Let's talk about UI, starting with booting up the game.
The current splash screen is final art. Progress.
An idea we've been mulling over is presenting the entire Brigador contract when the game boots for the first time. You'd be able to page through or zip to the end, but pressing 'N' would just kick out to desktop with a special message thrown in. I really like this idea, but the main concern of course is that we might ostracize some people either because they don't realize it's a fake contract or they don't appreciate getting booted to desktop if they decline. We'll go ahead with implementing it I think, and we can always pull it if needs be.
From there we need a proper menu screen done in the same format as the rest of the game selection elements. Playing the game will be "Launch" or "Fulfill Contract" or something, and then there'll be the rest of the roll-out: options, credits, review contract, exit etc. Not 100% sure yet on how to put that part together, but we'll get that blocked out soon enough.
Then we jump to the actual game selection elements. We'll be handling progression in a two-tiered fashion: unlocking and purchasing. You'll begin the game with 1 or 2 pilots, a single vehicle, a single set of weapons to go with it, and a defensive ability (probably the smoke launcher). Every item you can pick in this menu must first be bought, all the way from pilots to the runs themselves. Earn cash by completing objectives and collateral damage during a run, but you have to make it out alive to collect. Some equipment will be better than the rest, it's one of the ways we're allowing players to modulate difficulty in the game since we're not doing explicit difficulty levels. Pilots have no effect on combat, but function as the limiter for unlocking new elements in the game. Since we don't want to overwhelm new players with a huge variety of equipment to purchase, most of it will just show up in menus as "LOCKED" or "REDACTED", and possibly also mention the pilot that must be purchased to unlock. Buying pilots will unlock more pilots as well as unlock a set of equipment for purchase-- this way we can trickle in new variety, and shown through the pilot descriptions the players will have some degree of choice regarding what they unlock when. End of the line unlocks will be really hard vehicles like the Mongoose and Troubadour, as well as novelty profiles like the Death pilot. Final selection menu should look something like this:
Purchasing and unlocking new equipment, along with providing access to those elements for the player, is also planned as the metric for progress. The intent is to have new opponents / gameplay trickle in as you spend more time with the game. Tying this to unlocks rather than total money earned makes it easier to fine tune the system over the time and cushions it from the many times we'll invariably change the price of purchasing unlocks and the bounty payout for successful runs. Also, it doesn't punish players who save up a large sum early on for purchasing a single very expensive item.There's still a lot to work out yet but we're in the midst of building the new UI now, and as we get eyes on prototypes we'll be able to shift the design as needed.
At the end of every run, successful or not, we'll have a closeout screen that spells out the various stats and rewards. A big motivation here is that we want to pay money out to the player for any skillful play. Survive a long run? Bonus. Kill everyone? Bonus. Kill no one? Bonus etc. Obviously there are limitations to what we can handle, but we want to cater to as broad a play base as possible.
In order to enforce the risk/reward mechanic of pressing on vs hitting the spaceport & banking your money, the vast majority of player earnings on a run will be cancelled out if they die. A "premature death fee" if you will-- can't take it with you. As a consolation for dying though you'll get a token amount added for "funeral expenses", though much of that still gets eaten by the contract processing and currency exchange fees. Love having your shadowy overlords being scrupulously unscrupulous about stuff like this.
Moving away from UI, we've got some new explosions and weapon effects in the pipe. The old ones are over a year old at this point, so long overdue for having another look at it.
Here's a sample of new muzzle flashes:
In the above image you'll notice I disabled the tracers; this is another element we're mulling over, having tracer rounds actually be scattered through a magazine as opposed to giving all rounds fired that really high visibility. Personally I enjoy having barely visible projectiles for the standard ballistic weapons, but it does add additional difficulty to the learning curve. Machine guns particularly are good for teaching new players how the aiming mechanics work, but losing the tracers reverses that and makes them much harder to learn. Something to consider.
We also have just added a new flare gun "defensive" ability. For when you really, really want to get people's attention. It's best paired with very fast vehicles or very large guns:
After a lot of talking and testing we've cut weapons swapping during combat. it would take a lot of time to properly balance, present the UI and make it legible, and most importantly, this is a game where you unlock more and more guns, 50 of them, and encourage you to pick interesting combinations of two of them. Makes no sense to put all that emphasis on choosing your loadout only to allow players to randomly toss one of them away in the middle of the run. Loose ammo pickups from dead enemies will remain though, because that's fun.
On a final note, we've been working on new pilot portraits for the game, which fulfill a couple of roles. Most importantly they provide the player with an identification point-- cool little portraits to pick as "the person you are inside the mech". As explained earlier they also serve as a gating method, a tidy and fun way to dole out the enormous number of guns and vehicles in the game rather than just dumping it out on the player like a trash can. Each pilot should also come with their own little story vignette-- a little bit about who they are (can just be a sentence or two), and why they became a brigador, someone who sold out their city/country/planet for money. We like the idea that the first couple of pilots you unlock are just complete dirtballs; they don't cost much to unlock because they're some combination of desperate or hard up. Late unlock pilots are the more heroic types, ones more generally associated as the action hero type, but who are still traitors now because everyone has a price. Which is probably a line that will show up in a trailer somewhere...
Here's a schlub who just got a fresh kicking around but then goes for a contract. "What have i got to lose?" as part of the a little story vignette. Hopefully his face says most of it already though. Compare that with an enterprising pilot in the Loyalist military. Promising soldier who's willing to seize an opportunity when it's presented to her.
That's it for now! Still working hard on this, getting closer every day. Thanks for reading.
Live Gameplay Stream! Late Night Edition!
In about 10 minutes, 11:50pm Central, we'll be streaming developer gameplay runs for at least an hour. Come see the game in action, and ask any questions you've got!
increased front facing damage resistance on enemy loy_tank_04 (shield tank)
added loy_gravtank_01 to playable units
added artillery depot, more cornfields to outpost map
increased loy_tank_12 (shield beetle) shielding drops on death by 50%
fixed 'trainyard' and 'the loop' player spawning
added 'outpost' and 'fortress' to 'main run' set
revised 'trainyard' and 'slums' maps
added civilians to all maps
revised enemy spawning strengths 1-6
New Weapons Posted
Drafts for 46 of the 50 total weapons are now in the game (the remaining 4 still require some code work in order to be put in), with a pinned thread added to our steam discussions page that includes weapon descriptions. We'll soon be updating the main branch of the game to include these changes. Additionally, the controls & quick start guide has been properly updated, so the core bases should now be covered for playing the game.
A relatively full weapon set is in, and we're overhauling the alarm/spotting system as we speak. Once these are resolved we'll be ready for a more intensive set of playtesting to push through to the end of development.
We'll be updating the build pretty intensively over the next week or so in response to feedback and to fix the elements we've realized are broken (like spawning on the trainyard map-- I'm fixing that now)
For those of you currently with access to the staging branch, go ahead and try out the new weapons and let us know what you think on the discussions page.
Thanks!
April Progress Update
Ok guys, moving into the home stretch on Brigador I'll be posting progress updates here at least once a month.
For starters, we're getting the last units of the last faction finished out. Really exciting to close in on having all art assets finished. Units are 95% of the way there, as are environment elements. The biggest art gap that remains are FX sprites-- we realized that we were blowing our sprite budget on big, high frame explosions, which look nice enough the first few times they're used, but when you have only a handful of explosions for every effect in the game it gets old reeeeal fast. So instead we're redoing all those sprites to consist of individual elements: shockwave, dirt kick, smoke plume, explosive blast, whatever else we think of. I'll show the new system off here as soon as we have enough of the new component sprites finished.
In the mean time, new vehicles and other stuff! Like these two!
These are both Corvid units, the guy on the left being a late game brawler you can go up against, and the 'killdozer' on the right is designed to box the player in like the pink demons of olde (doom). We have directional armor in the game that works well, but realized we hadn't built enough units that really took advantage of that system.
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I'm still plugging away at getting all the guns in; the various mines (4 out of the total 50 weapons) won't be going in for a while yet-- they're prototyped but the code needs to get cleaned up before going in permanently-- but everything else should be up soon. UI is still a ways out from us embedding proper breakdowns for these weapons into the game itself; the whole UI was hacked in to begin with and as such needs to be completely rewritten (which we're moving onto after the volumetric lighting gets tidied up, so if all goes well new UI should start going in towards the end of April). In the mean time, here's a sampling of the new guns...
Here's a shot of the heavy mount MIRV artillery doin some damage. Long time to target, but deals the most damage of any weapon in a single volley:
Heavy mount, flamethrower type. Notice how the unit doesn't ignite while the shield is still up. This weapon has the smallest AoE size of the flamethrower type weapons, but targets hit with the weapon will continue to burn for high damage if you managed to land sustained fire. This was a fun one to design and build:
Heavy mount, another launcher/artillery type (we'll be sure the final art makes for an impressive light show, and sufficiently meaty bass when firing). It's a blunt instrument-- hit practically anything with it, and it is no longer there. It's loud, but that's probably not something you'll be worrying about if you're packing one of these. Just watch your ammunition; large shell size means a relatively small magazine. Difference between this and the MIRV is that you fire at a much shallower arc-- much shorter time to target, but you don't get the same high clearance over the environment. Which is fine, because you'll just blow up any environment in the way anyway:
Heavy mount MG. We've already got a couple weapons that are ostensibly flechette based (need new art and sound to help reinforce that), but we've yet to do a canister round variant. I'd been reading about how US forces in Vietnam deployed a "Beehive" round. From the wiki:
"Intended for direct fire against enemy troops, the M546 was direct fired from a near horizontally leveled 105 mm howitzer[2] and ejected 8000 flechettes during flight by a mechanical time fuze."
We can't handle 8000 projectiles, but we can approximate. Extremely high velocity, and the flechettes go through practically anything. Plus, it's fun to turn infantry to mincemeat with it:
Last one of the heavy mount weapons-- I've showed this beam weapon here before, but now we've got a nice new sparking effect added in. We realized we could tie gib spawning in to weapon impacts. By creating a secondary memory cache for those that's separate from what's used for spawning gibs off destroyed vehicles and props, we can maintain a very high cycle rate and not totally wipe environment destruction:
Moving down to the main mounts, the 240mm Siege Mortar fires Disruption rounds, aka "glitter bombs". Shells packed with a mixture of various magnetic filaments and a small explosive charge (LORE ALERT) can completely disrupt even hardened shielding with a single volley (uses the same gib spawning effect as the laser above). A favorite for combating Spacers who eschew heavy armor plating in exchange for stronger shielding and armament, though still very effective against these heavy Loyalist units:
Also, rockets. Main mount, launcher/artillery type. Art is temp, borrowed the old MG muzzle flash to differentiate it from the cannons and MGs until we render new FX sprites. It can sustain the rate of fire shown in the gif with only moderate accuracy bloom. Very high DPS, but you'll empty your entire magazine very quickly-- the idea is that you're trading total magazine damage output for really high burst damage. Great for hit and run, or if you plan on swapping out for a new weapon soon. It's possible to use it efficaciously though, esp. if paired with with a high total magazine damage weapon like an MG:
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Ok, enough guns. Let's talk about lights.
Here's an old screenshot of the game (click for a full size version):
If you look at the lights, you can see that there's no atmospheric scattering-- in this old model, you could have a really bright light shining, but if no surface is hit then there may as well be no light there at all. The lights only lit other surfaces, and not the air. Compare that with our new model:
Thanks to the scattering effect, you can actually see the shape of the light in space. This gives us a whole lot more flexibility with how we light spaces, and what kind of global lighting conditions we can support in the game. Also it just looks way cooler 8)
Here's an early test for the new effect. As we redo the game's lighting to account for this new effect we'll continue to refine it (again click image for full size):
Something that's been a known issue but which we hadn't thought of an easy solve for was how the 'bulbs' of lights aren't actually bright, even with the new volumetric lighting in place. Take a look here (click for full size):
The image on the left is what the lights currently look like. When you look at oncoming traffic at night you can see the beams and most particularly the headlights themselves-- we didn't have that. What we realized though is that we could just attach a tiny fill light to the same mount points as the conical beams, which illuminates the headlights themselves. The only extra step we need to take is make sure that the small fill light is color matched to the main light-- if it's just white light you get the middle example.
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So that's all the progress of the last ~4 weeks. AI, UI, sound, maps, and unit balancing remains. Lots of code, lots of content authoring, but a whole lot less than we used to have. Thanks for reading :)
