Brigador Killers News

We asked one of our artists for an explainer on what they’ve been working on. This time it’s Igor again, who previously helped us write this post, and has decided to drill down on his favorite building prop.

This is me playing on Manyson. The map cs_manyson.
- Anonymous youth, circa 2000s

McMansions, which are called "subhouses" in the game files, are one of my favorite prop sets in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition. The moment I blasted through one of them with a Banshee MG and saw it immediately collapse, I thought to myself "Oh, they're flimsy, that makes sense!". Working on the upgraded version of the McMansion for Brigador Killers was a challenging and occasionally painful quest that asked me to reconsider what constitutes good architecture.
[h2]New design, new problems[/h2]
The subhouse as it appears in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition, divided into its constituent tiles

Subhouses, as good as they are, needed a lot of reworking to fit into BK’s design requirements. With the increased fidelity and visual scale, as well as a greater focus on infantry combat, I had to show the collision boxes a lot more respect than the previous game, effectively blocking myself from using some of the modelling techniques deployed in Brigador. Significant deviations from the tile grid had to go for a while, returning only when the code team pushed an update that allowed us to put down what are called “qprops” (as the name suggests, it’s a prop that takes up one-quarter of a standard tile in the engine).

The modularity issue also needed to be tackled. The original game's subhouses were modelled from the top down, in that they were a complete house model divided into tiles. This approach allowed for the greater utilization of half-destroyed states, where destroying one of the building tiles reveals the ruins and debris "inside" of adjacent tiles as in the image above. However, this approach significantly limited the ways tiles could be combined together.

Last, but not least, the visual scale had to be more realistic. If our player character is standing next to a building, it would be better if they could visually "fit" inside it, at least when it comes to something as spacious as the houses of the wannabe ruling elite.
[h2]Italian inspiration[/h2]
The Villa La Rotonda, just outside Vicenza in Northern Italy, designed by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio

Since ordinary McMansions – with their seemingly nonsensical combinations of volumes – were too hard to work with from the get-go, I had to pick something simpler I could start tinkering with. The Villa La Rotonda immediately checked many boxes. A Renaissance masterpiece, I saw it has all the essential elements I could easily cut into tiles: entrance groups, corners, internals, dome... With this the basic combinatorics were born: tiles can be facade or corner, one or two storeys high, all with a front-facing sloping roof, meant to be assembled around core internal tiles.

An initial mockup of possible combinatorics

Importantly, the Villa La Rotonda also provided a general style guide. McMansions come in many different shapes and styles, but understanding that all those variations won't seamlessly click together, I had to narrow it down to just one. Italian quickly became the choice for good reason: it was thematically appropriate for Miami-inspired Mar Nosso and also worked better with more gentle roof slopes. This meant I could model my two-story pieces without occupying too much screen real estate with the jarring roof tiling.

With all the prep work done there was only one question: how do I turn a UNESCO World Heritage Site into complete shit?
[h2]Rules, or lack thereof[/h2]
First iteration of the new McMansion in BK

There were a few hard constraints left to set due to the modularity requirement mentioned earlier. The primary color has to be uniform to call less attention to the tile grid. In addition, all sets (I made three, which are differentiated by the wall and foundation design) have to share the same floor and roof heights.

As for the rest, well… one thing I noticed while looking at IRL examples of McMansions is that there is not a single architectural rule left unsullied. Rhythm, composition, using your classical references correctly – you name it, it’s disrespected. This was the paradigm I had to adopt. If a particular set corner had plain rectangular windows, its corresponding facade tiles should use ornate phallus-shaped ones instead. If one particular element had to, by all the rules of good taste, align with another – misalign them, but only slightly, lest someone think it was intentional. If the set you're making looks medieval, add one (just one) Neoclassical tile for good measure. If the tile you've made screams "entrance group" at you, conveniently forget to add a door.

And after you’ve broken everything, make a couple of tiles that actually look normal for once, just to subvert the meta rule you've set for yourself. But even then, remember: it’s "tacky", not "classy". After all, we're making a mass-produced steel-frame property investment, not some aristocratic manor. This approach came in handy when I was working on side wall greebles. Sure, I want them to have pipes and AC units just like in the original subhouses, but what's the proper nouveau riche way to do this? It's by ignoring the back-alley aesthetic and painting all of it with the primary wall color, of course.

Final iteration of the McMansion in Brigador Killers, divided into its constituent tiles

This brief article on McMansions omits many aspects of what could be a much longer story. There are other tales such as my work on actual wall and floor constructions, or the accompanying topiaries set inspired by the album cover of Supertramps’ Breakfast in America, or how I discovered some of the mappers were combining unfinished McMansion assets with office buildings behind my back. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did working on them, albeit without the minor existential crisis where you question how your education led you to this point.



P.S. We are running a very short survey about the exact make and model of controller you use to play on your computer. We particularly want to hear from those who played Brigador on controller. Participation in this survey is anonymous, but at the end you can submit your email address to be entered into a raffle to win something from our merchandise store. You will only be emailed if you win. This survey will run until October 31st 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).

[h2]SO WHAT HAVE WE BEEN UP TO? PROGRESS IN 2024[/h2]
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.

[h2]REFINING THE CORE LOOP[/h2]

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…
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]…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.

[h2]THE SOUNDSCAPE[/h2]
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.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
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…

[h2]THE MAPS[/h2]
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.

[h2]THE STEAM PAGE[/h2]
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.

[h2]ANSWERING A FEW OTHER BURNING QUESTIONS[/h2]
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 [email protected].

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

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

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

The 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.


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.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

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/

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.

[h2]Design evolution over time[/h2]
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)

[h2]Design escalation over time[/h2]
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).

[h2]A (brief) annotated visual history of the Lobo[/h2]
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, 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:



[h2]Mk1 Design[/h2]
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/

“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 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.



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 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…

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
…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…

[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.



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 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 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?



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.



A few years into the Dhofar War 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.

[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.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[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.]