Brigador Killers cover
Brigador Killers screenshot
PC Steam
Genre: Indie

Brigador Killers

Brigador Killers Will Not Come To Steam In 2024
We've shot for the moon, and we're almost there. Brigador Killers is an order of magnitude more complex than our first game: BK has cars that can handbrake around corners. You can travel freely between levels, you can talk to NPCs, and you can get in and out of vehicles. We've listened to the features you wanted and now we're close to the game of our dreams. We're just making sure that we unveil it when it's ready.

Thank you to all our fans and everyone that has shown interest in Brigador Killers. It will be worth the wait. If you’d like more details for any of these sections, check out our monthly posts (like this one) or watch our YouTube uploads (like this one).

SO WHAT HAVE WE BEEN UP TO? PROGRESS IN 2024


To catch you up, at the start of February 2024 we made the SECRET ALPHA 1 build of Brigador Killers available over on Itch.io. We updated that build a couple of times over that month to fix some issues: Windows Defender didn’t recognize the game and flagged it in a false positive, we had a few crash bugs that our dedicated players helped us discover, and our freshly-made playlist system sometimes failed to play music across level transitions. After solving those bugs and releasing fixes in March 2024, there have been no public updates, but in response to the feedback from SECRET ALPHA 1, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes:

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

A peek at the Lobos in-engine, an industrialized enemy type that you face early in the game

This is not the full list of things we’ve been working on, but we do want to go into detail on a few other things that are currently cooking.

REFINING THE CORE LOOP



As we mentioned above, players enjoyed SECRET ALPHA 1 but wanted to know more about their progression: how they could develop their characters’ abilities, and what challenges they would be working to overcome. We wanted to answer these desires while keeping in mind Brigador’s strong cast of vehicles, which many players have come to love. Only a subset of vehicles will return – Mar Nosso is on a different planet than the first game, after all – but we wanted to make sure to keep vehicles at the core of Brigador Killers.

One of the ways we’re doing that is to present vehicles as resources – not just a means to get around, or to shoot things with, but something you’ll want to hunt down so you can work towards a goal.

Now, what does that mean? The image above is an example – it’s a development tree that describes what you can do with a motorbike. Once you find and unlock it, you’ll be able to use blueprints and parts to turn it into more specialized variants.

Many players wanted more customization from Brigador, and ever since 2017, we’ve been keeping that in mind as we work on Brigador Killers. It would have been simple to add a looter-style progression to vehicles (“swap engines for +5% movespeed” - that kind of thing), but we wanted to really dig into what players wanted and come up with a satisfying system.

Along these lines, we’ve been working on identifying player types and giving each type options that are interesting and rewarding. In real life, someone who restores vintage cars doesn’t have the same priorities as a performance-focused hobbyist racer, even though they both work on cars in their garage. So, going back to the image above, a mobility-focused player can turn their motorbike into a Corvid Skate, and then a Rope Kid. A more combat-focused player can turn it into a Troubadour, and then a Pantry Boy, and even a Doorman.

In order to create these variants, the player needs to venture out into Mar Nosso and discover their blueprints, and then track down the parts needed to complete them. For example, a wandering SNC Ad Buddy™ might drop an agrav impeller, which is the drive unit you need to begin Corvidizing your motorbike into a Skate.

Anyone familiar with modding vehicles from our first game, kitbashing model parts, or, say an episode of The A-Team…
…will have a good notion of what we’re after.

We aren’t yet able to visualize this in-engine because what sounds like a “simple” idea (smoosh parts of vehicles onto another vehicle) is a lot of work. Brigador is a data-driven engine, which means that at its heart, mechs were described whole cloth in a JSON file. We don’t have to get into the details, but suffice to say that it was not designed to combine and change mechs like this. In 2018, when we started BK, we couldn’t even dynamically spawn units in a level. Everything that would be in the level had to already exist at level load time. Much of the code work since then has focused on making the engine more flexible and modern.

Even easy-seeming tasks like adding returning vehicles involve a ton of work: we have to import and re-render the required models at BK’s higher sprite resolution, as well as redoing their animations thanks to all the additional features we now have. These are problems we know how to solve, but they do take time.

THE SOUNDSCAPE


Another major change to the in-dev build of Brigador Killers is to the audio. Previously in Brigador, when you’d load up a level, the map would have a pair of music tracks associated with it. Once they finished playing, it wouldn’t start up again, so players were in for a quiet experience if they were on a particularly long or difficult run. Sound effects like gunfire and engine noise still played, but our implementation didn’t really allow for anything “dynamic” to happen during a level, like changing music tracks. We’ve focused on addressing these gaps from the first game in Brigador Killers. For instance, it’s much easier for us to specify the material of a ground tile. This means units can make different footstep noises when they traverse those tiles. This system existed in Brigador, but was only really used for grass tiles and railways. Now that we have infantry gameplay, footsteps are much more central to the world feeling alive, so we’ve expanded the surface audio system. Here’s a demonstration of what we mean: listen carefully to Dave’s steps as he traverses over each labeled strip.

Audio emitters can also be placed to play whatever sounds we want within a certain radius to the player. Later in the same video at the 1:59 timestamp you will see Dave teleport closer and closer to one of these emitters. It’s subtle, but notice how the volume of it increases as Dave gets closer, and the direction it plays in your headphones.

There is still plenty of work to do on the audio front, but we’re excited at the possibilities of what we can do with these fancy tools, especially in terms of making maps feel less static. Speaking of…

THE MAPS


The areas you can access in the current Itch build are, even with a vehicle, kinda time-consuming to get across. For the next public build, we expect to change the scale of the playspace, dividing these areas into smaller chunks. We also plan to add level transitions which can be unlocked or opened up via the world state, along the same lines as Dark Souls’ droppable ladders and unlockable shortcuts. The way you move around Mar Nosso will evolve and grow as you do.

THE STEAM PAGE


The images and content on the Steam page are not what BK looks like at all. Those images and GIFs are from the long-since retired build that was available to play if you saw us at PAX in 2019 or 2020. We’ll be updating the Steam page to better reflect what BK actually looks like. This might mean that certain units, like the Vocc Doll or Gravesend Pinball, are no longer showcased in the art on the store page, but don’t worry. They’ll still be in BK – they just need to go through the sprite updating and re-export process to be featured once again.

ANSWERING A FEW OTHER BURNING QUESTIONS


Why the delay?

In 2003 video games were somewhat niche, making roughly 7 billion USD in total across both console and PC according to the ESA. Jump forward two decades and in 2023 alone it’s been calculated the industry has made well over 180 billion USD. That’s way, way more than what Hollywood made in 2023. In terms of the number of games available to players, last year just on Steam over 14,000 titles were released.

At the same time, in just the past couple of years major corporations have consolidated a huge amount of talent under fewer and fewer roofs. Entire media outlets with years of experience covering the games industry have winked out of existence, to say nothing of all the recent closures of studios that put out critically-acclaimed and successful games.

What’s become apparent in the past decade is that successful indie titles tend to fall into one of the following camps:

  • 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)

More importantly, the indie titles mentioned have also spent years in development, often providing post-release support long after the game’s release. While Brigador Killers is taking a while to come together, it is no longer unusual for indie games to have project timelines that rival the AAA of yesteryear.

As established indie developers, we also find ourselves in the unusual position of being assigned the standard bearers for innovation. This is something you would hope to see out of the bigger companies that have the resources to do so (and in some cases used to do) but R&D into all-new IPs or hardware is not common. We want to do it, but that comes with the caveat of adding more devtime, especially since we’re one of the few developers making an isometric, sprite-based game in the 2020s.

Why not just do more Brigador?

The sentiment of “Why not just make more content for the first game?” has been expressed in various ways and the short answer is we consider Brigador: Up-Armored Edition to be feature complete. We may revisit it to make sure it is still functional on future versions of Windows and Mac, or make the default controls play better on the Steam Deck, but for the time being our focus is on developing this game. Brigador is kind of in a state where adding anything new would be like trying to add a pair of socks to a suitcase that you already had to sit on to close. The things we are doing with BK that we have outlined in this post are not possible with the engine that runs Brigador. We do not yet know what the minimum spec is for Brigador Killers but if you can run the current Itch build on your computer without issue you’ll probably be okay.

I have the Itch build - when can I get my hands on SJTiled?

The version of SJTiled for Brigador Killers will eventually become available - we don’t want to run into the problem we had with Brigador where when we updated that game with new assets, we bricked everyone’s maps they’d been working on. We are adding new features to SJTiled as well that haven’t been revealed in this post.

Where can I get the Makeup And Vanity Set soundtrack?

The tracks are infrequently released to our YouTube channel. The main soundtrack is about 40 tracks long, which is roughly the same as Brigador Volumes I and II. This doesn’t include the new ambient tracks that MAVS has also composed, or other music we have requested from them. As for the run of vinyl LPs of these albums, we intend to have a few of them available on our merchandise storefront, and MAVS themselves will also be selling them on their end. Judging by how well MAVS’ vinyls tend to do, we recommend that you either sign up to our newsletter over on our site or subscribe to MAVS to hear about the vinyl release first.

Are you going to make more minis for the merch store?

Yes. A new line of scale miniature models is coming later this year.

Hey! You didn’t answer my question!

Please leave your question in the comments, or in the #brigador_killers_chat Discord channel, or even email us at team@stellarjockeys.com.

Actually, we have a question - what recent release have you been playing that truly grabbed your attention?

Dioramas and Color Look Up Tables
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 weather files decide the basic lighting in terms of what color the direct light is, what color the ambient light is, and what direction and height the light is coming from in the game. The first four moods also use an associated Color Look Up Table, which is a feature new to Brigador Killers. CLUTs are screenspace shaders that can change how these colors look on screen in a fashion similar to color grading. In other words, all of the arranged assets in the eighteen different dioramas are not different colored buildings. Instead, what’s changing is some basic lighting information (which is kept in a .json file) and a .png file for the CLUT that’s only ~10 kilobytes in size, which lets us create completely different moods using the same scene. Dave is included because he has a flashlight on his chest rig and gun that we use to light up some of the assets when the dioramas get darker.

The Ambient Music


Accompanying the video is an ambient track composed by Makeup And Vanity Set. The track is titled “Faber” and is one of several that have been composed for the game in addition to the OST.

Yes, We Know About The Shadows


Why it happens is because you are not seeing “true” three dimensional models - you are actually looking at flat two dimensional quadrilaterals, or “sprites”, so the engine is repeatedly casting “slices” of the sprite rather than creating a regular looking shadow. Here is a longer explanation of the art pipeline if you are interested in learning more. At some point down the line the “staircasing” effect of the shadows in the game will disappear, so please enjoy it while it lasts.
That’s all for this month, but do tell us which mood and diorama was your favorite before you head off on holiday?

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

Dystopian By Design
This month’s post comes courtesy of our lead artist who also helped write the previous posts about the Mar Nosso SWAT vehicle and the spacer redesign.

Brigador is not a transhumanist or tech utopian setting. For as much as technology serves and eases human life, it can and is used to undervalue and enslave. We want to reflect this in Brigador Killers with designs like the Lobo.

Early in the story we discover specialized cyborgs used as soldiers, known as Lobos. This is the Spanish word for wolf, but is also suggestive of the word “lobotomy”. These soldiers did not volunteer; the fuller scope of the why and how for the Lobos came to be is part of the story.

Some key design goals for the Lobo:

  • Real world style design revisions over time, and
  • Those design revisions depicting escalation over time
Let’s talk about these two in turn.

Design evolution over time


Optimal design seems intuitive or even obvious, but only in hindsight. For example: the first minivans were smaller, passenger comfort-focused versions of cargo vans, which only had a single large sliding door, so the first minivans also only had a single slide door.

Minivans initially only had a single sliding door on the passenger side (source)

It took two generations of models in Chrysler’s case to introduce sliding doors on both sides, after which all the major auto manufacturers quickly followed. Obvious in hindsight, yet it took time to actually occur.

When we seek to reflect how designs change over time, we have to remember that the ultimate goal is not always in sight from the beginning. Designs evolve, clarify (or obscure and devolve!) over time. For a more realistic approach to design, we want to show iteration over time.

Top: 1st & 2nd generation minivans with no driver sliding door (1984-1995). Bottom: 3rd & 4th generation minivans with a sliding door (1996-2007) (source)

Design escalation over time


This leads into our second point: technology is not value neutral; it reflects the values of its creators. Shirley Cards tell us a lot about whom Kodak’s film stock was intended for, and who were not considered.

In the fiction of BK, between the Mk1 and Mk2, the designers of the Lobo stopped seeing the pilot as a person, only a design problem to be eliminated. Whoever the Lobo client is, it is not the pilot. The Mk1 is a half measure of hobbling and forcing a person to drive a suit of powered armor. With the Mk2, the awful logical conclusion has been reached: the person is another component to be streamlined, optimized.

Where the Mk1 is designed around a quadruple amputee with at least some allowances for the pilot, the Mk2 Lobos are maximally dehumanizing (an armored head enclosure with life support).

A (brief) annotated visual history of the Lobo


The Lobo design began in 2012 with a design I called “Company Man” for my game Animal Memory, which is the precursor to Brigador and the origin of the world setting. The goal was an unsettling robot/cyborg type enemy. The “empty helmet with optics” motif was seized upon.


Cyclolucidites’* particular head-in-a-can design is over a decade old at this point. The following image is also from 2012 and the same time period. In a world without, or few advanced computers, human brains would substitute.

[* For true Doom murderheads of The Lore, [b]read up about cyclolucidism.]


A few years later I would revisit this design circa 2015 as a sketch, adding the dress shoes which is my favorite element of the design.


In 2023 The Mk2 would be modeled. Other than being given a 20mm cannon the design is quite faithful to the 2015 concept.




Original head canister design as per 2015 concept sketch with rear wheel, suggestive of these wheeling around on their own like Star Wars mouse droids. Which I think is a little too cute.


Here is the revised canister design, which is much more like the 2012 original cyclolucidite canister sketch:


This is how the Mk2 finally looks after being animated and exported into the game engine:



Mk1 Design


Seeking to land the “design evolution over time” theme, I went back and designed a more primitive Mk1 model. Cutting off and using only the head for a cyborg is a severe move; it would take time to arrive at that. First, they would use a quadruple amputee and more primitive coercive methods of controlling the brain.


I did not particularly like the ape-like aspects of this design. While it was meant to look as though he was stooped and wizened from forced labor, it mostly just made you look at his butt. Not the design intent.


Some revisions later we arrive at the Mk1. Here it is in action in-engine:



Death flops are among the many animations made for this unit.


Notable influences on the Lobo are Ted Backman’s Stalker designs for Half-Life 2...




...And The Sequester by Keith Thompson, whose story vignettes also inspired the lore entries in Brigador.




It’s Steam Summer Sale time again, which means our first game is currently on discount for the next two weeks. If you would like to support our development, please consider telling a friend.

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

The Sun Never Sets On Volta

“Why’re they pink?” Gus asked, pointing to his chest as he struggled with the donning procedure of a Carmine in his size.

“Carmine. It’s 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.


[Excerpt from [b]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 you’ll 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 suit’s origins



Also known as a tactical rig or “tac rig”, the Carmine suit is less sturdy than a powersuit like the loyalist Mongoose. It makes up for this with increasing the player’s movement speed and kick power, as we have previously noted.


Within the fiction the suit comes from Volta, a mining colony planet mentioned in the text above. Voltan locals attempted a revolt with the use of these suits, though Volta is not a planet like our own.

Volta



Volta is different to both Novo Solo (where Solo Nobre is located) and Mar Nosso (where Brigador Killers takes place). There’s no specific mention of the following in the original Brigador, but if you listened to the prologue of the Pilgrim audiobook…


…At the 3:10 mark, you might have wondered what the word “terminator” means in this context.

On most planets like our own, the terminator is the ever-moving line that is the border between daytime and nighttime. In Volta’s case this line does not move. This is because Volta is tidally locked towards its sun, meaning one side of the planet is always facing that direction. Our own Moon is an example of this phenomenon, since it faces towards Earth.

In the novel extract, the character Amon mentions “a pinkish hue over the entire region” but most of us have experienced twilight - that period where the Sun’s light is still scattering into the upper atmosphere despite being below the horizon…

[[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight#/media/File:Powder_Blue_Desert_Twilight.jpg ]Mojave Desert via Wikipedia]

…but these periods are not exclusively pink. Missing from the extract is what sort of sun Volta has. Enter Dr. Lindsay DeMarchi, an astrophysicist kind enough to consult us on the vagaries of living on a tidally locked planet.

What is a red dwarf?



Our sun in the solar system is a yellow dwarf. It’s about 0.5 degrees across, or in other words takes up approximately 1/720th of the sky. Volta’s sun is a red dwarf, which is 2.1 degrees across and takes up 1/180th of the sky. If we overlaid both planets’ skies into one scene, the stars might look something like this.


Despite the yellow dwarf looking smaller than the red dwarf, red dwarves are smaller in mass, have less luminosity and are cooler than a star like our Sun. Volta is also much closer to its star for two reasons. The first is tidally locked systems occur when bodies are close to one another, such as Mercury and our Sun (another example of tidal locking... kind of). The second is that Volta’s red dwarf has a cooler temperature and is less luminous than our Sun. This means the ]

…but these periods are not exclusively pink. Missing from the extract is what sort of sun Volta has. Enter Dr. Lindsay DeMarchi, an astrophysicist kind enough to consult us on the vagaries of living on a tidally locked planet.

What is a red dwarf?



Our sun in the solar system is a yellow dwarf. It’s about 0.5 degrees across, or in other words takes up approximately 1/720th of the sky. Volta’s sun is a red dwarf, which is 2.1 degrees across and takes up 1/180th of the sky. If we overlaid both planets’ skies into one scene, the stars might look something like this.


Despite the yellow dwarf looking smaller than the red dwarf, red dwarves are smaller in mass, have less luminosity and are cooler than a star like our Sun. Volta is also much closer to its star for two reasons. The first is tidally locked systems occur when bodies are close to one another, such as Mercury and our Sun (another example of tidal locking... kind of). The second is that Volta’s red dwarf has a cooler temperature and is less luminous than our Sun. This means the habitable zone for Volta needs to be within 0.030 and 0.043 for Volta needs to be within 0.030 and 0.043 astronomical units from the red dwarf to make up for the disparity in temperature and light compared to the Earth (which is ~1 AU from the Sun).

If you are wondering whether from the red dwarf to make up for the disparity in temperature and light compared to the Earth (which is ~1 AU from the Sun).

If you are wondering whether we did the math on any of this, absolutely not. The astrophysicist who does this sort of thing as their day job did the math, resulting in the following table:


Or, as a diagram:


We are aware that tidally locked planets might not be habitable at all. Dr. DeMarchi wrote to us the following caveat:

“Astronomers don’t yet know for certain the effect tidally locking has on the development of life. Would this cause a temperature gradient that triggers very strong winds? Would the opposite faces each be too hostile for life to develop? Would an atmosphere be able to exist at all, or would the cold side condense it all until it’s too thick to be a gas?”


Yet when it comes to the realism vs. fun debate in video games, we tend to lean towards fun because it’s far more interesting to assume that Volta is (just about) habitable and all the effects that might have on a local population.

Now that we know where Volta is and what sort of sun it has, what does any of this have to do with the Carmine suit being carmine?

Light, Or The Ornamental Force Of The Universe



Since Volta has a red dwarf and not a yellow dwarf, there is going to be a difference in the range of visible light on Volta. This means that Volta’s star isn’t putting out a lot of blue or green into the spectrum, which we get a lot of from our own Sun. Put blunt, this is what a Voltan rainbow might look like.


This isn’t the full list of colors visible, just a snapshot of what might appear. If you’d like to play around with what colors appear at different wavelengths, on any of this, absolutely not. The astrophysicist who does this sort of thing as their day job did the math, resulting in the following table:


Or, as a diagram:


We are aware that tidally locked planets might not be habitable at all. Dr. DeMarchi wrote to us the following caveat:

“Astronomers don’t yet know for certain the effect tidally locking has on the development of life. Would this cause a temperature gradient that triggers very strong winds? Would the opposite faces each be too hostile for life to develop? Would an atmosphere be able to exist at all, or would the cold side condense it all until it’s too thick to be a gas?”


Yet when it comes to the realism vs. fun debate in video games, we tend to lean towards fun because it’s far more interesting to assume that Volta is (just about) habitable and all the effects that might have on a local population.

Now that we know where Volta is and what sort of sun it has, what does any of this have to do with the Carmine suit being carmine?

Light, Or The Ornamental Force Of The Universe



Since Volta has a red dwarf and not a yellow dwarf, there is going to be a difference in the range of visible light on Volta. This means that Volta’s star isn’t putting out a lot of blue or green into the spectrum, which we get a lot of from our own Sun. Put blunt, this is what a Voltan rainbow might look like.


This isn’t the full list of colors visible, just a snapshot of what might appear. If you’d like to play around with what colors appear at different wavelengths, you can use this site.

As the name of the red dwarf implies, Volta’s environment would appear very red on the surface. We arrive then at our answer as to why the Carmine suits are that colour: camouflage. There’s even precedent for this in an actual conflict.

The Pink Panthers of the SAS



A few years into the .

As the name of the red dwarf implies, Volta’s environment would appear very red on the surface. We arrive then at our answer as to why the Carmine suits are that colour: camouflage. There’s even precedent for this in an actual conflict.

The Pink Panthers of the SAS



A few years into the Dhofar War[TAG-80] that took place between 1963 and 1976, Britain supported the then-sultan of Oman with the Special Air Service. One of the vehicles used in this conflict by the SAS was a run of 1968 series IIa Land Rovers painted entirely in pink. This vehicle can be seen on display in the British Motor Museum in Warwickshire, England.

[[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhofar_War#/media/File:Land_Rover_series_IIa_'Pink_Panther'_SAS_desert_car_1968.jpg]Via Wikipedia]

The reasoning behind this choice of colour is that it turns out pink was effective at disguising the vehicle in Oman, the geography of which is mostly desert and valley. The colour scheme would later be abandoned when it was replaced with the sand-coloured SAS 110 Desert Patrol Vehicle in the 1980s.


If you’re voracious for more physics, you might have missed this lengthy chat our designer Hugh had with another physicist friend discussing the rationality behind the proposed form of space travel in the Brigador universe. Enjoy.



[[i]Special thanks to that took place between 1963 and 1976, Britain supported the then-sultan of Oman with the Special Air Service. One of the vehicles used in this conflict by the SAS was a run of 1968 series IIa Land Rovers painted entirely in pink. This vehicle can be seen on display in the British Motor Museum in Warwickshire, England.

[[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhofar_War#/media/File:Land_Rover_series_IIa_'Pink_Panther'_SAS_desert_car_1968.jpg]Via Wikipedia]

The reasoning behind this choice of colour is that it turns out pink was effective at disguising the vehicle in Oman, the geography of which is mostly desert and valley. The colour scheme would later be abandoned when it was replaced with the sand-coloured SAS 110 Desert Patrol Vehicle in the 1980s.


If you’re voracious for more physics, you might have missed this lengthy chat our designer Hugh had with another physicist friend discussing the rationality behind the proposed form of space travel in the Brigador universe. Enjoy.



[[i]Special thanks to Dr. Lindsay DeMarchi AKA ]

The reasoning behind this choice of colour is that it turns out pink was effective at disguising the vehicle in Oman, the geography of which is mostly desert and valley. The colour scheme would later be abandoned when it was replaced with the sand-coloured SAS 110 Desert Patrol Vehicle in the 1980s.


If you’re voracious for more physics, you might have missed this lengthy chat our designer Hugh had with another physicist friend discussing the rationality behind the proposed form of space travel in the Brigador universe. Enjoy.



[[i]Special thanks to that took place between 1963 and 1976, Britain supported the then-sultan of Oman with the Special Air Service. One of the vehicles used in this conflict by the SAS was a run of 1968 series IIa Land Rovers painted entirely in pink. This vehicle can be seen on display in the British Motor Museum in Warwickshire, England.

[[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhofar_War#/media/File:Land_Rover_series_IIa_'Pink_Panther'_SAS_desert_car_1968.jpg]Via Wikipedia]

The reasoning behind this choice of colour is that it turns out pink was effective at disguising the vehicle in Oman, the geography of which is mostly desert and valley. The colour scheme would later be abandoned when it was replaced with the sand-coloured SAS 110 Desert Patrol Vehicle in the 1980s.


If you’re voracious for more physics, you might have missed this lengthy chat our designer Hugh had with another physicist friend discussing the rationality behind the proposed form of space travel in the Brigador universe. Enjoy.



[[i]Special thanks to Dr. Lindsay DeMarchi AKA @stellarmorticia who also went to the trouble of explaining several other things, like why bees would not do well on a planet like Volta due to the lack of UV light from a red dwarf. Cover image is " AKA ]

The reasoning behind this choice of colour is that it turns out pink was effective at disguising the vehicle in Oman, the geography of which is mostly desert and valley. The colour scheme would later be abandoned when it was replaced with the sand-coloured SAS 110 Desert Patrol Vehicle in the 1980s.


If you’re voracious for more physics, you might have missed this lengthy chat our designer Hugh had with another physicist friend discussing the rationality behind the proposed form of space travel in the Brigador universe. Enjoy.



[[i]Special thanks to that took place between 1963 and 1976, Britain supported the then-sultan of Oman with the Special Air Service. One of the vehicles used in this conflict by the SAS was a run of 1968 series IIa Land Rovers painted entirely in pink. This vehicle can be seen on display in the British Motor Museum in Warwickshire, England.

[[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhofar_War#/media/File:Land_Rover_series_IIa_'Pink_Panther'_SAS_desert_car_1968.jpg]Via Wikipedia]

The reasoning behind this choice of colour is that it turns out pink was effective at disguising the vehicle in Oman, the geography of which is mostly desert and valley. The colour scheme would later be abandoned when it was replaced with the sand-coloured SAS 110 Desert Patrol Vehicle in the 1980s.


If you’re voracious for more physics, you might have missed this lengthy chat our designer Hugh had with another physicist friend discussing the rationality behind the proposed form of space travel in the Brigador universe. Enjoy.



[[i]Special thanks to Dr. Lindsay DeMarchi AKA @stellarmorticia who also went to the trouble of explaining several other things, like why bees would not do well on a planet like Volta due to the lack of UV light from a red dwarf. Cover image is "Planets Under A Red Sun" by NASA/JPL-Caltech.]

How the carmine suit is unlocked
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 we’ll 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***
[expand type=show more]* Resources are the game’s various .json files arranged by type; ITEM_PICKUP is new to BK
** SJTiled is a fork of Tiled, a map-making tool used by several games
*** Lua is a scripting language that allows the game to execute code; a Lua function is a self-contained module of code[TAG-20]

WHY THE BRAINTAPE DISAPPEARS



To jog your memory, this is what the braintape looked like placed on its own:



This is what the data for the tape looks like in the Data editor tab of the debug panel:



The two things to note here are the resource path i.e. assets/data/pickups/kipple/pkp_braintape_01.json, and what’s contained in the on_pickup field i.e. UnlockTape. From here we go look at the same scene, but in SJTiled.



The three elements to pay attention to here are:

  • 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
The scripting object is placed on an object layer within the map in SJTiled. When the map file is exported as a .json file that the game engine can read, this file allows the game to know where to place what assets, be they enemy spawns, building props or pickups like our braintape as well as what states they should be in.

The asset field tells the game what asset to use for that object. Since it’s using the same asset path as the braintape in the data editor screenshot earlier, this means the game knows to use the assigned sprite for the braintape. If no asset was assigned to this object, the game would not render any sprite at all (or possibly crash in the attempt to load the map) and the player would not be able to interact with it.

The disable_if field contains the text __IS_UNLOCKED__. This field means that the object will not appear if the object has been unlocked by the player. Recall that the on_pickup field in the Data editor tab contained the text “UnlockTape”. Reversing the idea, this means the braintape will always appear in game until the player interacts with it. This begs the question: how does the game know to do this?

The bridge between SJTiled and the game engine is a Lua function called by the ITEM_PICKUP resource. Here is the relevant Lua function in Notepad++:



This function is titled UnlockTape. In case you missed it, the text that was inserted in the on_pickup field is referring to this exact function. In other words, we can insert functions into the data of ITEM_PICKUP resources in order to execute a module of code. What this module does when the player interacts with the braintape is:

  1. Increases by one the gvar labeled “tapes_delivered”*
  2. Executes the relevant code to change the gamestate
  3. Unlocks the resource according to the indicated filepath in the resource that is calling the function
  4. Saves that unlocked state to a local Lua file called gvar_data
[expand type=show more]* Gvars, predicates and storylets were mentioned before and will be revisited in a later post

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 game’s Intel section accessed from the main menu:



The function being called in the Data editor for all the carmine suit parts is UnlockItem. Here’s 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.

WHAT’S 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, Brigador’s unlocks system was found lacking. This doesn’t come as a surprise to us as developers, because very little time was available for that aspect of the game’s 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.

We’re 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 what’s 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 weren’t 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 you’d 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.

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

Wait, what? There’s a build of Brigador Killers I can play?


Yes, and we wrote a few paragraphs to prime you on what to expect. Please read it, especially if you are a complete newcomer. And yes, it’s only over on Itch for the time being.

What’s the music track that plays in the menu?


It’s called Approach and it was composed by Makeup And Vanity Set. It has been uploaded to our YouTube channel.


What’s the font for the two new splash arts?


The loading screen splash is an homage to the title cards in Katsuhiro Otomo’s "Memories" (it’s free to watch on the Internet Archive).

The English text is set in Arial, regular and bold, with the Japanese set in GL Tsukiji 5go. The “haze” effect is achieved by making an outer glow and a drop shadow in photoshop with the following settings:

The text color is an off-white with a hex code of #e8f2fb. The outer glow color is #cdf4e9 and the drop shadow is #dcf4ec.

For the revised Brigador Killers logotype that can be seen on the recent Makeup And Vanity Set video posted to our YouTube.

“Brigador" is set in Cassannet bold with the color code of #e8f2fb. "Killers" is set in Times New Roman Bold Italic with a color code of #db214c. The Japanese text is set in Kozuka Gothic Pro Heavy (H) with the same color as "Killers". Here are the outer glow and drop shadow settings for for “Brigador”.

The drop shadow color is #d2f6f6 and the outer glow is #81b4d7.

The outer glow on the Japanese text uses the following settings with a color code of #ff0000.

The two splash arts and just the logotype can be downloaded by clicking these links.

Sidenote regarding most issues


Things that have not yet been dealt with and that aren’t covered in detail here – for example “Why do the menus look the same as in Brigador?” – are typically because those things overlap with so many other parts of the game’s code or are connected to systems that haven’t yet been set in stone. In other words they’re not just “one thing”. Instead, they are multiple things often tangled up with even more things, so tackling “one thing” would in most cases mean doing all of them at once. This is not unique to us or to Brigador Killers, and is better known as tech debt. That said, there were plenty of frequent questions or observations.

Why could I possess Froggy?


There’s a flag on the data of all mech-type NPCs that, if enabled, permits the player to “enter” it as if it were a vehicle like a tank or a mech [Side note: almost all NPCs are considered “mechs” in the game engine - even the agravs]. Usually this flag is for empty vehicles, but they weren’t set properly for every NPC placed on the maps and it wasn’t intended for people to “drive” Froggy or other non-hostile NPCs either. This is also the reason why players could enter multiple NPCs like a kind of Russian nesting doll even if it made no physical sense.

Needless to say very quickly many players in our discord server reported gleefully driving around as Froggy and setting off Froggy’s flop animation, before getting their Froggy into a Fork and stomping around.

We have since changed the data on various units including Froggy to no longer permit this behavior, but it is trivial to reenable Froggy piloting for those experienced with the debug panel.

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


There are three categories of things that can be changed in Brigador Killers’ settings:

  1. Mech & Tank movement
  2. Agrav movement
  3. “Suit” (or infantry) movement
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 it’s an alpha”. The longer version is that the game’s finite state machine broke in a way that stopped things from animating properly, hence why the player character could remain seated in mid air after getting out of a car.

When can we get our hands on SJTiled?


SJTiled is the tool we use to make maps in Brigador Killers and in the Secret Alpha post it is mentioned that this tool will be made available - and that will happen. A few things need to be pointed out.

The first is that although there are plenty of props to make maps, there is little in the way of enemy spawns to make interesting combat encounters. For instance in the BK build you can acquire the Fork mech or the Betka tank, but you don't get much of a challenge with them as there is nothing equivalent in force to those vehicles to give you a challenge.

Second is that we don't want to run into a problem we had with Brigador with breaking people's maps by performing any major revisions to the game’s assets. We don't expect to do this frequently but we do want to add in some newer stuff to both SJTiled and BK first so that you can make something more interesting than on-foot gunfights before we potentially break things.

Third is the modding document alluded to in the post that helps explain some of the new features is a work in progress and will definitely be rewritten (and probably re-rewritten) over time.

Once SJTiled is ready to be distributed, it will be done so initially via our discord server.

I have a crash bug!


Report it to the #bk_bug_reports channel on our discord server or email it to our team account. For the time being we are keeping any feedback to as few channels as possible. It makes our jobs much easier if we can reliably reproduce the bug you’ve encountered, so detailed explanations of the problems you have encountered are greatly appreciated.

If you’d like to support our development of Brigador Killers, consider sharing the fact that our first game Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is on sale on Steam until March 4th

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

Welcome to 2024
We’re 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 you’re 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 doesn’t mean you won’t 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 you’re on our mailing list but haven’t been receiving newsletters lately - please check your junk mail. If you haven’t 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.

A Year In Review

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



THE RELEASE DATE



Brigador Killers will not come to Itch.io in 2023. Due to how many other things we had going on, such as the surprisingly high demand for the Brigador pewter scale miniatures in the summer, and all the complications that come with adding new systems to Brigador Killers’ engine, we’re pushing the Itch.io release into early 2024.

One of the reasons why is from our experience with the first Brigador game. During its Early Access period and subsequent reviews in 1.0 and beyond, a very frequent criticism from players can be boiled down to “Looks cool, but what else is there to do?”. The first time that happened with Brigador in EA, it led to months of crunch in order to bring the game more in line with player expectations. Since we don’t feel like doing that a second time, we’ve spent our energies on making things that will hopefully rephrase any potential criticism of BK to “Looks cool, but there is too much to do”.

With that in mind, let’s look at some of the new things that were made in the past four quarters.

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



One of the first “big” tasks for BK was to tackle the aiming system and we think we’re on to something with the rework. Our dev update at the end of March 2023 showed off the new lock on system. Here is footage from our YouTube channel in case you missed it.

For this aiming rework to not feel off, we also needed to have what we call the “bloom box” which we can enable with the debug menu.



This square represents the spread of a firearm as the players aiming reticle intersects with building props. In this example the gun’s bloom box is smaller at closer targets and bigger further away. Note that having a high-spread weapon is not necessarily a bad thing when other new systems like morale and suppression are factored in, because guns (and the bullets they fire) can affect those two systems. Detailed explainers on these things will eventually be put out but the very short version is having a mean gun can intimidate enemies into doing things like hitting the ground or running away.

CLUTs, or Color Look Up Tables are screenspace shaders. That means they can change how the color looks on your screen. Rather than try to explain at length how it works, it’s easier to just show you an example of a test CLUT at work. Apologies in advance for the flashbang.



When the player gets into a vehicle, or in the above case a wheelchair, a CLUT can be applied immediately in-engine. This will allow us to give certain loadouts a particular visual flare like night vision goggles or an infrared filter.

Lastly in the first quarter of this year various animations were completed for “Dave” such as flinch and death animations.



Implementation of such animations was not without the occasional bug, however.



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



Pierce and penetration are separate systems that can overlap in a variety of ways both with each other as well as with above-mentioned morale and on-impact damage. The short version is this: pierce dictates whether bullets can “go in”; penetration dictates whether bullets can “go through”.



The easiest way to explain pierce is with a table. The first two columns of values below are example values – what matters is the third and fourth column.



So long as your bullets are strong enough to pierce through the impact resistances of NPCs or building props, you’ll be able to deal damage to those entities.

The penetration system is separate to pierce. If a bullet’s penetration value is less than or equal to the target’s penetration resistance, then the bullet is absorbed by the target entity. If a bullet’s penetration value is higher than the target’s penetration resistance, then a bullet will pass through the target entity. Again, another table:



You’ll probably have guessed that any time a bullet successfully passes through an entity, it loses some of its penetration value. To best demonstrate this, here’s a line of over 20 dummy NPCs with a cannon round going straight through all of them at about half game-speed.



The shot’s penetration value is high enough that it can pass through about half of the line. Once the cannon round terminates, it does additional damage via the subsequent explosive AOE, eventually leaving only the last six NPCs still standing who took a small amount of damage from the outer ring of the explosion. Did we mention that explosions also have pierce values?

Some new props were made in this period too.



And you could start kicking NPCs about.



Q3: DIALOG TOOLS, THE CISTERN AND OTHER ART ASSETS



While the summer faded, BK’s all-new narrative systems were introduced to the engine. A lengthy post titled Let’s Learn About Storylets was written back in September 2023 that covers the topic at length that we encourage you to read, especially if you’re curious to the mechanics of how games like Hades delivers its story.

On the art asset front, the first version of The Cistern was shown off in our Discord server.



The Cistern will be an important location to the player throughout BK’s campaign. Visually it draws inspiration from Saitama’s storm sewer system in Japan.

We also got plenty of rocks which will be very useful in dressing up outdoor areas.



And with spooky season looming, we figured a jump scare featuring Ed’s mascot “The Hundo” was in order as well.



Q4: VEHICLE EJECTION, GIBS AND SQUIBS



To close out the year, as of time of writing it is now possible in the BK engine to throw oneself from a vehicle in motion. For dramatic entries, of course.



Mind that you can also be thrown off a vehicle if you take too sharp a turn or too sudden an impact.



Such behavior might be a useful way to get around certain obstacles, particularly if those obstacles happen to be explosive. Speaking of things blowing up, we also got various gibs for props and NPCs…



…and blood squibs that may need to be toned down a little.



WHAT ELSE IS IN STORE?



More 1:144 scale pewter miniatures are coming to our merch store. Four new sets of miniatures will be added: one box containing 2x Buckmasters; one box containing 2x Forks; one box containing 4x Mongooses, 2x Dorothys and 2x Pellinores; and one box of 24x Loyalist infantry aka “Daves”. They’ll get their own dedicated post when they’re actually live but here’s a glimpse of an assembled Fork and Buckmaster.



All the new blister packs get new stickers too, as a treat.



Lastly, we’ll be reducing the prices of all of our merch items for the holiday season, so keep your eyes peeled on our socials or Discord server announcements channel if you’re looking to snap up an SNC Zippo lighter from our store at a discount.

And that’s it! Thanks for sticking with us throughout the year; there’s so much more to show you in the next.

[Banner image illustration by @flyingdebrisguy]

What Planning On Paper Looks Like
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 haven’t seen it, watch the first two sections to get context for the rest of this post.


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



This was my first assignment on BK. The Hrush, short for "Khrushchevka", represents modest modular housing widespread in Sady districts. To make it I decided to simply appropriate the Type I-335 Apartment Block, a fairly ubiquitous design in the former USSR, and accommodate it for the game, both structurally and stylistically. It wasn't a particularly hard feat, since two adjacent cells can be believably downscaled to fit into one game tile. However, the Hrush also represents a particular shift in environmental design philosophy between Brigador and BK, a shift that will complicate things later on. Due to the doubled output resolution of sprites, we're now making most of the large buildings as sets of interconnected props, akin to the mansions from the previous game.

slide_2_hotels



Nossian Hotels are essentially the Hrushes of downtown Mar Nosso, the design of which is heavily inspired by US hotel architecture of the 1950s-1970s, particularly that of Miami. Making them was a bit more involved, since the right balance should be struck between fancy and mundane elements – all to prepare for the eventuality of an unruly mapper overusing one particular prop style.

slide_3_offices



Mar Nosso Office Buildings. Glass and concrete. The 80s. The original design document proposed by yours truly said Nosso should feel open and uncomfortably clean, in contrast to the cozy misery of Sady. The first and the most straightforward idea here was to explore classic cyberpunk influences of Japan and Hong Kong. It clashed with Jack’s vision of a more neoclassical downtown. A compromise was found in turn-of-the-90s postmodern architecture. As with the hotels, a proper ubiquitous set requires many mundane modernist and internationalist elements, and US 80s office building architecture came in handy here. No need to go crazy yet.

slide_4_mcmansions



McMansions. You know ‘em, you hate ‘em. This was the moment where cracks in my psyche started to show. See, it's actually not that easy to make something as tasteless, as tacky and as stylistically inconsistent as a modern American McMansion when you have a degree in the field of architecture combined with very little experience of actually working in said field. This sheet represents one of my numerous attempts grasping at the plethora of contradictory styles and influences used by modern American architects tasked with building what are meant to be the most pretentious-looking houses in the country.

slide_5_office_postmodern



Postmodern additions to office buildings for Mar Nosso. This is hell. A particular late capitalist kind of hell fueled by late 80s pop/rock playlists. Go on. Just make a regular facade piece and put a giant bronze vase on its roof. Make a giant ionic column, but inverted. As long as it fits the 16x16 feet footprint and sufficiently blocks sightlines at the infantry level, anything goes. There Is No Law Here by Makeup and Vanity Set starts playing as teammates try to cheer me up.

slide_6_technotop



At this point I'm fully equipped to make products, not just assets. Remember that high topiary tile from Brigador’s suburbs/subwall_13-24 particularly liked by mappers? The one made of a combo of green wall and pieces of a Pak 40? Let's just make an actual thing out of it. So I did. No, it doesn't make any sense to encapsulate a piece of topiary into a proprietary plastic frame inspired by those trendy products I saw in the 1987/88 edition of The International Design Yearbook, but most startup ideas nowadays don’t make any sense either, so I'd say we're even.

slide_7_fabhabs



The FabHab. Cheap modular housing for general colonial purposes. Hugh casually mentioned styrofoam. I know everything that needs to be done. The Metabolism architecture movement and the Nagakin Tower in particular serve as inspiration. All I need to do is to make a more cruel version of it. That, and a catchy name. Jack suggested FabHab. Pre-Fabricated Habitat. Perfect. Ship it.

Holiday merch store discounts coming soon


Later in December we’ll be reducing the prices of all our items, including all the pewter miniature models, from mid-December until mid-January. If you’d like to support our development, consider picking up an SNC Zippo or a t-shirt. We'll announce via our Discord server and all the other usual places when the price drops are live.

Thanks for reading.

How gibs are generated in Brigador Killers
For this month we’re going to explain how the Brigador Killers engine handles the emission of gib sprites from entities during gameplay. In other words, this.


We’ve established in previous news posts that all you’re looking at on screen are flat 2D sprites and that BK’s systems can overlap in interesting ways to create unexpected outcomes, but we haven’t 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 game’s 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 game’s 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 game’s 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, let’s 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 unit’s 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 unit’s “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 - that’s part of what’s called Flinch, Suppression, Flop and Weapon Stability, which looks like this:


Getting back to the gib sprites, we look at what’s 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, you’ll notice that there’s 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!
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