along with the full list of games in the IMB sale can be seen here on the IMB site.

You can now take part in the Powersuit Mini-Map Contest thanks to the efforts of our Discord community. In this contest your goal is to make a single short traditional campaign-style mission tailored for mog-scale combat on unusually small maps, so make every tile count!

Your four powersuit-sized loadouts are:

• Fick's Dorothy, a mouseholing brawler equipped with an Archie, Temblor, and smoke.
  
• Costa's Fence, a silent, deadly, CQB specialist equipped with a Black Hand, Donkey, and active camo.
  
• Salazar's Rope Kid, a hit-and-run harasser equipped with a Crambo, Carlos, and EMP.
  
• Aein's Paver, a trickster well-versed in the world's deadliest game of hide-and-go-seek, equipped with two fakers and active camo.
  

• One map submission per participant
  
• Map dimensions may not exceed 60x60 tiles in total
  
• Map must stipulate one objective (captains, garrison or buildings of your choice)
  
• At least one map exit
  
• Map must be completable with all four loadouts
  
• Map must feature some kind of enemy resistance
  
• Title, music, banner, difficulty, enemy faction(s), visual theme etc. are up to mapmaker
  
• Submissions should be sent to @SCOREGOBLIN via Discord on or before May 31st.
  

Drop by our booth at PAX East 2020 in Boston, MA, from Thursday February 27th to Sunday March 1st. We'll be personally demoing Brigador Killers as well as talking to fans and showing off prototypes of future merchandise, so come and see us! Our booth is number #30041, and here's where you'll find us.



During PAX East we'll be having a fan meetup in Boston on one of the evenings. Be sure to keep an eye on the community announcements channel on our Discord server for details.

We'll have plenty of news about Brigador Killers later this year, and in case you missed it there's already a Steam store page. Please wishlist it to give us a boost in visibility!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/903930/

See you in Boston!

We have updated the Brigador OST and Audiobook to use Steam Soundtracks! If you owned the Brigador Deluxe DLC, they are now available in your Steam Library under "Soundtracks". As an added bonus, we've also added lossless versions of each of the Makeup and Vanity Set albums, which will be automatically downloaded alongside the MP3s. If you haven't had a chance to pick up the Deluxe DLC, each of the OST albums now has individual entries:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1239510/Brigador__Vol_I/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1239511/Brigador__Vol_II/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1239512/Brigador__Uplink_EP/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1239513/Brigador__UpArmored_EP/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1239514/Brigador__Audiobook/

Current owners of the Deluxe DLC still own all of the above - they have simply changed formats from a type of DLC to a Steam Soundtrack, meaning each album should appear as its own entry directly in your Steam library.

Also now available is a bundle of all of the above with Brigador: Up-Armored Edition. With the launch discount, this complete bundle of the game + albums + audiobook gives you 49% off everything.

To make sure that you'll get the high-quality FLAC versions of the albums, go to Steam > Settings > Music and check the box marked Download high-quality audio files (you may need to restart Steam for it to work).

The 40% launch discount on the albums and audiobook expires February 18th. After this date, the complete bundle of the base game and the albums and audiobook collection will still have a discount of 34%.

Today's Deal: Save 35% on Brigador: Up-Armored Edition!*

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends August 5 at 10AM Pacific Time

Welcome, Korean Brigadors! The game has been localized to Korean.
This update features excellent community work done by our fans in consultation with us:
* The F-series campaign maps, COME FINEST SURGEON, AS I STEP IN VAIN, and I'LL BE WHAT I AM.
* The Quatro Santos and Long Roads Freelance runs, featuring all new Freelance levels by community designers.
* Several new combinations of 2-3 map Freelance runs suggested by the community: The Sticks, Walk With The Dead, The Upper Crust, Great Outdoors

We have also included the Brigador Mod Kit as free DLC, for ease of distribution. It includes modding resources as well as a curated selection of community mods and maps. Check the box on your Brigador page in your Steam Library, under DLC, and check out the guide to the modkit on our Discord, where you'll also find modding resources and the #uploads community mod listing. Mods are community supportedwe'd love to help onboard new modders, but we are currently focusing all of our efforts on the followup to Brigador.

The Auditor has given Cephei the slip, and it'll take some funds to track her down: The Auditor is now a purchasable pilot in Freelance mode, rather than automatically unlocked. More playable vehicles have been added, and on fan request, Cephei has noted which pilots fight only specific factions in their dossiers.

Last but not least, our merchandise store is now up and running. Check out shop.stellarjockeys.com to see our t-shirts, pin, patches, and more Brigador-related merch.



This update brings us into the 4th year of Brigador support. We're currently working on a followup game, titled BRIGADOR KILLERS. Wishlist it on Steam, and join our newsletter or Discord at stellarjockeys.com to catch all the LORE, peeks, and news!

What are you buyin', Brigador? First 50 orders using the discount code TEXAS7 get 15% off.

The Stellar Jockeys online store is now open with a selection of posters, patches, an official Pinny Arcade pin, and a shirt. We can ship almost anywhere, and will be updating with new stock and designs from time to time as we step closer to the launch of Brigador Killers (which you should wishlist if you haven't already).

We'd like to thank everyone who's stuck with us through the development of Brigadorwe wouldn't still be working without your support, so thank you. Please enjoy what we've put together for you:






https://shop.stellarjockeys.com

https://i.imgur.com/tgUVR44.jpg

-Want to help write a lore entry?
-Do you have a cool story to tell about your favorite vehicle?
-Would you like to see your idea painted up by a professional artist?

Selected entries will be added to Brigador canon, given unique art as part of Brigador Killers' unlockable lore, and will get the writer officially acknowledged in the BK credit roll.

Full rules can be found in the `nose-art-challenge` thread on the Stellar Jockeys Discord, and entries must be submitted in Discord by 4/28/2019 to be considered.

Join the Brigador Discord here! https://discord.gg/dTgxDHj

* Welcome, Brigadors in Poland! The games full text is now available in your native language.
* Thanks for all your feedback Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish versions have been revised.

This update features a complete revamp of in-game lighting, as well as Chinese and Italian localizations. It also includes a couple of exciting new features, with balance tweaks and bug fixes. We’re celebrating two years from our 1.0 release and we’ve still got more to come.


For new features, we’ve filled a common request from players: you can now purchase individual campaign missions to run with any loadout in Freelance, without having to attempt the complete campaign Freelance run.


Additionally, we've added the final set of pilots to the Brigador roster, each of whom specializes in fighting against particular factions (for example, only fighting Corvids and Spacers, not Loyalists). Discover who they are, and use them to better tailor your experiences fighting in Solo Nobre.

Complete changelog is here, and be sure to come visit us at the Brigador community Discord server.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edbyHEVjQj4
11/06/2017 — the All Saints Update

-Added 'E' campaign mission set
-Added vehicle horns (press 'H')!
-Added the Pantry Boy as a playable vehicle
-Extended ammo pickup timers on destroyed vehicles
-Added new explosion effects for all neon lights
-Additional visual & balance changes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edbyHEVjQj4
11/06/2017 the All Saints Update

-Added 'E' campaign mission set
-Added vehicle horns (press 'H')!
-Added the Pantry Boy as a playable vehicle
-Extended ammo pickup timers on destroyed vehicles
-Added new explosion effects for all neon lights
-Additional visual & balance changes

Hi! We've been pushing fixes every day to Brigador: Up-Armored edition, so here is a cumulative Steam hotfix list since Friday:

Linux

• Linux is now UP-ARMORED; Mac support is still underway, but should be finished soon.
  
• If you were previously on the "previous" branch under the BETAS tab in Steam's properties window for Brigador, please switch back to default.
  
• Fixed issues with localization breaking on initial Linux release
  

• Added locale persistence, so the game will respect your locale choice and not reset the game's language to the system locale every game launch
  
• Added MS VS2015 Redistributable (x86 and x64) to Steam's install process to solve a "program unable to start" issue caused by missing dependencies (MSVCP140.dll) on the user's machine
  
• Pushed an update to increase the maximum allocatable memory by the process (making it "large-address aware"), solving those 'Brigador won't start due to insufficient memory!' issues.
  

• Fixed turret-related crash bug on PLACEBO SYNDROME, Nobre Dunes Freelance, and other maps which have Tobruks which exceed a certain amount.
  
• Fixed the root cause of that crash bug, so we may bring those turrets back once we verify it works for everyone.
  

• Fixed an issue which caused UI text to run out of visual bounds after visiting the language select menu
  
• Set a portion of the achievements to visible (some are available but still hidden to preserve the surprise)
  

• SLO-MO INHALER: Fixed float comparison math so that this is possible
  
• THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT/THIS IS WHAT YOU GET: Fixed typo which prevented this achievement from being unlocked
  
• NO STONE UNTURNED: Fixed typo which unlocked this achievement at $10k property damage, rather than $10 million property damage. If you got it early, you'll keep it. Everyone else, have fun.
  
• The achievements for completing the FULL LINEAR SOLO NOBRE, CLOSED CASKET SPECIAL, and CAMPAIGN RUN Freelance runs have been disabled, as those runs are temporarily broken. We're fixing them as soon as possible.
  

Hi! We've been pushing fixes every day to Brigador: Up-Armored edition, so here is a cumulative Steam hotfix list since Friday:

Linux

• Linux is now UP-ARMORED; Mac support is still underway, but should be finished soon.
  
• If you were previously on the "previous" branch under the BETAS tab in Steam's properties window for Brigador, please switch back to default.
  
• Fixed issues with localization breaking on initial Linux release
  

• Added locale persistence, so the game will respect your locale choice and not reset the game's language to the system locale every game launch
  
• Added MS VS2015 Redistributable (x86 and x64) to Steam's install process to solve a "program unable to start" issue caused by missing dependencies (MSVCP140.dll) on the user's machine
  
• Pushed an update to increase the maximum allocatable memory by the process (making it "large-address aware"), solving those 'Brigador won't start due to insufficient memory!' issues.
  

• Fixed turret-related crash bug on PLACEBO SYNDROME, Nobre Dunes Freelance, and other maps which have Tobruks which exceed a certain amount.
  
• Fixed the root cause of that crash bug, so we may bring those turrets back once we verify it works for everyone.
  

• Fixed an issue which caused UI text to run out of visual bounds after visiting the language select menu
  
• Set a portion of the achievements to visible (some are available but still hidden to preserve the surprise)
  

• SLO-MO INHALER: Fixed float comparison math so that this is possible
  
• THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT/THIS IS WHAT YOU GET: Fixed typo which prevented this achievement from being unlocked
  
• NO STONE UNTURNED: Fixed typo which unlocked this achievement at $10k property damage, rather than $10 million property damage. If you got it early, you'll keep it. Everyone else, have fun.
  
• The achievements for completing the FULL LINEAR SOLO NOBRE, CLOSED CASKET SPECIAL, and CAMPAIGN RUN Freelance runs have been disabled, as those runs are temporarily broken. We're fixing them as soon as possible.
  

Massive thanks to all our players who've stuck with us over the last year, especially those who've been with us all the way since Early Access. Having a community like this makes all the difference in the world – and it's what kept us going through another year of development. Thank you, Brigadors.

Now for the re-launch! What wonderful new things await?

Achievements!


New Campaign!


New Pilots!


New Playable Vehicles!


Better Explosions!


Other changes include spawnlist scaling, allowing us to better tailor enemy unit spawns relative to the level size (no more enemy tidal waves on Gasworks Turnpike), and more weapon / vehicle balance tweaks. We'll continue fine-tuning these elements, but for now get playing and tell us what you think in the discussion forums! And if you haven't posted a review for the game yet, now would be a perfect time.

As a special gift for those of you who own the Deluxe Edition, we're adding the Up-Armored EP to the audio collection. Curated by Makeup and Vanity Set and featuring tracks by a variety of outstanding musicians, the Up-Armored EP puts the total Brigador OST length at over 3 hours, and the total Deluxe Edition audio to 10 hours of content. A labor of love, all for your listening pleasure.

Brigadors! We're proud to announce the game will re-launch on June 2nd as a free update, a special thanks to all of you for sticking with us.

The changes include:

• A new intro campaign
  
• New pilots and playable vehicles
  
• Achievements
  
• Complete rebalance of difficulty to better ease in new players
  
• Localization to German, Russian, Japanese, French, Spanish, & Brazilian Portuguese
  
• A few more things we're keeping secret for now
  

Have a friend who loves mechs but doesn't own Brigador? Maybe you've heard about the amazing soundtrack by Makeup and Vanity Set, or want to listen to a high quality audiobook. Maybe you want a combined total of 10 hours of music and audiobook for 3.49 USD--now is your chance.

Brigador: 50% off
Brigador Deluxe edition: 55% off
Brigador OST+Audiobook: 65% off

Take time out from strenuous turkey eating and naps on the couch to finish out another contract for the SNC. The Halloween Update brought four brand new campaign levels, four new pilots, a bunch of new playable vehicles, and a revised Audiokinetic Pulse ability.

And please consider nominating Brigador for The “I Thought This Game Was Cool Before It Won An Award” Award--you know you're ahead of the curve.

All you who had problems with the AK Pulse and any Party Van campaign missions rejoice! The new and improved Audio-Kinetic Pulse has just arrived. The blast is in a forward cone now instead of a full 360°. Now you can properly mousehole through the environment, and most importantly the new pulse will actually kill enemy units.



Beware using it when close to the perimeter walls though, or you might get a nasty surprise...

Going forward we're going to have some more meaty updates for you leading into the holiday season, so stick around!

Apologies for the late announcement, but the Halloween rolling updates are complete. Here's a complete list of changes and additions.



Oct 28th:
- Four new pilots undertake a brand new Campaign level, "It's No Game". No repeat loadouts from the campaign.
- Also includes a new playable vehicle, the Fence, a Corvid power armor/ultralight mech, also available in freelance mode.
- Volume II of the Brigador Soundtrack has been added to your library (Deluxe edition)

Oct 29th:
- Added "Kill For Love," campaign level 23
- Added Mantis, a new playable Loyalist mech.

Oct 30th:
-Added Lowmil and Roper to playable vehicles
-Added "Placebo Syndrome, campaign level 24
-Increased Killdozer earnings multiplier to 3x
-Increased Killdozer shields
-Buffed Brokenheart Corvid heavy tank

Oct 31st:
- Added "Wait for the Blackout," the final Halloween update level, and the first daylight mission.
- Added Corvid Rat King as playable vehicle
- Buffed Julius heavy mech
- Added Corvid Varlet as playable vehicle
- Added freelance pilots The Auditor, Man From Volta, Marie Locke, Johnny Five Aces
- Significantly increased objective and special win bonuses
- Added game launch sound
- Fixed bad prop sounds



Thank you so much to all our new players who bought the game during the sale, and for our existing fans for helping spread the word. Sale went well for us so we will definitely be doing more content updates in the future. Good hunting, Brigador.

Rolling Halloween update continues with just one more left later tonight.

Oct 28th: "It's No Game" level, 4 new pilots, the Fence Corvid mech, Vol II OST added

Oct 29th: "Kill For Love," level, the Loyalist Mantis mech

Oct 30th: "Placebo Syndrome" level, Lowmil and Roper playable vehicles, balance tweaks

Oct 31st:
- Added "Wait for the Blackout," the final Halloween update level, and the first daylight mission.
- Added Corvid Rat King as playable vehicle
- Buffed Julius heavy mech
- Halloween pilots added to Freelance coming later this evening!

Just so much to get in for this update, we couldn't fit it into a single patch. So play the new level and stay tuned for the four new pilots to officially be added to the Freelance selection later tonight.

Rolling Halloween update continues!

Oct 28th: "It's No Game" level, 4 new pilots, the Fence Corvid mech, Vol II OST added

Oct 29th: "Kill For Love," level, the Loyalist Mantis mech

Oct 30th:

-Added Lowmil and Roper to playable vehicles
-Added "Placebo Syndrome," mission 24
-Increased Killdozer earnings multiplier to 3x
-Increased Killdozer shields
-Buffed Brokenheart Corvid heavy tank



Oct 31st: ???

Please check back daily for each update. It's almost Halloween!

Rolling
Halloween update continues!

Oct 28th: "It's No Game" level, 4 new pilots, the Fence Corvid mech, Vol II OST added

Oct 29th:
- Time to play "Kill For Love," level 23. The same four pilots are tasked to clear the district of Morafeno, but there's a nasty surprise waiting for them out among the graves.
- Added Mantis, a new playable Loyalist mech.

Oct 30th: ???

Oct 31st: ???

Please check back daily for each update. Happy Halloween, Brigador.

We've got a special event for our players. Not only is the game on sale for the lowest price yet for the whole Steam Sale (running until November 1st), but each day until Halloween we'll be adding a new playable level and other content.

Oct 28th:
- Four new pilots undertake a brand new Campaign level, "It's No Game". No repeat loadouts from the campaign.
- Also includes a new playable vehicle, the Fence, a Corvid power armor/ultralight mech, also available in freelance mode.
- Volume II of the Brigador Soundtrack has been added to your library. If you don't have a copy of the audiobook/OST, be sure to pick it up on sale!

Oct 29th: ???

Oct 30th: ???

Oct 31st: ???

Please check back daily for each update. Happy Halloween, Brigador.

Hello everyone! We just went live with a big update. In addition to some balance changes and new Lore entries, we now have alternative control schemes available in the game. In addition to the controller support added last patch, we now have a more traditional 'twin-stick' style movement scheme - pressing 'W' will move your vehicle up on the screen rather than forwards at your current orientation. We also have some additional variants for how this alternative control scheme orients on your screen.

We still strongly recommend tank controls, as this is what the game is designed for and once learned we believe will provide the best player experience, however we've received a lot of feedback regarding controls and based on that have made these changes.

If you're playing with the new control scheme and are having issues with vehicle orientation, we have a toggle in the settings to set your vehicle to *always* move forward. Additionally, I'll be looking to fine tune how and when exactly each playable vehicle chooses to move forwards or backwards based on player input - the current update is a broad pass that I'll be going through again over the next week.

To anyone who refunded the game or gave up based on difficulty with the controls, we hope you come back and try out this new scheme.

Thanks!

Thank you so much to our veteran and new players alike, we’ve got our 1.1 update for you. Take a look at what’s new:

• Controller Support with fully rebindable mapping
  
• Time Scaling - slow the game down by as much as 50%
  
• Steam Trading Cards
  
• Updated and revised Intel unlock descriptions
  
• Second half of the Brigador Audiobook is now online (Deluxe edition/DLC only)
  
• Additional unreleased Makeup And Vanity songs written for Brigador added as the Uplink EP. (Deluxe edition/DLC only)
  
• New Splash/Promotional image
  
• Minor bug fixes and tweaks
  

It's been a long road, getting from there to here, but Brigador has finally left Early Access!

We'd like to thank those of you who voted for us on Greenlight and all of our testers from before and during Early Access for your feedback and support. And all of our contractors and middleware providers for their hardwork. And our families and friends for their help and encouragement through the years.

We hope you enjoy the game, and let us know if you have any issues. If you enjoy the music, be sure to check out the OST by Makeup and Vanity Set.

-- WELCOME BRIGADOR --

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRYc0HLWePo

Hey everyone!

We're excited to finally announce that the Brigador v1.0 will be launching June 2nd, just 3 weeks away! Much of the new content is in now in place, we're just waiting on a few more changes before posting our final Early Access update prior to launch.

In addition to the game launching, we've also got the soundtrack and audiobook coming as DLC-- you can access it now via the main page or directly HERE, though you won't be able to purchase until the June 2nd launch. Vinyl editions of the soundtrack will also become available for purchase on June 2nd as well for $15; we'll post the links when available.

We're really proud of the work our collaborators have produced, 2 hours of original music and a 5+ hour audiobook chronicling a Loyalist platoon's journey through Solo Nobre when the city starts to burn. I'll be streaming parts of the book a few times between now and release via Twitch for anyone who would like a preview.

PC Gamer was courteous enough to run a full page on all this new content, if you'd like to read more you can find it here: http://www.pcgamer.com/brigador-is-releasing-in-june-with-an-unusual-extra/

Big news, with more coming soon! First, for anyone who's attending PAX East this year, we're showing Brigador once again as part of the Indie Megabooth. We're tucked into a minibooth, so just look around for these two idiots in military jacksuits:



As well as PAX East in Boston I'll be flying to San Francisco next week as part of a little press tour for showing Brigador. The build we lock in for that will also go live for you guys as well, so finally a proper update. The biggest change is that weapons visuals have gotten a complete overhaul, and I've locked in the full roster of 40 playable weapons. I anticipate launching the new build this coming Sunday or Monday, which will add all 40 weapons as playable and some new vehicles that utilize both heavy and small mounts.



The other big thing is that the unlock system is finally going in place. I don't think I'll have time to get in a rudimentary balance pass on money so all the unlockables will just cost $0 for now, and will only include pilots and vehicles. Oh yeah, and pilots are going in too. From a gameplay standpoint the pilots function as mutators for the game; for now pilots determine the starting strength level of enemy units as well as the speed with which enemy strength escalates on subsequent levels. That's currently in the game, and we're hoping to add some other cheeky options there as well.



As a final note, the Brigador soundtrack is nearly complete, and we're really excited to announce that a 2-disc vinyl edition is in the works, the 1st of which will be going up for preorder in the near future. Soon as it's up we'll post an announcement here. In the mean time, get hyped, and thanks for sticking with us-- we're in the home stretch now!



---------

One more thing-- MAVS just popped a new single that you should all listen to, catch it here.

Want to ask the team questions about the development of Brigador live? Come check out their stream with Volition:

https://www.twitch.tv/dsvolition

Want to ask the team questions about the development of Brigador live? Come check out their stream with Volition:

https://www.twitch.tv/dsvolition

We're all looking forward to spring and being able to open up the windows-- the number of computers we have in one room has hit the double digits, so a little ventilation goes a long way.

Anyway, to business! Something we've been working on over the last few weeks is a way to better visualize pathable area. Given the fully destructible nature of the game, it's possible for the player to create corridors through the environment. Up to now however, it hasn't always been clear what areas are walkable or not, or in the case of anti-gravs what areas can be flown over. The varying heights of rubble exacerbates this problem.

Our solution to this problem will look something like this:


Like the directional indicator and most other visualizers will be toggle-able of course. It's not a perfect solution but I'm not sure there is one for this kind of problem which is inherent to isometric games. As we get closer to the end of development there's a lot of these little quality of life things that we're working to address in order to make gameplay as smooth as possible.

Another small but significant change in the pipe is a revision to how smoke and EMP work against enemy units. Currently there's a known tactic (*cough* you know who you are -___-) to deploy smoke and simply stand within it while engaging enemy targets. Since the original implementation of smoke blocks line of site entirely this functionally made the player invisible. Our solution to this problem boils down to allowing the AI to approximate the player's location when they are receiving fire from or can hear the player. So far this seems to work well enough, though we'll continue to tweak it once we start getting player feedback.

On the EMP side it's a small but simple change: boss/captain units will be affected for a shorter duration than other units, possibly as low as 1/2 the duration. Those numbers will be tuned over time.

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Probably the most important part of this post is that we're putting updates on hold until the end of March. The main reason being there's a lot of different logs in the fire right now, and it's much easier for us to temporarily halt the update rotation in order to focus solely on finishing new features. If all goes well, by the time the end of March update rolls around we'll have all 3 factions available to fight, several more playable vehicles and weapons, a first draft on the new soundscape, some new missions, and possibly even a first pass on the unlocks system if we're lucky. In the mean time we'll of course still be active on the threads if you have any questions. Thanks for bearing with us, and we hope you're as excited for what's ahead as we are.

Cheers!

New build is up. Free Mode now has you facing the Corvid Uprising, all 40 different units. Because I didn't have time to do a full 20 strength spawnlist, and because it's expedient to condense that for testing, there's now only 4 strength levels. First map should be around a 2nd map in strength, followed by ~str 6, str 11, str 18. If you can beat the 4th map and beyond, especially with any kind of regularity, I want to know about it in the discussion threads. How often, how many times you did it, and what equipment you were using. Also the smoke grenade nerf is coming next week so if you know what's good for you don't do the 'huff your own fumes and stomp everyone who comes in' trick because it's going to get you killed once the next week's build goes up.

In the future, the plan is to have either dedicated runs with this speed of difficulty escalation or use the pilots as mutators for things like run difficulty. The latter is the ideal scenario though it's also the one that takes more work, we'll see. Either way though we definitely want to make it so that if you just want to jump in at really high difficulty, even for the beginning of a full Solo Nobre run, you'll be able to.

I'm going to power through revising the Loyalists and getting the Spacers in as well, at which point you guys will finally have all 3 factions to play with. Once those are all in, I'll go back through the player weapons and recalibrate them based on the variance between factions. My hope is to have all 3 factions in by the beginning of March, and by the beginning of April to have all playable vehicles, weapons, and abilities in. Buckle your pants, because new content is going to come streaming in from now on, and I'm going to need all the feedback I can get.

Cheers.


- DEVELOPMENT LOG - (check steam page for full log)
*Please bear in mind Brigador is a work in progress.*

2 / 18 / 2016 - Current Update:
- Added Corvid enemy faction to Free Mode, removed Loyalist enemy faction.
*note* for testing purposes this is a heavily compressed spawn progression, increasing up to max difficulty at 4th stage. Any levels beyond that will repeat that difficulty.

-------------------
2 / 4 / 2016 - Previous Update:
- Added substations and panic walls
- Added 4 new maps & run

Hello everyone!

Another month, another set of updates. Tonight's one includes another 4 new maps, bringing that total up to 21 playable. Our goal was to hit 20 so we're in good shape there. About half of them still need some minor reworking, and a few are short on set dressing but they're all playable and in pretty good shape. If there's time we'd like to squeeze in another couple of maps but for now we're switching to full production on the campaign missions.

You'll notice that there's some new structures on the maps, and a nasty surprise on some when the alarm is sounded. We finally have the new 'panic walls' in engine and partially implemented on the maps. These retractable walls are passable by enemy units but remain closed for the player, so it's possible to put yourself in a real deathtrap, especially if you're not specced to deal environment damage. The only way to drop them back down is by destroying all power substations on a map. Most times they'll be clustered together but not always... Additionally, destroying all radio stations will dramatically increase the time required for enemy units to spot the player and sound the alarm (currently we don't have any indicators for either of these on the HUD but we'll get those in soon). We're hoping these new elements will help make the decision-making during missions more interesting, and to provide the player with more challenging but entertaining situations when things inevitably go wrong.


(a radio substation surrounded by panic walls)

I've removed the "Tears of the Ancestors" mission for now, partly because we learned what we needed from it and partly because my current overhaul of the Corvids means that the balance on that mission was completely out of wack. My hope is to have a playable draft of *all* Corvid vehicles by next wednesday, at which point we'll swap them out for the Loyalists as the enemy faction in 'Free Mode'. While I'm overhauling the Loyalist units we'll start building Corvid based missions, and once I've finished the Loyalist refit we'll bring them back into the 'Free Mode' rotation and start building the Loyalist missions as well. Ditto for the Spacers after the Loyalists.

New sound is still a ways out-- there's a lot of ground work that has to be laid and things are made more difficult for the audio guys because of how much we're still changing elements in the game. All the puzzle pieces are fast coming together though so you should see an explosion of new content starting soon.

However, that major optimization I mentioned before is now in, and should noticeably improve performance, particularly on older machines. We're hoping to still do some more optimizations down the road but for now this is a big step.

The plan going forward is to finalize combat elements and get the skeleton of the campaign in place. Personally I'm shooting to have a playable draft of all enemy units and weapons completed by the end of this month, and we also hope to have a skeleton of the campaign in place by then as well. From there it's getting money / unlocks / metagame sorted out, and fleshing out more of the fun parts like pilots and playable vehicles.

We're getting closer and closer to the end, and we really appreciate you all sticking with us. As always, let us know what you think about new changes in the forums, and please tell your friends about Brigador if you like it!

Thanks!

Hello everyone!

We've got a fresh new update for you, which includes 4 new maps and a new defensive ability. We've also got a major optimization in the pipe that should noticeably improve performance on older machines-- expect that within the next couple of days.

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy, between planning out the final months of development setting the groundwork for these final features to get implemented. The two biggest features incoming are defensive weapon emplacements and gates that can raise and lower under various conditions. The former are much hardier than standard units and serve an area denial role / help make fortresses and the like seem more properly guarded, while the latter will be a nice surprise for when alarms get triggered and will also help make securitized areas actually be, well, securitized. It always bugged me that these big imposing battlements would have just wide open entryways like they do. Well not anymore! Or at least, coming soon!

Next few weeks will be focused around getting in another story mission or two, and fleshing out more units for the player to fight. My hope is to, by mid February, have an entire second faction in rotation in the 'Free Play' mode so that suddenly you're dealing with a whole lot more variety during those runs. Those new units will also lay the groundwork for building out more story missions.

Alright, that's it! Let us know what you think about new changes in the forums, and please tell your friends about Brigador if you like it!

Thanks!

Hello everyone, hope you all had a wonderful holiday. Here's the current situation with Brigador:

The last month was spent getting a lot of infrastructure and behind the scenes sort of things established. For example, we now have the ability to spawn any unit at any point on a map and to then refresh that map in the game while maintaining player location. This is a godsend for iterating both new maps and new units/weapons. We'll soon also be able to switch out the player vehicle and weapons in a level, which is similarly useful for iterating player elements.

We've hired two contractors to work with sfx and as we speak they're hard at work getting new sounds ready to go and plugged in-- if all goes well you'll see the first fruits of their labors by the end of the month.

The other major change is that we've split the game into two different modes: Free Mode (what's currently playable in the game) and Contracts, which is a linear set of missions that will be much more story heavy and will have pre-selected player loadouts. The idea with the latter is to give something that's a more gradual introduction to the core game concepts, and well as to provide a more structured play experience for players who might be less interested in the current form of the game.

We're going to still shoot for updates every week, but with how hard we're pushing on development now we're not going to have it be an explicitly scheduled thing anymore. Once we've got something new worth playing, we'll post the build and let you guys know. If development stabilizes over the next two months we might get back to a regular build schedule, we'll see.

Thanks again for sticking with us, we're in the final push now. Wish us luck.

Sorry for the late update, and unfortunately no new context was ready for this week.

To compensate, we've added a public Steam beta for experimental controller support. It's fairly hacked together at this point (and not well tested), so it may be buggier than the default build. Please post about issues on this build as well, but be sure to specify that is from the experimental build.

In the Steam properties for the game should be a beta named 'controller'. You may need to restart Steam for it to show up. Once the game is running you should be able to press START or OPTIONS to use that controller.

If you press F1 to open the debug panels, at the top of the main tab should be some settings for the controller including most of the control bindings.

A non-comprehesive list of the current default controls are:

• left stick: move (tank controls)
  
• right stick: aim (see below)
  
• left shoulder: coarse aiming (see below)
  
• right shoulder: special
  
• left trigger: primary fire
  
• right trigger: secondary fire
  
• left stick click: stomp / tank bullrush
  
• x (xbox) / square (ps): reload
  

Because of taking a few days off for Turkey Day and the general upheaval with the team right now (one member is in the middle of moving across the country, and we just hired a sound designer), we'll be skipping next week's update in favor of a single, larger one come December 9th. And now that we've finally settled on and hired a sound designer, we can begin working over the soundscape. Expect to see some changes coming in starting at the end of January. Thanks for bearing with us, and enjoy the holiday! Here's the changelog:

- added 'Scimitar' turret mount artillery weapon
- added descriptors for auxiliary mounts
- reduced 'Mae Dois' impact impulse

This update was all about weapons. First off, added some much needed extra info to the loadout screen when selecting weapons, including things like loudness and explosion size. Eventually these descriptions will be more colorful rather than just straight info-dumps, but for now that's better than nothing. If all goes well we'll get one more update in before the Thanksgiving holiday gets underway (all 4 members of the team are American), and otherwise we're making good progress towards adding in stat tracking and the unlocking system. We'll tell you more when there's more to tell. In the mean time, here's the changelog:

- added additional data and descriptions for most weapons
- revised ratios for weapon penetration ratings
- increased aggro size of green bigpipes from 45 to 65
- increased Zeus railgun noise, explosion radius
- reduced Drillbit stun effect
- increased Duchess and Stutter aggro
- increased Preacher stun effect, firing aggro, penetration
- increased Banshee penetration, firing aggro
- decreased Banshee projectile velocity
- reduced Doorbell impact aggro radius
- increased Broiler stun
- increased Galinha aggro radius
- reduced Confessor daze, increased daze duration
- reduced Mae Dois daze, increased daze duration
- increased Parliament firing aggro radius
- increased Bully stun

Couple of changes. First, we're switching the weekly update schedule to run every Wednesday instead of every Friday. As part of that, we've posted the first Wednesday update extra early so you folks can get your hands on it. With the holiday season coming up we're only going to do one more weekly update this month before going on break, after which we'll get back to it in December.

We're hard at work on the new unlocking, pilot, and money system. As they're all intertwined we have to build the system up as a whole, so it's still going to be a while before you see these structural changes in the game, but once they start going in it should be a pretty rapid set of changes-- we're really excited to fill out more of the story and build a proper progression structure into the game. We're also about to contract a sound designer to come in and start really fleshing out the soundscape, which at the moment is rather bare-bones we know, so you should start to see a lot of changes coming in especially after the new year hits. In the mean time we'll keep adding new weapons, vehicles, and maps, as well as laying the groundwork for all these other changes. Thanks for being patient with us and playing the game.

In the mean time, here's the most recent changelog:

-switched Loyalist spotter agrav to 'tank destroyer' behavior (unit closes until in range of target, stops moving until target is out of range)
-revised spotter stun laser to fire continuously, increased daze
-increased 'Zeus' railgun impact daze
-significantly increased 'Toaster' laser RoF
-increased 'Galinha' mass driver magazine size
-all 3 spaceports are now selectable on Solo Nobre run
-increased 'Drillbit' cannon dmg vs all types, decreased magazine size, increased daze
-decreased 'Abbot' cannon magazine size, decreased impact daze, increased explosion daze

The first of many weekly updates! Every Friday we plan to post a new update, usually with new content, for Brigador so that there's always something new for you to try on the weekends. Here's to the first of many!

Full changelog:

 -Added 3 new vehicles
 -all player vehicles balance pass
 -ball agrav stun laser can now be dodged at high speeds
 -increased all non-superheavy trample damages
 -increased Pitbull (arty_main_02) aoe environment damage
 -increased Zeus railgun (laser_main_02) recoil
 -all player vehicles now feel recoil
 -tweaked longyard map
 -switched trainyard and longyard in the inner city and outer city runs
-all overshield decay rates now set to 1.5/sec

Hello everyone! Our store page is back up as you can see along with the forums, and we're now less than 3 weeks from the Early Access release! We can't wait to share the game with everyone come Oct. 20th. Please spread the word and get your copy day 1-- every purchase helps us make this a bigger and better game.

Thanks to everyone who's been supporting us so far, especially you folks who preordered way back in 2014, it means a great deal to the whole team.

On a technical note, for now we'll only be selling the base game. Once the soundtrack (over an hour of music!) and other companion material are finished we'll add it to the store page as a separate purchasable item, but that won't be for a few more months.