Brigador Killers News

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.

[h2]Wait, what? There’s a build of Brigador Killers I can play?[/h2]
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.

[h2]What’s the music track that plays in the menu?[/h2]
It’s called Approach and it was composed by Makeup And Vanity Set. It has been uploaded to our YouTube channel.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]What’s the font for the two new splash arts?[/h2]
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.

• BK Secret Alpha Program
• BK Auditor
• BK logotype

[h2]Sidenote regarding most issues[/h2]
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.

[h2]Why could I possess Froggy?[/h2]
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.

[h2]Why does the Settings menu not change the movement of the cars?[/h2]
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.

[h2]Why was the Fort NPC repeating the same line over and over?[/h2]
It was due to a bug with the storylet system not working as intended. It has since been fixed.

[h2]Why was my character stuck in a particular pose after getting out of a vehicle?[/h2]
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.

[h2]When can we get our hands on SJTiled?[/h2]
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.

[h2]I have a crash bug![/h2]
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/

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.

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…



[h2]THE RELEASE DATE[/h2]

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.

[h2]Q1: AIMING REWORK, MORALE & SUPPRESSION, CLUTS AND NEW ANIMATIONS[/h2]

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.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
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.



[h2]Q2: PIERCE & PENETRATION, SOME NEW PROPS AND KICKING THINGS INTO OTHER THINGS[/h2]

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.



[h2]Q3: DIALOG TOOLS, THE CISTERN AND OTHER ART ASSETS[/h2]

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.



[h2]Q4: VEHICLE EJECTION, GIBS AND SQUIBS[/h2]

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.



[h2]WHAT ELSE IS IN STORE?[/h2]

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]

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.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
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.

[h2]slide_1_hrush[/h2]

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.
[h2]slide_2_hotels[/h2]

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.
[h2]slide_3_offices[/h2]

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.
[h2]slide_4_mcmansions[/h2]
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.
[h2]slide_5_office_postmodern[/h2]

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.
[h2]slide_6_technotop[/h2]

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.
[h2]slide_7_fabhabs[/h2]

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.

[h2]Holiday merch store discounts coming soon[/h2]
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.

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!