Brigador Killers News

Two months ago we wrote that we planned to have a demo ready for the upcoming Steam Next Fest in June. We are instead aiming for the Steam Next Fest after that, which should be some time in mid-October.

We still plan to put up a demo for Brigador Killers, but including ourselves in the Next Fest at this time would not meet the expected bar of quality either for ourselves or our audience.

What will happen is the Itch build will get updated first before anything comes to Steam. Brigador Killers has progressed a lot in the past few months, albeit mostly in small ways that are difficult to show off beyond using screenshots. For instance, the gun reticle has been changed to this dot sight.


The lock on has gone from its red spotlight to clearly highlighting the whole NPC.


In addition, the dialog system is beginning to take shape, the presentation of which takes a little bit of inspiration from Disco Elysium.


Overall a lot has happened to the UI, such as making the gun pickup prompt something more user-friendly, like this image below.


These are only a few examples of the many changes that have been made. In the next month or two we'll put up footage of this stuff in action on our YouTube channel, especially since there have been plenty of changes made to the audio as well.

If you would like to support our work, our first game is currently on sale this week until May 5. Please consider telling a friend.

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

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

[h2]A few notes about the production of the audiobook[/h2]

The original text of Brigador Killers: Pilgrim was completed in September 2021. The voice recording sessions with Ryan Cooper started a month later in October. Twice a week, Ryan would head to his VO booth (you can see Ryan's setup here) in the evening for about an hour at a time to locally record the book.

Unlike the previous audiobook's production (which was less than ideal), this time around our editor and producer Benjamin was able to direct Ryan as he recorded. Since this was during the height of pandemic lockdown, there were a lot of free solutions available, but Skype was profoundly terrible at it due to its poor audio quality. Fortunately, we were able to use something called Zencastr, which allowed Benjamin to remotely hear Ryan clearly, but still chime in in real time to give direction where necessary. It wasn't exactly like an AV engineer overseeing a VO session, but it was close enough for our needs given the circumstances.

After Ryan sent over the raw audio between each recording session, Benjamin took it into Audacity to cut it all together as well as double checking for any parts that weren't caught during the live session in order to re-record them in the next session. This twice-weekly process went on until late January 2022, with a few minor additions like the intro and end credits recorded in March 2022. The audiobook was then shelved for about a year, before receiving its final touches (the addition of MAVS' music and an EQ pass) made by Grant. Two years after that brings us to today and the book is out.

[h2]Some character trivia[/h2]

Josh Brolin's character in 2015's Sicario was a heavy influence on how Pilgrim team member Marco was performed - specifically his demeanor, not his accent.

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The mispronouncing of Louis Valka's first name by Daarb is a reference to Frank Oz antagonizing Dan Akroyd in 1983's Trading Places.

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Lastly, given who Tuno Vocc is within the fiction of the Brigador universe, we needed to pull from a personality of equal measure. Who better, then, than the late Oliver Reed? More specifically, this extract from the 1985 BBC documentary "In at the deep end".

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Reactions on Discord[/h2]

Our Discord server was the most active channel and several community members got through the book with somewhat worrying speed. In mostly chronological order:

Originally posted by author

Just finished up, that was one hell of a ride

- Squared

Originally posted by CeriseCisilipp

200% respect absolute banger i will be thinking about this book on the toilet

- CeriseCisilipp

Originally posted by basedthunk

Yeah it's fuckin' phenomenal

- basedthunk

Originally posted by pommy

Good book

- pommy

Originally posted by MOTHER

This picture of Bugs Bunny I think summarizes exactly how I felt when reading the last two chapters

- ANIMAL MOTHER

Originally posted by miffledkrisp

>chapter 24 what the fuck man

- miffledkrisp

On a lighter note, I fucking died laughing at "Oh fuck, did i pull the pin?"

- the huanglong

Guh I have work [tomorrow] still but ended up finishing the epub in one sitting

- hax

"Cartwheeled into a lifetime of therapy" is probably my favorite phrase out of the whole thing.

- HomelessCylon101

Finished listening to it this morning, and holy crap! It was nice having a book that didn't hold anything back. I think four years of life experience and three years of the army has made me appreciate your writing a lot more now, I don't think stuff like "You know what I love about the army?" (especially the one about the cages/stores) and the armoured NCO in charge of a recce/special ops mission would have phased me nearly as hard without that. Your written dialogue is real in the best way, makes me feel like they're people, not book characters.

- Boliervac

Great stuff, absolutely unrelenting by the final chapters.

- heavilyaugmented

[h2]On Reddit & Youtube[/h2]

Elsewhere on the internet, the r/brigador subreddit has seen a handful of reactions:

[Just] read it all in one sitting, really scratched an itch I didn't know I had. Hit me like a truck when I realized halfway through I was reading the exact paragraph describing the book cover. Absolutely worth the five bucks.

- u/Ok-Spend-4503

It was fun

- u/Nodbot

...While over on YouTube, the first half of the book is being uploaded one chapter at a time over the next few months, and has generated plenty of comments:

Can't express how happy I am to see the same author & VA return. Loved the first one in ways I can't describe.

- westonshores9248

Oh yeah, I'm Brigadoring it

- captainkarmine9014

Why is that mech so curvy? It's making me feel strange things 😂
But seriously, thank you guys for these, they are of amazing quality

- MrBjanders

I've listened to the Brigador book DOZENS of times, looking forward to doing the same here

- mossy3565

[h2]FAQ[/h2]

Where can I get the book?

You can acquire the audiobook on Itch (and also listen to the first 15 chapters entirely for free). The epub & pdf version is sold separately and available on our merch store.

The Kindle version is available here. The Audible version is pending as of time of posting.

Will there be a physical version of the book?

If Brigador Killers (the game) does well, only then we will consider pursuing a physical release of the book.

On the book cover, is the photo on the helmet Aline Vocc?

You'll just have to read (or listen) to the novel to find out.

Available on Itch.io right now is the next audiobook in the Brigador universe titled Brigador Killers: Pilgrim. Both Brad Buckmaster and Ryan Cooper return as writer and narrator respectively and this book takes place both before the events of our next game and is a direct sequel to the first book.

You can listen to the first part of the audiobook entirely for free on this Itch page. The free segment is about 3 hours and 50 minutes long, while the total runtime of the audiobook is just over 9 hours long. We don’t wish to spoil the details, other than to warn you up front that it contains graphic descriptions of bloody violence and dismemberment (like the last book).

If you choose to buy the audiobook now at its price of 9.99 USD, later down the line you will also be given a DLC upgrade key for both the audiobook and the soundtracks by Makeup And Vanity Set for Brigador Killers on Steam. The audiobook is delivered as a zip file and you will find the chapters as mp3s sitting in the media folder.

Though we have mentioned multiple times that a lot of music has already been made by Makeup And Vanity Set for Brigador Killers, we haven’t yet finalized what tracks are going to go into each album since the structure of the game has changed. When the soundtracks are ready, we will add them to the Itch page. You should note that when that happens we intend to increase the price to 14.99 USD. In other words, acquire it now at 5 USD cheaper than the intended price.

We’re uploading a chapter of the audiobook to YouTube as a kind of weekly serial for the next few weeks. Technically the very first one is a reupload but this one has the fancy cover art courtesy of Flyingdebris as well as the wallpaper engine effects courtesy of Hara. The next chapter will appear tomorrow with a new one every week.

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UPDATE: The ebook version is sold separately. You will find it available as an epub & pdf on our merch store, and on Amazon. The audible version is still processing but should be available soon.

Lastly, here is the book cover in various formats for your desktop wallpaper or phone lockscreen needs:

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

By summer of 2025 we expect to have a demo ready in preparation for the next Steam Next Fest. That Next Fest will begin on June 9th, or about three months from the time of this post. As a result a few things are going to happen, though not all at once.

First, the storepage - which was set up in haste after Rock Paper Shotgun covered our appearance at BitSummit in 2019 - will finally get its long-due overhaul. That means those images and gifs will be replaced so that it’s clear what Brigador Killers actually looks and plays like, instead of things from the build that did the rounds at PAX in 2019 and 2020. All those “old” images from that version of BK can be seen in this dev archive album.

Next, we intend to put the demo up before the June Next Fest starts so that we’re eligible for the press preview event that occurs before each one. Developers only get one go at this event per game so we want to make the most out of it. What this means for you the public is that you will probably be able to access the demo not long before the festival begins. We do not intend to take the demo down after the Next Fest ends either.

Another piece of news is that the next audiobook will become available soon. One reason it has taken a while is we needed a good illustration for it. The work is almost done and here’s a peek at one part of the overall image (click here for a bigger version).



In case you missed the prologue post from before, the book is titled Brigador Killers: Pilgrim, written by Brad Buckmaster and read by Ryan Cooper. It is a direct sequel to the events of the first novel and it takes place between the first and second game. The first half of the new novel will be put up on our YouTube channel, one chapter at a time. The ebook version will follow at some point after since it is also waiting for the cover.

We realize this is a short post for this month but they aren’t the only things that are going on behind the scenes at Stellar Jockeys - this is just what to expect in your immediate future.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The video above is about a new debug tool added to Brigador Killers called “Ghost Lights”. The rest of this article repeats the content of the video in text form with some additional details.

[h2]A brief note about map making[/h2]

Like in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition, the Brigador Killers engine uses a combination of global illumination and small destructible props called “minis” to light its levels. Global illumination is where we model the position of a “sun” inside the game, while minis are things like lamp posts, traffic lights, neon signs etc. When these minis are destroyed, the lights attached to them are also removed, as one might expect.

The levels are made in SJTiled - a fork of an open source program called Tiled - and it works like a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. In other words, where you place a building prop or an NPC spawn in the editor corresponds to the same position inside the game when you load that map. SJTiled, however, cannot have the same lighting conditions as the game as can be seen at the 34 second mark.

Regardless, SJTiled is great at making levels. When we export a file from SJTiled, it creates a .json file for the game to read. This .json file tells the game what to load for that map and where. We demonstrate this in the footage by placing a blue barrel in the map, exporting the map, switching over to the game that is currently still running, and reloading the map with a developer command to show that same blue barrel in the game. Dave promptly kicks the barrel to show it’s not some sort of trick.

Although placing mini lights to illuminate a scene in the right way is still something we’ll do, constantly having to go back and forth between SJTiled to adjust the position of a lamp post, exporting the map, reloading the map over and over can become tedious.

[h2]What are ghost lights?[/h2]

Ghost lights allow us to dynamically place lights anywhere in-game via the debug panel, instead of placing minis via SJTiled. They are neither props nor minis and can exist entirely on their own if needed.

In the footage we start by placing a simple electrical light via a sub menu in the Rendering control tab, which in its default state is a bright white sphere that initially has green, blue and red lines sticking out of it when selected. We then use the debug panel’s Data editor to change the width of its cone to create a small spotlight and give it a sodium lamp-like color.

After navigating back to the ghost lights sub menu, we change the direction of this spotlight via the X, Y and Z direction where X corresponds to the red axis, Y corresponds to the blue and Z corresponds to the green. This spotlight is then categorized by giving it the category name “spot” before it is duplicated to create a second light in the list.

This duplicate light uses the same data values as the first but we can change its position and direction independent of the original ghost light as seen at the 2:37 mark in the video. Also, since both lights are in the same category, this lets us bulk select and move them together as a group, so we move them over to spotlight the barrel that was placed via SJTiled earlier.

When we save our ghost lights via the “Save ghost lights for this map” button in this sub menu, this creates a “meta” .json file for that map specifically for the ghost lights. Once the lights have been saved, if we mess up the position, we can reload that meta file to reset their position.

[h2]Where things get interesting[/h2]

The sneaky part comes at the four minute mark: ghost lights can be linked to a prop or mini. In the video we link our two ghost lights to the barrel, then have Dave destroy the barrel, at which point the ghost lights disappear just like when Dave kicked over the lampposts earlier.

We can also make the ghost lights flicker by checking the "flickering" checkbox in the ghost lights sub menu. Once enabled, we can choose from one of many preset patterns available in the Data editor depending on what sort of effect we want, be it a fluorescent light with a faulty capacitor, or the gentle whispering of candlelight.

Since Brigador Killers is more zoomed in than the first game, the player’s attention is much more likely to be drawn to environmental details, so it’s important that we have the capability to fine tune those things.



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