HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Once upon a time Stellar Jockeys’ first game was going to look something like this…
…and not this.
Upon reading that you might be wondering how, so it’s high time we actually made good on a post from June 2012, wherein studio CEO Hugh Monahan wrote the following in a since-dead blog:
So with about a decade behind us, in this post we’ll recount a couple of the first key events and the people that led to where we are now, or at least the start of it. We’ll be unable to recount the whole story – certainly not in one post – because so many people have touched what you now know as Brigador: Up-Armored Edition in those past ten years. And no – we're not just talking about how the game’s name changed from its original title of Matador.
It might not be as riveting as this excellent retrospective on Diablo II but if for some reason you’re wondering how someone even gets into game development, this was how (some of) that happened.
[h2]🤝INITIAL MEETINGS[/h2]
Before talking about Brigador, we ought to talk about the origins of the company and where its name came from.
Back in the fall of 2009, at the University of Illinois, the second meeting of ACM GameBuilders was held wherein people could pitch game ideas. ACM GameBuilders is a community of student game developers at the University of Illinois and is a spin off of the ACM (or the Association for Computing Machinery) which has a number of chapters both across the United States and the rest of the world.
In attendance among others at this 2009 meeting were three people: Hugh Monahan, Dale Kim and Harry Hsiao. Both Dale & Harry were the original engineers of Brigador's custom engine and were studying Computer Science at the time. Hugh, meanwhile, was working at the high school associated with the University of Illinois, which granted him credentials to use academic facilities. Hugh was there at that 2009 meeting to pitch - Dale and Harry were there to listen.
Reminiscing on the event, Dale explained that out of the majority of the pitches, Hugh's idea was not only clearly described but also actually achievable. A small group formed to work on the project for the rest of the school year, culminating in them managing to show off the project at the university's engineering student showcase event called Engineering Open House. Given the team had managed to pull off the project, Harry, Dale and Hugh realized they could probably make more games in the future, so they stayed in touch...
...But what even was that game? Unfortunately, we don't have any images of it. Effectively it was a clone of the original Star Control game from 1990. The title of this student project? Stellar Jockeys.
[h2]💻ZACH, “TOBY” & GDC 2012[/h2]
Roughly two years after that fateful 2009 meeting a fourth figure comes into the story: Zach Reizner.
In the fall of 2011, Zach was a freshman at the University of Illinois studying Computer Science and also attended ACM GameBuilders. At the same time, Dale Kim was graduating and, following another pitch by Hugh in 2011 for a project called That Thing You're Searching For (or TTYSF), Zach was also signed on to work with Stellar Jockeys.
TTYSF was originally concepted as a Castle Crashers clone, an image of which we showed at the top, but here's another for good measure.
Now who - or what - is Toby? Toby, or rather The Toby Game was one of the first things Stellar Jockeys ever produced. It was an internal game jam project that took place in the first three months of 2012 created with the intention of Hugh having something to show for his first ever Game Developers Conference later in March that same year. Pictured below is Zach in the office space Stellar Jockeys used in 2012, grinning with both the finished Toby and their first ever paycheck (image provided courtesy of Zach).
Unfortunately, despite the first iteration of Stellar Jockeys shipping Toby in time for GDC 2012, due to a variety of factors, not only did Hugh go to the Game Developers Conference without The Toby Game, but also Hugh's entire portfolio website was brought down and wasn't functional at all prior to attending the event - so the game never ended up getting shown to anyone there.
...Yet it was not all bad. At Hugh's first GDC, he ended up meeting several other developers who would later go on to either directly join Stellar Jockeys proper later down the line, or have a significant impact on Brigador's eventual development.
[h2]💭BRIGADOR’S ENGINE NAME FINALLY REVEALED…[/h2]
We’re going to close this post out with this last detail, because if we don’t then several thousand more words would be needed to recount what took place during the rest of 2012 alone.
Hardly anything has been said about the elephant in the room: the game’s engine. At one point the Brigador engine was briefly codenamed Ziggy, though it never took off with the other team members. As a result, it’s just called “the Brigador engine” internally nowadays.
If you aren't familiar with what a game engine is, it's typically defined as a software framework that's used to make and run games, and comes with a suite of development tools. One such example is Unreal Engine, which comes with its own physics engine, renderers, animation and scripting among other things. For anything a game engine can't do, there are also proprietary tools that can handle such things - like how Brigador uses FMOD for its audio.
The other main thing about the Brigador engine is that it is entirely custom made and the result of years of work mostly by Dale & Harry. We should also note that at the time of the Brigador engine's creation in late 2011, the game engine landscape was not how it currently is. Using engines like Unity (Escape From Tarkov) or Unreal (Fortnite) came with steep license fees that would typically either require a lot of money up front or significant publisher support. That has changed drastically in the past decade. Although there are open source projects like Godot (Cruelty Squad), it only came into being in 2014.
While money is an important factor, the other bonus of not using an off-the-shelf engine is you effectively get to control your own destiny. Most of the above mentioned engines are created with a specific genre of game in mind. If you decide to make a game in an engine that doesn't support a feature you want to have in your game, you are effectively at the whims of the engine's creators as to whether such a feature is important enough to ever get supported. If you've ever read stories about game studios switching engines mid-development, it's likely because the engine they were using wasn't able to support their design goals.
So making your own engine all sounds great... except for the part where you have to write the blasted thing. While we won't be going into precise detail behind all 118,435 lines of code that are currently in the Brigador engine, in future posts we will explain how a few things about the game came to be. In fact, we already gave a brief overview of the art pipeline back in January’s post.
Because if you read that previous article carefully, you’ll get clued into the fact that this…
…and this…
…are actually running in different versions of the same game engine.
This post was based on several monthly newsletters that were sent out back in 2021. Click here if you’d like to check out our newsletter archive.
…and not this.
Upon reading that you might be wondering how, so it’s high time we actually made good on a post from June 2012, wherein studio CEO Hugh Monahan wrote the following in a since-dead blog:
This isn't the retrospective of some proven developer, full of knowing speeches about their path to success or platitudes of hard work and discipline. We don't have the luxury of hindsight, or the comforting knowledge that everything will work out in the end, at least not yet.
...This is about helping future studios as encumbered as we are with inexperience to succeed. This is about all the pain, patience, frustration, creativity, sacrifice, and love that go into making games.
So with about a decade behind us, in this post we’ll recount a couple of the first key events and the people that led to where we are now, or at least the start of it. We’ll be unable to recount the whole story – certainly not in one post – because so many people have touched what you now know as Brigador: Up-Armored Edition in those past ten years. And no – we're not just talking about how the game’s name changed from its original title of Matador.
It might not be as riveting as this excellent retrospective on Diablo II but if for some reason you’re wondering how someone even gets into game development, this was how (some of) that happened.
[h2]🤝INITIAL MEETINGS[/h2]
Before talking about Brigador, we ought to talk about the origins of the company and where its name came from.
Back in the fall of 2009, at the University of Illinois, the second meeting of ACM GameBuilders was held wherein people could pitch game ideas. ACM GameBuilders is a community of student game developers at the University of Illinois and is a spin off of the ACM (or the Association for Computing Machinery) which has a number of chapters both across the United States and the rest of the world.
In attendance among others at this 2009 meeting were three people: Hugh Monahan, Dale Kim and Harry Hsiao. Both Dale & Harry were the original engineers of Brigador's custom engine and were studying Computer Science at the time. Hugh, meanwhile, was working at the high school associated with the University of Illinois, which granted him credentials to use academic facilities. Hugh was there at that 2009 meeting to pitch - Dale and Harry were there to listen.
Reminiscing on the event, Dale explained that out of the majority of the pitches, Hugh's idea was not only clearly described but also actually achievable. A small group formed to work on the project for the rest of the school year, culminating in them managing to show off the project at the university's engineering student showcase event called Engineering Open House. Given the team had managed to pull off the project, Harry, Dale and Hugh realized they could probably make more games in the future, so they stayed in touch...
...But what even was that game? Unfortunately, we don't have any images of it. Effectively it was a clone of the original Star Control game from 1990. The title of this student project? Stellar Jockeys.
[h2]💻ZACH, “TOBY” & GDC 2012[/h2]
Roughly two years after that fateful 2009 meeting a fourth figure comes into the story: Zach Reizner.
In the fall of 2011, Zach was a freshman at the University of Illinois studying Computer Science and also attended ACM GameBuilders. At the same time, Dale Kim was graduating and, following another pitch by Hugh in 2011 for a project called That Thing You're Searching For (or TTYSF), Zach was also signed on to work with Stellar Jockeys.
TTYSF was originally concepted as a Castle Crashers clone, an image of which we showed at the top, but here's another for good measure.
Now who - or what - is Toby? Toby, or rather The Toby Game was one of the first things Stellar Jockeys ever produced. It was an internal game jam project that took place in the first three months of 2012 created with the intention of Hugh having something to show for his first ever Game Developers Conference later in March that same year. Pictured below is Zach in the office space Stellar Jockeys used in 2012, grinning with both the finished Toby and their first ever paycheck (image provided courtesy of Zach).
Unfortunately, despite the first iteration of Stellar Jockeys shipping Toby in time for GDC 2012, due to a variety of factors, not only did Hugh go to the Game Developers Conference without The Toby Game, but also Hugh's entire portfolio website was brought down and wasn't functional at all prior to attending the event - so the game never ended up getting shown to anyone there.
...Yet it was not all bad. At Hugh's first GDC, he ended up meeting several other developers who would later go on to either directly join Stellar Jockeys proper later down the line, or have a significant impact on Brigador's eventual development.
[h2]💭BRIGADOR’S ENGINE NAME FINALLY REVEALED…[/h2]
We’re going to close this post out with this last detail, because if we don’t then several thousand more words would be needed to recount what took place during the rest of 2012 alone.
Hardly anything has been said about the elephant in the room: the game’s engine. At one point the Brigador engine was briefly codenamed Ziggy, though it never took off with the other team members. As a result, it’s just called “the Brigador engine” internally nowadays.
If you aren't familiar with what a game engine is, it's typically defined as a software framework that's used to make and run games, and comes with a suite of development tools. One such example is Unreal Engine, which comes with its own physics engine, renderers, animation and scripting among other things. For anything a game engine can't do, there are also proprietary tools that can handle such things - like how Brigador uses FMOD for its audio.
The other main thing about the Brigador engine is that it is entirely custom made and the result of years of work mostly by Dale & Harry. We should also note that at the time of the Brigador engine's creation in late 2011, the game engine landscape was not how it currently is. Using engines like Unity (Escape From Tarkov) or Unreal (Fortnite) came with steep license fees that would typically either require a lot of money up front or significant publisher support. That has changed drastically in the past decade. Although there are open source projects like Godot (Cruelty Squad), it only came into being in 2014.
While money is an important factor, the other bonus of not using an off-the-shelf engine is you effectively get to control your own destiny. Most of the above mentioned engines are created with a specific genre of game in mind. If you decide to make a game in an engine that doesn't support a feature you want to have in your game, you are effectively at the whims of the engine's creators as to whether such a feature is important enough to ever get supported. If you've ever read stories about game studios switching engines mid-development, it's likely because the engine they were using wasn't able to support their design goals.
So making your own engine all sounds great... except for the part where you have to write the blasted thing. While we won't be going into precise detail behind all 118,435 lines of code that are currently in the Brigador engine, in future posts we will explain how a few things about the game came to be. In fact, we already gave a brief overview of the art pipeline back in January’s post.
Because if you read that previous article carefully, you’ll get clued into the fact that this…
…and this…
…are actually running in different versions of the same game engine.
This post was based on several monthly newsletters that were sent out back in 2021. Click here if you’d like to check out our newsletter archive.