Earlier this month we released the next audiobook in the Brigador universe - Brigador Killers: Pilgrim - and since then there's been plenty of chatter. This post will not be spoiling any details of the plot but we suggest refraining from reading if you want to go in blind. Before we get to some of the community's reactions...

A few notes about the production of the audiobook

Some character trivia

Reactions on Discord

On Reddit & Youtube

FAQ

Available on Itch.io right now is the next audiobook in the Brigador universe titled Brigador Killers: Pilgrim. Both Brad Buckmaster and Ryan Cooper return as writer and narrator respectively and this book takes place both before the events of our next game and is a direct sequel to the first book. You can listen to the first part of the audiobook entirely for free on this Itch page. The free segment is about 3 hours and 50 minutes long, while the total runtime of the audiobook is just over 9 hours long. We dont wish to spoil the details, other than to warn you up front that it contains graphic descriptions of bloody violence and dismemberment (like the last book). If you choose to buy the audiobook now at its price of 9.99 USD, later down the line you will also be given a DLC upgrade key for both the audiobook and the soundtracks by Makeup And Vanity Set for Brigador Killers on Steam. The audiobook is delivered as a zip file and you will find the chapters as mp3s sitting in the media folder. Though we have mentioned multiple times that a lot of music has already been made by Makeup And Vanity Set for Brigador Killers, we havent yet finalized what tracks are going to go into each album since the structure of the game has changed. When the soundtracks are ready, we will add them to the Itch page. You should note that when that happens we intend to increase the price to 14.99 USD. In other words, acquire it now at 5 USD cheaper than the intended price. Were uploading a chapter of the audiobook to YouTube as a kind of weekly serial for the next few weeks. Technically the very first one is a reupload but this one has the fancy cover art courtesy of Flyingdebris as well as the wallpaper engine effects courtesy of Hara. The next chapter will appear tomorrow with a new one every week. [previewyoutube=qEiKhnq_hF8;full][/previewyoutube] UPDATE: The ebook version is sold separately. You will find it available as an epub & pdf on our merch store, and on Amazon. The audible version is still processing but should be available soon. Lastly, here is the book cover in various formats for your desktop wallpaper or phone lockscreen needs:

• With logotype
  
• Without logotype
  
• Full book cover with logotype
  
• Full book cover without logotype
  

By summer of 2025 we expect to have a demo ready in preparation for the next Steam Next Fest. That Next Fest will begin on June 9th, or about three months from the time of this post. As a result a few things are going to happen, though not all at once. First, the storepage - which was set up in haste after Rock Paper Shotgun covered our appearance at BitSummit in 2019 - will finally get its long-due overhaul. That means those images and gifs will be replaced so that its clear what Brigador Killers actually looks and plays like, instead of things from the build that did the rounds at PAX in 2019 and 2020. All those old images from that version of BK can be seen in this dev archive album. Next, we intend to put the demo up before the June Next Fest starts so that were eligible for the press preview event that occurs before each one. Developers only get one go at this event per game so we want to make the most out of it. What this means for you the public is that you will probably be able to access the demo not long before the festival begins. We do not intend to take the demo down after the Next Fest ends either. Another piece of news is that the next audiobook will become available soon. One reason it has taken a while is we needed a good illustration for it. The work is almost done and heres a peek at one part of the overall image (click here for a bigger version).
In case you missed the prologue post from before, the book is titled Brigador Killers: Pilgrim, written by Brad Buckmaster and read by Ryan Cooper. It is a direct sequel to the events of the first novel and it takes place between the first and second game. The first half of the new novel will be put up on our YouTube channel, one chapter at a time. The ebook version will follow at some point after since it is also waiting for the cover. We realize this is a short post for this month but they arent the only things that are going on behind the scenes at Stellar Jockeys - this is just what to expect in your immediate future.

[previewyoutube=zZxaDPUQqjE;full][/previewyoutube] The video above is about a new debug tool added to Brigador Killers called Ghost Lights. The rest of this article repeats the content of the video in text form with some additional details.

A brief note about map making

What are ghost lights?

Where things get interesting

A short post this month for the end of 2024, this time again from our lead artist who previously wrote about the Lobo, the Mar Nosso SWAT vehicle and the spacer redesign. This post is about a few new vehicles assets recently added to the game.
Earlier this year we put out an alpha of Brigador Killers over on Itch. We learned a lot of good lessonsone lesson being that the game world felt empty between playable vehicles. It was time to add a lot more civilian vehicles to Brigador Killers, starting with smaller ones. Many of the fan favorites in Brigador were small, so we knew the Tuk Tuk had to come back, and we already had a motorcycle. What else fits into that category? I wanted an electric scooter, and some kind of goofy small commuter car.

Teddy Boy

Liliputter

An aside on the process

The Tuk Tuk

[quote]Restitution - Physics. the return to an original physical condition, especially after elastic deformation.[/quote] Video games are not bound by what we understand to be the laws of the universe. Objects can be given ridiculous values for their acceleration or mass and they wont suddenly create shock waves or distort space time around them if the engine running that game doesnt have systems trying to simulate those things. Generally speaking, games trend towards simplification when recreating the underlying chaos of nature. Note that this doesnt mean work isnt involved - the math for things like real time fluid simulation are very complicated and resource intensive, so to get the thing running at a steady framerate concessions must be (literally) made. At the same time, this simplification process is where things that might be referred to as jank can appear.
Entities in the Brigador engine love to spin Jank isnt necessarily bad - in the above case its just an example of the Lobo inflicting pure impulse on the car with both set to deal no damage - but it looks off. Within the game data, impulse is the value that decides how much push another entity has. In this instance the Lobo is applying impulse with its arm swing, while the car is applying its own pushing force by driving into the Lobo, but its not quite right because the Lobo is being shunted slightly while the car bumps off it and spins nearly 270 degrees. In isolation this might look fun, but in the heat of gameplay a vehicle wildly clipping into the player might get old fast. [Tangential: one in-game distance unit is equivalent to just over 8 ft (or 2.44 meters). A tile in-game is two units by two units. Mass correlates to kilograms 1:1. For example, Dave who has featured in previous posts has a mass of 70 kg.]
Dave standing on a tile To keep things simple in the Brigador engine, only NPCs are affected by impulse. Props (static objects like lampposts or office buildings) are not affected by it - though that is not to say props do not have an effect as was discussed in this previous post. So how do we go about reducing janky moments like the one above? It sounds crude but in truth we just start smashing things into one another and keep changing the values until its right. In other words, a crash test.
Two identical Lobos at one end, with two cars going at full speed towards them. The car on the left can go faster than the other one, though in this next gif the slower one arrives first in frame.
In this demonstration the slower car (with all its doors) has a mass of 615 kg, the faster one (no doors) has a mass of 750 kg. The Lobos are both 1000 kg. There is a name for the phenomenon when two bodies collide with one another: Coefficient of Restitution. To directly quote the wikipedia article: [quote]the Coefficient of Restitution (or COR) is a dimensionless parameter defined as the ratio of the relative velocity of separation after a two-body collision to the relative velocity of approach before collision. In most real-word collisions, the COR lies somewhere between 0 and 1, where 1 represents a perfectly elastic collision (in which the objects rebound with no loss of speed but in the opposite directions) and 0 a perfectly inelastic collision (in which the objects do not rebound at all, and end up touching).[/quote] For our purposes, we need the COR for the bodies involved to be neither too close to 0, nor too close to 1. In the example above the COR is about 0.35. In this next example, the Lobos have a higher COR of about 0.75 meaning they will spring back more than in the previous GIF - notice how the Lobo on the bottom being hit by the slower car doesnt get knocked over until the second impact.
If we keep these same parameters but decide to increase the mass of the Lobos up to 1500 kg from 1000 kg, then the impact will look like this.
Neither Lobo is knocked over on the first hit and both cars bounce back pretty hard. Since theres a greater disparity in mass between the two entities, the resulting bounce is harder. Because restitution is basically how much inertia is preserved after an impact, this ties into another system that weve mentioned before - reverse trample (short version: both rapid acceleration and deceleration can be deadly). So if cars end up having a default COR of 0.35, and that at full speed that deals about 50% of their HP on impact (such as from hitting a wall, or hitting another NPC of equal or greater mass with a COR of 0.35 or lower), then hitting a unit that is both bigger (like the Lobo, or a mech, or a tank) and has a higher COR means the impact will be more destructive. Whether that destruction is fun, however, is a different question. We expect players will want to gun the engine, but we might not want to make every impact potentially lethal to the player. Something else discovered during these crash tests is that reverse trample damage does carry over into whats called overkill damage. In plain terms this is what happens if you drive a 2000 kg cop cruiser into four Daves.
In other words, if you have a heavy enough vehicle moving fast enough, you will insta-gib infantry.
Over on the Brigador: Up-Armored Edition news section weve just announced four new pewter minis are coming to our merch store, as well as a 20% holiday discount. Full details can be seen here. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/274500/view/4488495001178736877 Alternatively, if you want to go straight to the store, click here and dont forget to enter HOLIDAYS2024 at checkout.

[previewyoutube=_iwOdmoP2yc;full][/previewyoutube] The video above shows off a basic implementation of two major mechanics for Brigador Killers. The first is weapon pick up and drop, and the second is the vehicle bay. Caveat as before that what you see in this footage is subject to change, both in function and especially in terms of appearance. Since the UI is very simplistic, the rest of this post is an explainer for this footage.

Weapon Pick Up And Drop

Vehicle Bays

• Store/Retrieve
• Summon vehicle
• Store Vehicle

How Does Any Of This Work?

What This Lets Us Do

• Players can pick up weapons found on the ground
• Weapons and vehicles can be stored to be retrieved for later use

We asked one of our artists for an explainer on what theyve been working on. This time its Igor again, who previously helped us write this post, and has decided to drill down on his favorite building prop.
[quote]This is me playing on Manyson. The map cs_manyson. -Anonymous youth, circa 2000s[/quote] McMansions, which are called "subhouses" in the game files, are one of my favorite prop sets in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition. The moment I blasted through one of them with a Banshee MG and saw it immediately collapse, I thought to myself "Oh, they're flimsy, that makes sense!". Working on the upgraded version of the McMansion for Brigador Killers was a challenging and occasionally painful quest that asked me to reconsider what constitutes good architecture.

New design, new problems

Italian inspiration

Rules, or lack thereof

We've shot for the moon, and we're almost there. Brigador Killers is an order of magnitude more complex than our first game: BK has cars that can handbrake around corners. You can travel freely between levels, you can talk to NPCs, and you can get in and out of vehicles. We've listened to the features you wanted and now we're close to the game of our dreams. We're just making sure that we unveil it when it's ready. Thank you to all our fans and everyone that has shown interest in Brigador Killers. It will be worth the wait. If youd like more details for any of these sections, check out our monthly posts (like this one) or watch our YouTube uploads (like this one).

SO WHAT HAVE WE BEEN UP TO? PROGRESS IN 2024

• March also saw the addition of brutalist-themed cinema building props, the configuration of the pierce resistance values for smaller props (referred to internally as minis) and their hitboxes, as well as making the storylets system friendlier to modders and designers. After SECRET ALPHA 1, player questions revolved around progression and a sense of purpose, and weve spent the rest of 2024 addressing this feedback. More on that later.
• In April, more props were added, we streamlined our story and world progress tracking systems, and made it much less likely for the player character to unintentionally run themselves over with their own vehicle after exiting it.
• During May, many art assets were rendered out, such as scrap gibs and other debris, various street minis and the first variant of the Lobo, an early-game enemy type (pictured below).
• In June, the second variant of the Lobo was added, along with the TV trees and other lights you may have noticed from last months dioramas video.
• July was very big on the audio front. Weve been working closely with our audio people to better take advantage of FMODs features. Where Brigador was straightforward in its soundscape, mostly focusing on gunfire, bullet impacts, and stompy mechs, were adding a lot of detail to the world of Mar Nosso. As a result, the sound bank has grown and several sound events have been added, while more are coming. New lighting (or weather) files for levels were also authored.
• The sound bank changes continued into August, with the addition of locational sound emitters - think a buzzing neon sign, or a leaking water pipe burbling into a storm drain. Now, designers have the ability to enrich their levels with these ambient spots. Also, we added the ability to display text comments in the game that have been placed via the map editor. Brigador Killers systems are much denser than the first game, which can be hard to keep track of as a map designer. We needed a clear way to signal how the levels work in-engine, both for our own use and for future modders. Finally, weve enabled the player to pick up and drop weapons while in infantry loadouts, which is easy to say, but required fundamental changes to the engine.

REFINING THE CORE LOOP

THE SOUNDSCAPE

THE MAPS

THE STEAM PAGE

ANSWERING A FEW OTHER BURNING QUESTIONS

• Highly polished with a narrow scope (e.g. Hollow Knight or Celeste)
• Roguelikes blended with other genres (Hades, Noita, Slay The Spire)
• Crunchy world simulators and builders (Rimworld, Project Zomboid)
• Cozy (Unpacking, Stardew Valley)

[previewyoutube=jHoNCIfszPI;full][/previewyoutube]The video above is of eighteen different themed dioramas shown in five different lighting conditions, one after another. These five lighting conditions (or weather files) are called:

• green mood
• orange mood
• pink mood
• blue mood
• pitch black

The Ambient Music

Yes, We Know About The Shadows

This months post comes courtesy of our lead artist who also helped write the previous posts about the Mar Nosso SWAT vehicle and the spacer redesign.
Brigador is not a transhumanist or tech utopian setting. For as much as technology serves and eases human life, it can and is used to undervalue and enslave. We want to reflect this in Brigador Killers with designs like the Lobo. Early in the story we discover specialized cyborgs used as soldiers, known as Lobos. This is the Spanish word for wolf, but is also suggestive of the word lobotomy. These soldiers did not volunteer; the fuller scope of the why and how for the Lobos came to be is part of the story. Some key design goals for the Lobo:

• Real world style design revisions over time, and
• Those design revisions depicting escalation over time

Design evolution over time

Design escalation over time

A (brief) annotated visual history of the Lobo

Mk1 Design

[quote]Whyre they pink? Gus asked, pointing to his chest as he struggled with the donning procedure of a Carmine in his size. Carmine. Its the colour as well as the suit, Amon corrected him. Fine. Why are they fucking Carmine? Amon rattled off his lines like an actor jumping the mark. It put Gus on edge in a way he struggled to articulate. The area in which these suits saw action is tidally locked. That is, the strategically important areas on Volta are cast in a permanent twilight, which casts a pinkish hue over the entire region. Carmine-ish, Gus corrected him.[/quote] [Excerpt from Brigador Killers: Pilgrim by Brad Buckmaster] Arriving at a particular design is one of the difficulties of video game development. Just come up with something new sounds romantic, but is often an ineffective approach. We find that the best designs are often authored in response to particular constraints; those can be story (the planet has a red star), practical (we only have two weeks to build this), gameplay (we don't have the sprite budget for this unit to animate), or even just arbitrarily self-imposed. If you read our post on Reimagining The Spacers from last year youll know comes next: we went one step before that process to answer what might seem to be a simple question: why is the Carmine suit that colour? Naturally, we asked an astrophysicist to help us out.

The Carmine suits origins

Volta

What is a red dwarf?

Light, Or The Ornamental Force Of The Universe

The Pink Panthers of the SAS

There are a few things to interact with in the Secret Alpha build of Brigador Killers that generate a small amount of reactivity for the player. For this month well look at the two main ones: the braintape, and the carmine suit parts. Please note that these systems are still a work in progress and what is detailed in this post is not necessarily indicative of the final product. Both of these interactive elements have the following things in common:

• They are ITEM_PICKUP resources* in the game
• They have a condition assigned to them in SJTiled**
• They change state because of a Lua function***

WHY THE BRAINTAPE DISAPPEARS

• The green key icon that is currently selected named Braintape 01, which is a scripting object
• The asset field under Custom Properties
• The disable_if field under Custom Properties

Saves that unlocked state to a local Lua file called gvar_data [/olist][expand type=show more]* Gvars, predicates and storylets were mentioned before and will be revisited in a later post[/expand] So, once the braintape is picked up, it will be unlocked by the game engine. In SJTiled, we assigned this object to be disabled when it is unlocked. This means that when we come back to the same location
the tape is gone. Now that we understand how the braintape appears and disappears, we can look at the suit parts.

ONE MORE LAYER OF COMPLEXITY

Unlocking the carmine suit follows the same path as the braintape but with a couple more steps. Going back to our test level, all three suit parts are laid out in a line and have the same disable_if condition as the braintape to stop them from reappearing after being interacted with. Here is what the parts look like in SJTiled:
While this is what the parts look like in the game:
And all the resource data for the carmine suit parts looks something like this:
An additional field to pay attention to here that the braintape did not have filled out is menu_unlock. When the function unlocks this resource, the intel entries on these items also become available to read. Until the pickups are interacted with, they will look like this in the games Intel section accessed from the main menu:
The function being called in the Data editor for all the carmine suit parts is UnlockItem. Heres what this Lua function looks like in Notepad++:
Simply put, this function unlocks the resource that is calling it (the three carmine suit parts), and saves that state information to the gvar_data Lua file. When this map that contains the carmine suit is being loaded, two other things are going on. The first is another function called HandleItemUnlock, which looks like this in the file called mapstates.lua:
There is also a reference script called pickup_ref.lua which contains this:
In this reference script we can see the filepaths for the three ITEM_PICKUP resources that are also placed in the map in SJTiled, and we can see the filepath for the carmine suit itself. The reason why this script is referenced is because of something called BRIGAHACKED. This is another object layer in SJTiled that has a custom property called luaload assigned to it which contains a string called, you guessed it
pickup_ref.lua. Combined with HandleItemUnlock, this reference script gives the layer of this map a list to check off when it is loaded. This reference script is also meant to be copied and modified to unlock other items on other maps. So what about the suit itself? We already know how the suit parts disappear when interacted with - how is the suit being handled? Returning to SJTiled, the suit is just sitting there, but when we look at the custom properties for it
Instead of disable_if, we have the custom field enable_if with __IS_UNLOCKED__ in the field. In other words, until the three parts are acquired and trigger the UnlockItem requisites, the suit is disabled from appearing on the map. When all three suit parts are acquired and the map is revisited
The three suit parts are gone as we would expect, but the suit is now available for use. It should be noted that for demonstration purposes, all three suit parts and the suit itself were placed on the same test map but they do not have to be. Since the unlocks system is being handled by these Lua functions, which are entirely separate from the maps, the unlocks can be made to appear wherever we want them. If we look at the Fort map that you see when you start the Secret Alpha build, the suit is placed there in SJTiled.
However, it is only until the player ventures out and finds all three carmine suit parts that they will find this reward waiting for them back at the fort.

WHATS IN IT FOR ME?

This unlocks system for Brigador Killers is how we are responding to some of the feedback the previous game Brigador has received over the years. While the quality of action and writing in lore entries was fine for enough players, Brigadors unlocks system was found lacking. This doesnt come as a surprise to us as developers, because very little time was available for that aspect of the games design. Brigador Killers is in a different position and we think this new system of unlocks will address the criticism of there being nothing to do. Players will have reasons to return to certain locations, as opposed to the previous method of earning arbitrary sums of money to unlock pieces of text in a menu that was too many clicks away from the action. Were also exposing these details to give our modding community advance notice. Those who have made Brigador maps and mods in the past will likely have already thought of ways to go one step further with whats been detailed in this post. After all, why give someone a carmine suit as a reward and have nothing to fight against? Why not place something more lethal in a map that can only appear in-game once the carmine suit itself has been unlocked? Or if entire layers of a map can be given custom properties, why not change that map entirely? In a later post we will revisit the topic of gvars, predicates and storylets. We already talked before about how they handle dialogue, but what we werent able to say back then is we are also able to use those narrative systems to effect changes on gamestate in the much same way that ITEM_PICKUP resources can.
If youd like to support our ongoing development efforts, consider making a purchase from our merchandise store where we sell minis, pins, t-shirts and many other items.

[ 2024-04-24 18:27:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Before anything else, everyone at Stellar Jockeys would like to thank you for your reception earlier this month. Considering what we were up against, and how deliberately narrow we made the announcement, we were taken aback by how much attention we ended up getting for the first public build of Brigador Killers.

Wait, what? Theres a build of Brigador Killers I can play?

Whats the music track that plays in the menu?

Whats the font for the two new splash arts?

• BK Secret Alpha Program
• BK Auditor
• BK logotype

Sidenote regarding most issues

Why could I possess Froggy?

Why does the Settings menu not change the movement of the cars?

Suit (or infantry) movement [/olist]These three categories cover four movetypes, but behind the scenes each mech in the game can actually have one of six movetypes. This is most noticeable when driving any of the new wheeled vehicles, but the wheeled vehicle movetype cannot be altered via the Settings menu because there is currently no category for it.

Why was the Fort NPC repeating the same line over and over?

It was due to a bug with the storylet system not working as intended. It has since been fixed.

Why was my character stuck in a particular pose after getting out of a vehicle?

The short version is because its an alpha. The longer version is that the games finite state machine broke in a way that stopped things from animating properly, hence why the player character could remain seated in mid air after getting out of a car.

When can we get our hands on SJTiled?

SJTiled is the tool we use to make maps in Brigador Killers and in the Secret Alpha post it is mentioned that this tool will be made available - and that will happen. A few things need to be pointed out. The first is that although there are plenty of props to make maps, there is little in the way of enemy spawns to make interesting combat encounters. For instance in the BK build you can acquire the Fork mech or the Betka tank, but you don't get much of a challenge with them as there is nothing equivalent in force to those vehicles to give you a challenge. Second is that we don't want to run into a problem we had with Brigador with breaking people's maps by performing any major revisions to the games assets. We don't expect to do this frequently but we do want to add in some newer stuff to both SJTiled and BK first so that you can make something more interesting than on-foot gunfights before we potentially break things. Third is the modding document alluded to in the post that helps explain some of the new features is a work in progress and will definitely be rewritten (and probably re-rewritten) over time. Once SJTiled is ready to be distributed, it will be done so initially via our discord server.

I have a crash bug!

Report it to the #bk_bug_reports channel on our discord server or email it to our team account. For the time being we are keeping any feedback to as few channels as possible. It makes our jobs much easier if we can reliably reproduce the bug youve encountered, so detailed explanations of the problems you have encountered are greatly appreciated. If youd like to support our development of Brigador Killers, consider sharing the fact that our first game Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is on sale on Steam until March 4th https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/

[ 2024-02-29 18:05:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Were a little delayed in sending the first BK update of the year, but for good reason. First up, four new miniatures are available for purchase from the Stellar Jockeys merchandise store: Buckmasters, Forks, Powersuits and Daves are up for sale. Further details after the jump: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/274500/view/3739732875058752728 Our entire range of minis and several other items have also been reduced in price for the entire month of February. If youre interested in supporting our development efforts, consider picking up an item from our store while the sale is on. Second, we have news about BK over on Itch.io. This doesnt mean you wont get development updates on BK as usual, but nothing substantial is appearing here on Steam just yet.
For the time being the comments and discussion board on itch.io are disabled. If you wish to discuss all things BK, please do so in the new dedicated Brigador Killers section of our Discord server. Third, a bit of housekeeping. If youre on our mailing list but havent been receiving newsletters lately - please check your junk mail. If you havent been receiving newsletters lately despite subscribing, sign up here. We keep an archive of every monthly newsletter on our site that you can see here so any newcomers can take a look at our backlog. Come back later this month for a more substantial development post.

The past twelve months have been very busy for Stellar Jockeys on multiple fronts, so were going to briefly run down most of the stuff we made just for Brigador Killers alone. Before we do that

THE RELEASE DATE

Q1: AIMING REWORK, MORALE & SUPPRESSION, CLUTS AND NEW ANIMATIONS

Q2: PIERCE & PENETRATION, SOME NEW PROPS AND KICKING THINGS INTO OTHER THINGS

Q3: DIALOG TOOLS, THE CISTERN AND OTHER ART ASSETS

Q4: VEHICLE EJECTION, GIBS AND SQUIBS

WHAT ELSE IS IN STORE?

The above quote is attributed to Paul Rand who was a famous graphic designer responsible for numerous corporate logotypes. You may have already seen the allprops tour with Dave video that was posted several months ago which featured building assets from a few areas in Brigador Killers. If you havent seen it, watch the first two sections to get context for the rest of this post. [previewyoutube=8gE4F2juPz4;full][/previewyoutube] Neither the video nor the post for it talked about the conceptual origins of those buildings for BK. To rectify this, we asked the artist responsible for a lot of the props in that video, Igor, to dig up some of their pencil and paper sketches for them along with penning a few thoughts behind each one. Click the images to expand them in your browser.

slide_1_hrush

slide_2_hotels

slide_3_offices

slide_4_mcmansions

slide_5_office_postmodern

slide_6_technotop

slide_7_fabhabs

Holiday merch store discounts coming soon

For this month were going to explain how the Brigador Killers engine handles the emission of gib sprites from entities during gameplay. In other words, this.
Weve established in previous news posts that all youre looking at on screen are flat 2D sprites and that BKs systems can overlap in interesting ways to create unexpected outcomes, but we havent touched on the data end of these things. First off, to save on space, both the Brigador and the BK engine store all assets in a large collection of compressed data called a pack file which has the exciting name of assets.pack. By using the games debug panel, we can look up these assets via the Pack file tab. At time of writing there are roughly 19 thousand assets categorized into 60+ different resources. Sometimes these assets are .png image files (such as the various sprite sheets for all the building props and characters) but a large portion of them are JSON files which allow us to specify the values of all sorts of various things in a human readable manner. Most of the screenshots in this post are of the games debug panel, which is a version of Dear Imgui that among other things allows us to look up and iterate on data values during a games runtime without having to make a new build of the game.
The JSON for a specific unit can be made up of several JSONs itself. For instance, lets look at foot_loy_bd_01.json, which is the JSON file for a typical enemy infantry unit, and which turns out to be made out of a lot of JSONs.
The keen of eye will notice that, yes, infantry in Brigador Killers are all technically mechs behind the scenes - anything in assets/data/vics/units is a mech, be it the player in a carmine suit or an NPC-controlled forklift truck. This is just how the game data is organized. From this list of JSONs, we want to inspect the units salvage, which is a file called salvage_foot_01.json.
Here you can see not only even more JSONs attached to this one, but also the types of values that can be assigned to its salvage hulk. A units hulk is what is left over after its health has been fully depleted. Vehicles that have been destroyed will leave a wreck, which is usually just the top part of the same model but desaturated to give the appearance of burned out armor. From the above menu most of the values are set to zero, as the hulk left over is for a body instead of a chunk of metal, but for purposes of player reactivity, hulks will still have some amount of health. Tangentially, infantry units as seen from the opening GIF will go through a series of animations as they are being attacked, which is not handled in this menu - thats part of whats called Flinch, Suppression, Flop and Weapon Stability, which looks like this:
Getting back to the gib sprites, we look at whats assigned for the on_damage_pyro, which is pyro_blood_mist_01.json, which is emitted by infantry-type NPCs and is a pyro-type resource.
Within that JSON we look for the gibs assigned to that pyro, which leads us to gibs_blood_mist_01.json. Explosion layers and lights are for bigger pyro effects. For instance, a gas station blowing up will need a fireball attached. Three layers down we have arrived at the resource that handles the attributes of blood sprites that an infantry NPC will emit on receiving damage: gibs_blood_mist_01.json
Here we can see what type of sprite has been assigned and how the animation for that sprite is set to play. We also get to decide how many blood mist sprays shoot out from the unit and at what speed, height, angle etc. These numbers are kept low for infantry gibs but, if we want to get silly, we can crank the numbers up and end up with something like this.
Again, the use case for more flamboyant gibs would be the destruction of a bigger entity like a heavy vehicle or a building prop that will have their own pyro and gib effects. Note again like in the first GIF at the top of the post an entity will do more than just shoot out a blood mist spray - just like a practical effect in movies, a squib also plays out to leave a blood stain on the ground. But unlike movie FX, we have to account for more situations than a carefully staged scene. Therefore one of the many other things to bear in mind with making these gib effects is that they have to have different spreads depending on what caused the hit. Here for instance is what happens if we put a bunch of infantry NPCs in a straight line and attempt to drive a heavy caliber round through them.
On top of the fireball explosion sprite and the bloom of light for the explosive bullet, youll notice that theres some uniformity to the ground spatter. This is because the sprites will only shoot out from an entity a limited number of ways. It would be too expensive (and a waste of time) to have our artists render out every single possible angle. Instead, the hope is that the gibs are done in just enough ways that the player fantasy is maintained. Thanks for reading, and happy halloween!

Weve mentioned that one of the criticisms the original Brigador frequently received is along the lines of Cool mechs, but what else is there to do? If you havent been following our development updates since they began, part of what were doing as a response to this is adding elements of progression like acquiring unlocks within a map, rather than the previous system of spending money in a menu outside of the action. What we havent talked about yet is how Brigador Killers is presenting the narrative - and yes, modders will have access to these tools. (By the way, whoever is responsible for looking after the TVTropes page for Brigador - your efforts have not gone unnoticed and we appreciate those of you who spent the time piecing together that games story.)
Brigador Killers will have narrative systems, including dialogue. They are heavily inspired by Emily Shorts article Storylets, You Want Them and Elan Ruskins article Dialog in Procedural Storytelling in Game Design (eds. Tanya X. Short, Tarn Adams), which describes the contextual dialogue systems in Left 4 Dead. The overarching system is made up of four overlapping narrative systems: storylets, predicates, the gvar (or "global variable") editor and a library of Lua functions. Note well: what were showing off is a work in progress, and both the systems and UI elements will change, particularly the debug panel.

WHY THESE SYSTEMS?

A set of changes that happen to the world state after the storylet is completed. [/olist]Why do this, and not just a normal dialogue system? For one thing, we didnt just want a dialogue system. This system of storylets and qualities gives us far more flexibility to describe a changing world and react to the players actions. On Brigador, we freed the player from some level design constraints by implementing completely destructible environments; on Brigador Killers, we want to do the same thing with our storytelling. Storylets enable us to write reactive chunks that respond to the players decisions and behaviour. Lets say that you have intel on a Betushka that you want to steal. In a traditional model, wed simply set a flag saying that you unlocked the Betka and dialogue trees would have variations to account for that flag. Using a storylet model not only allows us to track whether you steal it, but also how you steal it. Rather than accounting for flags within complex trees, we can (following from Left 4 Deads contextual systems) write reactions for various NPCs based on the stolen Betushka quality assigned to the player. Qualities are like a flag, but with more semantic information. Where Left 4 Dead's characters react to the world around you in an FPS, Brigador Killers characters will react to the story-world of the players actions. Not only that, storylets and qualities can be used to affect the game state on a local, per-map level, as well as on a global, game-wide level. They are not just a means to make NPCs interactive on a map, though we can do precisely that. Lets say we set down two NPCs that when we interact with them, a text box will appear.
If we interact with the NPC on the left, their text box is a simple introduction. If we interact with the NPC on the right instead, we can have them ask the player if they spoke to the first person.
And as a part of that chain of dialog we can have the first NPC chime in on the conversation
And if we wanted to do the same thing for both NPCs, we can do exactly that.
A system like this is appropriate for the needs of BK because we have player reactivity in mind for the design of the game. Put another way, if presented with a choice of left or right, we want the player to be able to select either one and still be able to advance, and not be required to speak to the correct NPC. Indeed, the player could just as easily choose to not speak to any of these NPCs. They might ignore them entirely, or the NPCs might have been spooked into running away because of a gunfight across the map, or an explosion might have killed them before giving the player the chance to talk to them. We can factor all of this in with such a narrative system. Better still, we can continuously add new content to this system without breaking existing chunks. Heres how a basic dialogue box is created in the game. In the games debug panel we click the Show Dialogue Editor button in the Main tab.
This opens up another window called the node editor, which looks like this. Node graph editors have been seen elsewhere, like Unreal Engines visual scripting system. We use the imnodes extension to Omar Cornuts excellent Dear IMGUI library.
When we click Add dialogue storylet, a box containing several fields appears on the node graph for us to fill out. A functional storylet would look like this:
Interacting with the NPC will prompt a text box to display Hi I am Tester 1. If we want an interaction to display a sequence of text boxes, the node graph editor would look like this.
So if we want the text boxes to go Hi I am Tester 1 and then Did you speak to Tester 2 yet?, we add the name of that second storylet to the response field of the first one. When we do that, the interaction will produce two text boxes in sequence on screen. Lastly, in order to assign these speakers, we need to use Tiled - the open source program we use to make maps - to give these NPCs names in their properties, because this is how the storylets system knows who is a speaker, even if multiple versions of the same NPC are populating a map.
But its trivial to display text on screen after hitting an interact key next to an entity. How do we make things more interesting?

COMPLEXITY THROUGH CONDITIONS

The three other narrative systems are predicates, the gvar editor and Lua functions. You might have spied the Show Predicates Window button in an earlier screenshot. Clicking it shows us the window. What is a predicate, you ask? A predicate is just an expression that evaluates to true or false.
What appears is a list of all existing predicates currently in the game. This window also serves as the predicate editor. Predicates can be considered the conditions that can be applied to a dialogue storylet in order for the dialog storylet to play. For example, if the player has done a specific action, like having talked to another NPC or completed an objective, this can be queried through a predicate. Lets say one NPC can have two storylets with the same predicate but with two forms: one of those forms says gvar.rescued_norman == true and the other says gvar.rescued_norman == false. This gvar part is a global variable which is a thing tracking the overall state or world quality of the game. If the player has rescued Norman, then the first storylet will play because the predicate has determined based on the gvar that Norman was rescued. If the player left Norman to his fate, then the second storylet will play. [table equalcells=1] [tr] [th]gvar[/th] [th]NPC storylet text[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]Rescued[/td] [td]"Thanks for rescuing Norman[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Not Rescued[/td] [td]You didnt rescue Norman?[/td] [/tr] [/table] Before you ask, yes, predicates can be nested within other predicates and we can make the Norman example more complicated. Maybe we have a gvar like gvar.alive_norman which is tracking whether Norman is alive or dead, not just whether the player rescued Norman or not. In this case we can have four potential predicate outcomes. [table equalcells=1] [tr] [th]gvar[/th] [th]Alive[/th] [th]Not Alive[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]Rescued[/td] [td]"Thanks for rescuing Norman[/td] [td]"At least you tried[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Not Rescued[/td] [td]You didnt rescue Norman?[/td] [td]"You didn't even bother[/td] [/tr] [/table] These gvars can be a simple true/false statement, or take on the form of a number or a string. The gvar editor within the game lets us decide what form these things take. Its also not limited to NPCs either. This system lets us express complex situations by responding to simple tests. Its easier to keep track of, for designers, and easier to reason about, for programmers and modders.

ONE MAP, MANY OUTCOMES

When a level loads up, the game engine checks the gvars and mvars (or map variables) for what to load within that level. When we make maps in Tiled, we can populate that map with whatever we want it to display according to the current quality state of the game (instead of having to make multiple versions of the same map to accommodate different outcomes which would be extremely tedious for our level designers). Any entity, like a building prop or an armored vehicle containing a full squad of tac-suited mercenaries, could appear, so long as they have been placed in Tiled and have been given the necessary labeling. Last of the four narrative systems are Lua functions. Lua functions either modify the game state or are bound to game code. They can be applied to storylets to generate an outcome of some kind. For example, when a certain enemy spawns and initiates dialogue, we can use Lua callbacks to play a particular music track or sound cue. They can pause or unpause the game, spawn units, set or complete objectives and eventually, much more. Note that this is not full on scripting in the sense that were not putting a programming language into the game. Doing that would open the door for all kinds of malicious activity. While Lua is a programming language, what were putting in the game is more like a lesser version of Papyrus, Bethesdas in-house scripting language. Its a set of predefined functions that we make available to designers and modders. Well go into more depth on that later. Combined, these systems massively expand our options as designers; were no longer limited to hard-coded objectives and mech spawns, and we gain a huge amount of flexibility and iteration speed. The tradeoff, wellwe spent most of this year on these systems. What were hoping, though, is that we can pass on that flexibility and massively expanded set of options to the player. Players who come in to Brigador Killers expecting the limited-by-comparison playspace of Brigador are in for a pleasant surprise. Thanks for reading.

WIN SOME MINIATURES BY PAINTING MINIATURES

We are currently holding the Olive Drab Everything painting contest on our discord server. The theme is Brigador - do with that what you will - all we ask is that submitted minis be painted. Painted minis do not need to be official Stellar Jockeys pewter figurines if you have kitbashed a Brigador vehicle of your own, or 3D printed a Touro you are eligible. Winners will get to choose one of the new sets of minis that are coming to our merch store later next month. The contest will be taking submissions until approximately 23:00 PST on Monday October 9 2023. Check the pinned message in the #olive-drab-everything channel for the full details Lastly, our first game Brigador is currently on sale as part of the Steam SHMUP Fest. If youd like to support our development for BK, tell a friend? https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/Brigador_UpArmored_Edition/

[ 2023-09-29 14:17:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Courtesy of our lead artist, August's post is a look into the design of an armored vehicle belonging to NOSPOL, which is one of the enemy factions you'll be facing off against in Brigador Killers. Without further ado...
Brigador Killers deals in part with the question of militarized police and police violence. How to approach this in the design and presentation of the world of Mar Nosso and its inhabitants? It is not enough to present to the player an MRAP [Editor's note: Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle] with police badging. While obscene, absurd, it is also perfectly ordinary to Americans. We are inured to it. So, the initial point of departure for the SWAT vehicle was to go back to the source: the Los Angeles Police Department and their SWAT Team. This departments escalation of weapons, tactics, and equipment would I believe set the template for militarized police presence in America for years to come. Which brought me to the Cadillac Gauge V100/Commando:
While iconic and fitting for the technical restrictions of our engine (wheeled vehicles can only have four wheels), we run into a similar problem as the MRAP: too many associations, many of them positive. The player cant see it with new eyes, which to us is one of the crucial aspects of good science fiction. So well shift to an older, and much more loaded point of departure: German wartime armored cars.
British soldiers inspecting a captured Sd.Kfz. 222, North Africa, 1941 (Wikipedia) While the associations vary, the baggage is unquestionable. WW2 German hardware should be unambiguous enough of a reference. Not so simple! German wartime hardware is the background radiation of popular cultural designs in film and videogames for decades, everything from Star Wars to Killzone. These design elements are powerful, but so much so they can easily overwhelm your own design intention and muddy your intended comment. Another particular difficulty with referencing German wartime designs is that one can end up on footing to that of say, Jin Roh where the loving depiction of German wartime arms and armor could be read as uncritical devotion. This is not what we mean to suggest with NOSPOL, the corrupt and gang-ridden police force you face in Brigador Killers. Early on, I switched from the Cadillac Gauge basis to this idea of roughly approximating the Sd.Kfz 222. I wanted to echo the angular hull shapes, but the overall design shouldnt map too closely to any original wartime design. Rather, I wanted to design my own vehicle to invoke, rather than recreate a wartime vehicle explicitly that might distract or muddy the players read for the vehicle. Again, lets have the player see it with fresh eyes. There are myriad other pitfalls with fascist police force design. Travel too far in a given direction and you retread others work, like Viktor Antonovs brilliant Combine APC design for example was something I wanted to avoid. The best way to do this was to design the vehicle in a way that made sense to how NOSPOL might commission the vehicle in the setting: a retrofit from an existing truck chassis. I had this Russian tanker truck model on hand. Perfect!
But its Russian, not German, how is that helping your association? Good question. Just as with the Loyalist military gear was largely but not exclusively Russian in origin, we dont want any one single source. When the viewer sees a design that is by turns subtly heterogenous in character its my theory that it aids in, to introduce a metaphor, slower digestion. An obvious design is like a piece of candyit can be very sweet, but its gone and eaten quickly without a second thought and without a lasting impression. We want this design to be somewhat chewier. More complex flavor notes. We want the taster to think about what flavors strike the palate. So we begin from a Russian truck chassis to execute a German influenced armored hull design to talk about American militarized police. Simple enough, right? Lets chop off the back wheels and introduce a magenta box to remind us of the package space required by the engine. Whatever else goes on in the design, were going to need ample clearance to house the engine. While were at it, I quite like those big, high clearance front fenders. Lets turn them around and put them over the rear wheels.
Now were getting somewhere. We havent really had to design anything yet, actuallybut by using a real world truck, notice how confident and realistic the scale read is. Provided we keep it consistent with our chassis here, the scale read will be more or less an automatic bonus, and will keep our work from getting too outlandish. [Side note: one such problem that science fiction designs from scratch will run into is that when designing a ground car the designer fails to take into account the legal width limits for road legal vehicles. While military machines can be bigger, they are also still expected to travel on the confines of established road infrastructure. Get those dimensions dialed in first and youll get a lot for free.] All we need to do now is start fitting an angular hull on top of this chassis, while still keeping in mind our other core requirements. How many people can it hold? Where does the driver sit? Does the armored car actually have a front and back driver, as some armored cars did? What engine limitations for a sprite-based and isometric game do we need to cater to?
In the interest of time were not going to walk through the rest of the design in detail, but with the major hull shape established, much of the rest would be about adding the hull detailing consistent with armored vehicles, stowage, searchlights, etc. Once weve got our goal in mind for this design theres not a lot of quibbling over different shapes and thumbnailing different looksone of the great pleasures of independent game development is that we can dispense with a lot of tiresome Art Director behavior most of the time. Heres the finished render of the armored car, in two flavors. First we see it as it will first appear to the player:
Beyond the police colors, something that always distinguishes overenthusiastic purchase of surplus military equipment by police departments in America and the former military service these vehicles saw is plainly their role. In the military, an armored vehicle is maintained but often subject to a lot of wear and tear. Once an MRAP is back home in America, emblazoned in SWAT livery, it seldom has to work. Its purpose is intimidation and peacocking for the department by and large. This is the initial guise I wanted to see the SWAT armored car deploy in BK as. A little underdressed compared to its military companions, seen elsewhere in the game. Then, as the game progresses, and the players fight against the Concerns and their attendant police and mercenary forces intensify, updates and changes are made. Even a SWAT vehicle is forced to work under something more akin to active combat conditions. It needs to keep ammunition and fuel and spare tires with it.
It might even need to get semi-improvised slat armor for the wheels, a repeated weak point for ambush attacks from the player character (or other parties?). We highlight for the player that the slat armor is definitely newer by giving it fresh, dark paint compared to the more sunfaded exterior of the main hull. Hopefully youll agree that at least some of the above is more than bluster and the design principles as established are borne out in the final design, and that the up-armored variant makes it clear to the player that the fight is escalating. See you, killer.
Stay appraised of news about Brigador Killers development by wishlisting and following the game. https://store.steampowered.com/app/903930/Brigador_Killers/

A while ago we revealed that one of the big visual differences between Brigador Killers and the previous game is the increased output resolution of sprites. This increase in fidelity means you the player will get a closer look at exported models in-game. If you'd like a longer read on the topic of how these models become sprites then consider reading this other article from Brigador's news hub. Getting a closer look means we get to focus on the infantry scale of things. In that spirit, we're going to run you through how an all-new spacer suit for Brigador Killers goes from concept to final sprite render.

The first step is what's called the mood board. This is the conceptual framework where the artist references the mood, texture and detailing that we want to evoke with the spacer power suit.
Step two is the adapt or "kitbash" stage. Seeing as we've already developed a powersuit for Clade Vocc (not pictured), in 3DSMax, we extrapolate a suit design to help suggest how mainline spacers are still related, though considerably drifted away from in both culture and military doctrine.
The third step is the paintover in photoshop. With a basic suit layout in hand, we think about how we are going to change and treat the design. Returning briefly to the mood board's astronaut references, we decide on a cloth-covered suit. At this stage the helmet is unsatisfactory, but that will get revised later.
Once we have arrived at a satisfactory model of the suit, the finished design is then broken down into components for baking down and then texturing in Substance Painter. The final sprite render shown in the bottom right corner of the above image is done in Blender. Here is the finished suit as a render (click here to open a full size version in your browser).
As a bonus, a scene was composed using the model of this new spacer powersuit, which was used as the header image for this article. You can get a wallpaper sized version by clicking here, with deference to American digital painter Craig Mullins for this piece.
This post was based on one of our monthly newsletters that was sent out back in March 2022. Click here if youd like to check out our newsletter archive.

For June 2023 we are (very briefly) showing off one of the major new features for Brigador Killers, which we're calling map connections. [previewyoutube=1sxs1NDXhHc;full][/previewyoutube]

WHAT ARE MAP CONNECTIONS?

BRIGADOR PEWTER MINIS NOW ON SALE

For Mays update on Brigador Killers weve decided to talk about something many of Brigadors modders will be familiar with: the debug panel. For those not familiar, if you press F1 at any time in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition an overlay window appears that looks something like this.
In BK, the debug panel has had some work done to it
so were going to highlight three of its new features. [For those wondering, yes, this is Dear ImGui by Omar ocornut Cornut, which is used by a lot of other game developers in their games though its typically not made accessible in the public versions of those games.] Our usual caveat as ever: what you see is still a work in progress and not everything in this articles screenshots are necessarily representative of the final product. If you're having trouble viewing the screenshots, try right clicking the image and opening it in a new tab (click here to view this post in your browser).

Tile contents tooltip

Patrol routes

• Select patrol origin
• Select patrol endpoint

Get the coordinates for those two points that we can take over to the Tiled version [/olist]As you might expect, this is going to allow us to create more interesting combat encounters, particularly in light of the third feature.

Civilian socializing

This ones complicated, and this screenshot is probably not going to help either, but bear with us.
What youre looking at is the debug draw of the social paths. Put simply, civilians have new socialize AI states. In the case of the above, the green hemispheres indicate areas of socializing, while the white lines indicate civilians searching for such areas and the path theyre taking to get to one. When a mech enters the social state, it will randomly pick another mech, internally called its "friend". The friend's current position will be chosen as a meeting point (or green hemisphere) and it too will enter the socialization state. Futher mechs that enter a socialization state and choose either of the currently "socializing" mechs as a "friend" will converge to that meeting point. After an amount of time passes, these civilians will search for another place to socialize. In the process of writing out this post, we had left the level running a bit too long in the background and 99% of the test level civilians ended up all grouped together.
Civilians dynamically moving around in such a manner goes a long way to making levels seem more alive but its not the only thing. Not featured here is the ability to make props that are socially interesting and not just to civilians. Other on-foot NPCs like cops are also capable of the social AI state. What does this potentially mean from a gameplay design standpoint? One possibility is it means we can place entities in levels that will draw the attention of NPCs and cause them to gather in particular spots. Maybe its a fast food restaurant, maybe its a police checkpoint, or maybe its something the player can use to create a diversion within a level Whatever form it ends up taking, we know were excited to see what our community of established modders gets up to with these features alone.
Did you know that Stellar Jockeys has a merchandise store? If youd like to help fund our development, consider purchasing a pin, t-shirt or even an SNC Skull & Laurel Zippo lighter.

[ 2023-05-31 15:59:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

This months post looks like a GIF explainer but its secretly a ruse to explain how systems can overlap in Brigador Killers. Heres the GIF in question, taken from a recent debug build:
Weve slowed this GIF down considerably because at normal speed, it would look something like this
Also well post the first GIF a bunch of times throughout this article so youre not constantly scrolling up and down. The GIF shows several entities in its short clip. An entity is an object that interacts with the game and responds to player input or other entities. These entities are:

• 1 x Carmine suit
• 1 x police cruiser
• 2 x Dave
• 1 x destructible object or prop in the form of yellow buckets filled with water

• A label called Max speed
• A label called Decay
• Green HP bars above the police cruiser and the two Daves
• A red and orange ring that briefly appears beneath the Carmine suit

• A kicking up of dust from the Carmine suits kick
• A darkening effect on the Carmine suit, police cruiser, two Daves and prop
• The Daves changing animation states
• The inertia of the police cruiser after colliding with the prop

• Impulse
• Wheeled vehicles
• Trample
• Reverse trample

The police cruiser still has inertia and continues to roll forwards before stopping. [/olist]All of what you just read is about 1000 words explaining what happens in roughly a second of gameplay.
Why we bothered to write that all out is because at the time of capturing this GIF we didnt even expect the second Dave to have been killed by the interaction - we would have been content enough with the police cruiser shunting into the NPCs and inflicting some reverse trample damage, which it did. Instead, weve found ourselves in a much more exciting place, because we now know that such player actions have the potential to be messy in ways that means players wont see the exact same thing over and over if they replay certain combat scenarios. The reason this has happened is because its a combination of multiple overlapping systems that, in some cases, have taken several years to develop, and can now be expressed in Brigador Killers.
If you enjoyed this post, you can find quite a few more in-development GIFs on our discord servers #brigador_killers_chat channel.

[ 2023-04-28 14:29:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

One of the major advances that we made the past month was changing how the aiming works in the games engine for Brigador Killers along with some new animations. Weve recorded some footage of the new aiming system in action and put together this post as an explainer for what youre about to watch. A reminder as always: what you see below is not indicative of the final product, and theres plenty still left to do but its starting to get much closer to the game we want to make.
[previewyoutube=67fyHDSzQ6o;full][/previewyoutube]

Combat Glide (0:00)

Lock Target (0:56)

Level Aim (2:52)

Flop, Drop & Prone (4:45)

Death Animations & Gibs (6:29)

Back in July 2022 we wrote that we wanted to put some form of Brigador Killers out in 2023. We have recently decided that the game will come out first as a build on Itch.io in the coming months. Assuming that period on Itch goes well, BK will then come to Early Access on Steam in 2024, and then eventually 1.0 with post-release support. The Itch page is up though there are no builds of the game to get your hands on just yet. You can take a look at it here. Price is still TBD.

WHY WERE DOING THIS

ANSWERING THE QUESTION OF IF I BUY IT ON ITCH FIRST, WILL YOU GIVE ME A STEAM KEY FOR IT LATER?

WHATS BEEN HAPPENING WITH BK

BEFORE WE GO

NEW MAKEUP AND VANITY SET TRACK

OUR PLANS FOR 2023

OTHER THINGS OF NOTE

STAY WRAPPED UP TIL NEXT MONTH

[previewyoutube=_2dPb9XSzs8;full][/previewyoutube]As a parting gift for 2022, here is the first chapter of the next audiobook written by Brad Buckmaster and read by Ryan Cooper. Titled Brigador Killers: Pilgrim, it is a direct sequel to the events of the first book and will serve as a companion novel for the game Brigador Killers. We are thrilled to have worked with both Brad and Ryan again on this project. As we state in the novels foreword:[quote]Be ready: this is no mere "tie-in" novel. We gave Brad the go-ahead to run, and he ran all the way into the dark.[/quote]As for Brad's own blurb:[quote]Solo Nobre fell in one night. Those loyal to Great Leader were pushed to the edge of oblivion, yet remained unbroken, and now they turn their gaze skyward towards a new world, jewel of the corporate oppressors that now reign over them. It is there on the rich colony of Mar Nosso that the hated Brigador mercenaries enjoy the spoils of war, basking in newfound celebrity status, lionised as heroes to the ignorant masses. They think the fight is over. For the members of Kill Team Pilgrim, they havent even started. Pilgrim will take the fight to the enemy, on their home turf, where they think they are safe and protected. Its time for the Brigadors to die.[/quote]Were looking forward to you learning more about both Zhe and Kill Team Pilgrim when the novel is released in full in 2023.
P.S. Our merchandise store is still running its sale all December long. You can get 20% off your next merch order by entering promotional code HOLIDAYS2022 at checkout, or clicking here. P.P.S. Like the splash art? An album of all our splashes to date for Brigador and BK can be seen over on this IMGUR album.

[quote]Earnest, loyal, and doomed. Loyalist Infantry is filled with a dying breed of hard-asses. Theyre a dying breed because most of them get killed, because theyre infantry on a battlefield crowded with heavy metal. That doesnt stop them sneering at basically every other branch in the military. The way they see it, everyone else is trying to hide their deathwish behind armor plating and hardshields. The grunts just like to get there faster. -MB[/quote]In last month's post we talked about how one of the problems we wanted to address was how aiming generally felt bad. This was in part due to the player having to stop-and-start the process of aiming and shooting which was not at all fun. We think we're a step closer to achieving that with what we are tentatively calling "aim glide". Long time readers will know the drill but for new readers: what you see below is not indicative of the final product. The keen-eyed among you will likely notice shadows popping in or other sorts of graphical artifacting - rest assured there are plenty of things you can't see that also need smoothing out. All music in this video is by Makeup And Vanity Set and the first track is an alternate version of the track "Strange Bedfellows". As for those asking "Wait, who's Dave?" - the answer lies further down.

OPEN THIS IN A SEPARATE WINDOW AND READ ALONG

BKTEST Allprops Sady (00:00-03:51)

BKTEST Allprops Mar Nosso (03:52-08:44)

BKTEST Allprops [Unnamed Location] (08:45-11:51)

BKTEST Dave Animations & "Aim Glide" (11:52-13:57)

A FESTIVE ANNOUNCEMENT

For this post we want to highlight one of the less exciting things about making games from the past month and how we plan to address it. Its often referred to as finding the fun i.e. the process of iterating on a set of prototyped mechanics or systems and testing them to see if it fits within the expectations of our design and achieve a broadly enjoyable feeling of play (also sometimes referred to as a flow state in more academic circles). Our caveat like last time that what you see below is not indicative of the final product. Theres still jank like map boundaries missing allowing units to wander into the void and things generally looking empty while veterans of our first game will recognize reused elements. The following video is of three short encounters on small scale maps that measure about 40x40 tiles. We also had a fourth, much larger map (around 220x250 tiles) to stress test how many things we could stick into one map, but it is not included for reasons that will be laid out in this post.

OPEN THIS IN A SEPARATE WINDOW AND READ ALONG

1ENCOUNTER 1 (00:00-05:11)

• Player aim sucks
• Player damage output sucks
• Environmental props are very solid (compared to the previous game)
• Engagement distances feel off
• Reloads suck
• Camera sucks

2ENCOUNTER 2 (05:12-08:53)

3ENCOUNTER 3 (08:54-12:08)

TO SUMMARIZE THE CURRENT PROBLEMS

• Player movement doesnt feel good especially compared to vehicle movement we either walk/run or mostly stand still to shoot
• Aiming and shooting feels very static and uninteresting to engage in this is amplified by how the accuracy system functions causing projectiles to catch on top of barriers we want to shoot over, as well as the excruciatingly slow reload times
• The environment is tanky part of the joy of the previous game is that even though shots from either the player or NPCs sometimes failed to land, the environment was so fragile that something was still happening even when shots missed
• Time to kill is off versus armor an on-foot player should certainly feel terrified going up against a bigger foe, but theres a current frustration just dealing with units of the same size (even non-Faber) which can lead to the player getting dogpiled by multiple enemies
• Engagement distances are too great getting damaged from off-screen sources not only adds to the frustration but also encourages the player to default to camera-optimal distances i.e. zoom out and extend the camera as far out as possible to get a bead on any potential threats
• Too much is going on and cognitive load irritates the player frequently the player was trying to quickly dish out damage at approaching units, only to find that their guns had to be reloaded and their health was quickly deteriorating and had no means to counter incoming threats both on- and off-screen beyond running away

SO WHAT TO DO?

• A form of ADS (Aim Down Sights) along with a new type of aiming reticle our intent is to have right click on mouse act as a form of focused aiming for the player which will involve changing how the camera operates
• Changes to the AI behavior of enemy infantry these NPCs fundamentally act the same way as vehicles do which does not translate well as infantry behavior
• Tweaking a number of values experienced Brigador modders will be aware that its possible to do many things with the data in-game, so reducing reload times and HP pools, stopping bullets from catching on chest-high walls, or changing when and how quickly enemies engage with the player is already doable
• Simplifying input while not overburdening the player this point is a bit vague but one thing we might do is give the player character an additional option to run and gun on top of firing while either crouched, standing or walking which means new animations are required

One of the hallmarks of our previous game Brigador is its fully destructible environments. With a few exceptions, every prop visible within the games levels can be smashed through or blown up and left as a pile of debris on the ground. Here's a Touro from our first game next to some buildings showing the before, during and after effects of a stomp (right click > open image in new tab to get a better look).


[Images from Brigador: Up-Armored Edition] How this system works in Brigador is each prop, depending on a few factors like its size and what hit it, has a couple of destruction states (or variants of the prop) that then, when damaged enough, leave a flat rubble texture on the ground tiles which the player can walk through as if it were a regular ground tile.
[GIF from Brigador: Up-Armored Edition] Were adding what were calling systemic building collapse to this existing system in Brigador Killers. Related to it is a tactic that we tutorialize in the first game: mouse-holing. As developers we give you the ability to make your own space through that game's environment and its up to you to make use of that space in whatever way you the player deem fit. For instance in Brigador its entirely possible to just destroy one chunk of a building prop with certain weapons and not really affect anything else connected to or around it. If youre accurate enough and shoot through a sturdy-enough prop with something like a railgun, youll carve out a neat line through it. Heres a before and after of a typical Zeus shot in Brigador going through a couple of building props.

[Images from Brigador: Up-Armored Edition] What you can see is a convenient, Touro-wide hole through which to stomp through as a result. Although it serves our gameplay purposes in this game, this would not really be the case in real life as can be evidenced by looking at footage of any collapsing building (volume warning ahead). [previewyoutube=AGUqcnhJbeg;full][/previewyoutube]Rubble scatters around, dust kicks up to say nothing about anything or anyone that happens to be by a collapsing building. The structure of the damaged building is also heavily compromised and the rest of it is liable to fall as a result. The previous approach is also not suitable for BK for three big reasons:

• The change in initial scale from vehicle -> infantry
• Variable zoom for the player, and
• Buildings are much tougher and bigger than before

At the end of last months post, we mentioned that there have been a number of Brigador Killers test builds (or BKTESTs as we call them) put out over the past eight months. In this post were going to cover some of what appeared in the first three BKTESTs with a series of clips of each in the video below. Each section is timestamped and a short explainer is provided. Caveat as before that what you see is not indicative of the final product; this is us lifting the lid up and letting you take a look at the less glamorous side of game development. That means youll see jank like clunky animations and weapons not mounted properly, a distinct lack of things like new sound FX, while veterans of Brigador will recognize reused UI elements. Please also note that some of the things mentioned in the previous news post, such as the in-level item acquisition or threat response escalation systems, are not yet implemented either. However, careful listeners keep an ear out you might hear something new in the first section Lastly, in terms of timeline, BKTEST01 was pushed in December 2021, BKTEST02 was March 2022 and BKTEST03 was June 2022.

WATCH THIS IN A SEPARATE WINDOW SIDE-BY-SIDE WITH THE TEXT

BKTEST01: ALLPROPS LEVEL (00:00-01:37)

BKTEST01: RACE TRACK (01:38-02:31)

• Vehicle entry/exit
• Wheeled vehicle movetype

BKTEST01: CITYSCAPE (02:32-04:20)

BKTEST02: CITYSCAPE (04:21-11:25)

• Player suit choice (which later affects incognito status)
• Infantry scale weaponry
• Running and crouching animations for on foot characters
• New road vehicles
• Morale system

WHAT IS THE MORALE SYSTEM?

BKTEST03: SHOOTING RANGE (11:26-14:44)

• A shooting range and another cityscape nicknamed the Broken Grid Arena
• Uprezzed playable versions of the Spacer Arlo agrav and Rounder tank, and the Loyalist Betushka
• Mousewheel zoom
• Threat indicators
• Flinch/flee behavior
• Trample damage
• Incognito mode and non-hostile NPC behavior
• Destruction sprites for props

BKTEST03: BROKEN GRID ARENA (14:45-22:30)

WHAT WE FOUND OUT AND WHATS NEXT

WELCOME CAVEAT

FOR CONTEXT: A VERY BRIEF RECAP

SO WHAT IS THIS GAME?

VISUALS

TECH SPECS

GAMEPLAY LOOP

Let the player acquire unlocks during in-level play [/olist] Mechanically, the elevator pitch is akin to something like Hitman: Contracts meets GTA2. Your initial loadout will be limited but when we set you loose within a level, you as the player may find vehicles, weapons or items that can be acquired for current and future use. However, in order to add them to your permanent arsenal and use them in subsequent forays you will need to get out of the level alive. In addition, such vehicles and weapons will influence the force posture of enemy forces and affect a type of escalation system. For example, you can go into a level incognito on foot with discreet weaponry and local security will not consider you a threat nor will they attack you on sight. Or, assuming youve unlocked it, you could strut in with a Touro sporting a Zeus and a Me Dois and its safe to assume local security are going to call HQ. Why you would go down either route depends on your objective. Maybe youll want to scout things out or simply jack a vehicle and book it before Nospol gets wise, or maybe youll need something with enough oomph to break into a Faber compound to either acquire or eliminate a high value target. Regardless of how your recon goes, the idea behind combatting this lack of things to do from Brigador is to let the player take an active hand in the acquisition and behavior of weapons and vehicles within a BK level, rather than just buying things from a menu. In addition, the implication of all of the above means we need to make new weapon types suitable at the infantry/squad level, along with damage models and enemy behaviors to compliment this style of play.

MUSIC

Makeup And Vanity Set has already composed about 40 new tracks for BK. A few of them were already posted to our YouTube. Heres the playlist of the tracks weve already made available. [previewyoutube=z3WmEYtpFQY;full][/previewyoutube]

LORE/PLOT

Spoilers for Brigador but in case you missed it, in that game [spoiler]you were playing the bad guy[/spoiler]. All the Brigador pilots were mercenary contractors for an intergalactic corporation called the SNC that disrupted Solo Nobres government so that it could take over the planet. The action this time around takes place some time after the events of Brigador. Youll largely be playing as the Nobreans that survived the mess the SNC caused. The action will initially take place on the planet of Mar Nosso, which is an SNC colony and new home for several of the Brigador pilots, but youre not just coming for them. With BK, the wider fiction is going to be fleshed out. Youll learn more about the enigmatic Spacer clades and the intercorporate politicking with various security companies, as well as find out what happened to your favorite Brigadors from the first game.

(AUDIO)BOOK

Both the text by Brad Buckmaster and audio version recorded by Ryan Cooper of the next book is done but there's still some cleanup required on both to make everything presentable specifically, making sure the page layout on things like Kindle is good, and double checking the mastered audio. It is also a direct sequel to the events of the first book.

OBLIGATORY RESPONSE TO JUST ADD MULTIPLAYER

We realize it wont stop a particular set of people asking so heres our response you give us at least ten times the amount of our lifetime revenue from Brigador, and cover the costs of increasing our staff to about 50 people, then maybe well talk about the idea of making a functional multiplayer mode in Brigador Killers. Thats our proposal: give us a lot and we mean A LOT of money up front and maybe well consider it.

PLATFORMS AT LAUNCH

• Windows
• Linux
• Mac

Mac OS in recent years has become an extremely hostile environment for developers. For us there are two big reasons:

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

Both of these together mark a fundamental change in how Mac machines function. It is only a matter of time until OpenGL itself disappears from Apple's operating systems, and with it the ability to run Brigadors engine. Though projects like MoltenGL exist, the amount of work that would be required to make a Brigador engine game functional on a modern Apple machine will likely be unjustifiable. That said, if BK ends up doing well, well reconsider our current attitude towards Mac.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Given the new systems were making, well hopefully be able to make more interesting ones beyond Kill X of Y or from acquisition unlocks.

ACTUAL RELEASE DATE

We want to put some form of BK out in 2023 because at some point we have to pay for the roofs over our heads. We may go down the Early Access route like before but thats still TBD. Regardless we intend to produce a demo for people to play as well so that no buy-in is required for those on the fence.

ANSWERING YOUR OTHER QUESTIONS

AdeptOfHellLife asked: [quote]Will there be any WMD's in BK? I wanna nuke the establishment.[/quote] Modding weapon values and explosion radii will still be possible in BK via the F1 debug panel just like in Brigador. Youre more than welcome to mess around with weapon values and make screen-filling explosions, though if you crash the game as a result of doing so dont say we didnt warn you. [quote]Also, any plans for trailers or demo-version, even?[/quote] There are plans to make a demo. A trailer is going to be a major marketing beat and we dont have enough of a game yet to make one. [quote]Will there be multiple endings to Campaign?[/quote] Telling you how it ends before its even started is a bit premature. [quote]Will I pick my loadouts for Campaign missions from set options like in original Brigador or will it be like Freelance?[/quote] Like we wrote above, the intention is that Campaign & Freelance are going to be merged into a single mode. Unlocks will be tied to your actions and progression through this mode. The current idea is that the things you acquire in later levels can be used for deployment in early ones. [quote]Will Freelance mode make a comeback?[/quote] We are not ruling out a sandbox mode of sorts, but whether such a thing will be suitable for the game were making remains to be seen. Kris in a discussion thread asked: [quote]Are we still a lone mech/vehicle or will we have allies?[/quote] For now, the idea is youll initially play as a member of the Nobrean hit squad, but other members will be recruited into the fold. Our plan is that each person will have a certain effect on gameplay in that some will be better at using certain vehicle types or weapons. It will be vaguely reminiscent of Hotline Miamis mask choice system. Though its a direct inspiration to this game, a Syndicate-like party-of-four system is not on the cards. Omni asked: [quote]Is BK going to be evolution of the first game, more of the same but polished and iteratively improved, or do you plan some revolutionary changes in gameplay? Not that I expect to outright share them at this point if you do.[/quote] Aside from being able to switch between vehicles within a level, one of the most significant changes is the pierce/penetration system. Our design lead discussed it along with some other in-progress features in a June stream you can watch an archive of here [previewyoutube=NJNkV6AJ77w;full][/previewyoutube] The short version is weapons will have varying pierce values while vehicles and environmental props will have penetration values. Example: shooting a handgun at a tank wont do anything because of its thick armor plating. [quote]Is BK going to take place on one planet, or many?[/quote] We intend the player to start on the SNC colony world of Mar Nosso, but who knows where you might end up [quote]Are you sticking to Tank-Mech-Agrav trio, or are we going to see some new type, flier maybe?[/quote] In terms of things you can drive around, we have added wheeled vehicles. Physically modelling the physics of driving a car is one of the most complicated things in game dev (theres a great GDC talk from the Rocket League devs on this subject that we recommend watching) but is necessary in order to get the right feel. We do not expect to add any sort of flying vehicle to the roster. [quote]Are you planning for the game to have some kind of coop capacity of any sorts (as implied by Brigador Killers)?[/quote] No. [quote]I always felt like AI can be its weakest link in its chain, and I often wished it was bit smarter about things, communicating better, trying to use its numerical advantage, contain, encircle and flank me, behaving bit more like actual combat force, are you per chance aiming for development in that area?[/quote] Yes. One of the issues presented by infantry-scale combat versus vehicle-scale is people do things like take cover in response to suppression. Its still early days but weve been making systems to try to reflect this sort of behavior. Please refer to this newsletter from January for additional details. [quote]A number of people asked about the topic of melee weapons[/quote] Melee weapons arent being considered currently, either for mechs or on foot. There will still be a melee attack/stomp for on-foot and vehicles but we dont intend to extend this system out. Leif asked: [quote]What faction will the player be working for in Brigador Killers?[/quote] Youre not working for the SNC in this game. Primarily you will be part of a Loyalist cell that survived the devastation of Solo Nobre sent to Mar Nosso to get payback. zwzsg asked: [quote]I know it's the future and that the spacer one uses balls not treads, but still, drifting tanks???[/quote]
(Yes we are aware that a tank drifting is generally a terrible idea, usually for the treads, but we'd like to find an entertaining middle ground between players looking for cathartic release and those with lifetime passes to Bovington)
Once again, thank you for the questions. Next month we'll give an overview of what happened with each of the recent BK test builds. Until then feel free to join our Discord server and maybe check out the #becks_best channel.

[ 2022-07-29 17:00:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

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:





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