Brigador Killers News

This month’s post looks like a GIF explainer but it’s secretly a ruse to explain how systems can overlap in Brigador Killers. Here’s the GIF in question, taken from a recent debug build:



We’ve slowed this GIF down considerably because at “normal” speed, it would look something like this…



Also we’ll post the first GIF a bunch of times throughout this article so you’re not constantly scrolling up and down.

The GIF shows several entities in its short clip. An entity is an object that interacts with the game and responds to player input or other entities. These entities are:

• 1 x Carmine suit
  
• 1 x police cruiser
  
• 2 x Dave
  
• 1 x destructible object or “prop” in the form of yellow buckets filled with water
  

The Carmine suit is player-controlled. The police cruiser has no driver and is empty. The two Daves are non-player characters that either have no AI or are set to not to react to player actions. The yellow bucket props are in-universe impact attenuators.



We also have some debug visualizations on screen, which are:

• A label called Max speed
• A label called Decay
• Green HP bars above the police cruiser and the two Daves
  
• A red and orange ring that briefly appears beneath the Carmine suit
  

Max speed and Decay aren’t important to this specific scene, but we’ll try to explain them regardless. Max speed is, as the name suggests, that unit’s maximum speed. The Carmine suit has a greater motive power than the two Daves. Decay is the “bleed off” of bonus velocity that an entity would get from boosting or charging. In the previous game Brigador, after you stop boosting your vehicle, your max speed immediately goes back down to its original value. We smooth this transition out now for Brigador Killers, but because of how these bonuses work, we have to keep track of how much "bonus" there is which we then gradually subtract from. So, the decay value represents the remaining bonus we're still subtracting from - but the decay value in the GIF is zero because no entities have boosted or charged.

The green HP bars are an abstraction of how many hit points that entity has left after taking damage. A green bar that has turned completely transparent will disappear because the remaining HP has hit zero. Not all entities on screen have HP bars visible. Player-controlled entities like the Carmine suit have their HP displayed elsewhere. Props do not tend to display HP bars either, sometimes because their HP pools are so small and because we express damage to props in other ways.

The red and orange ring underneath the Carmine suit are visualizations of the damage radii of the “kick”. You might remember something similar from a previous post about systemic building collapse.

Third, let’s go over the visual effects going on in this GIF.



The visual effects that we can see are:

• A kicking up of dust from the Carmine suit’s “kick”
  
• A darkening effect on the Carmine suit, police cruiser, two Daves and prop
  
• The Daves changing animation states
  
• The inertia of the police cruiser after colliding with the prop
  

Technically the Carmine suit’s “kick” here is actually a reused mech stomp. More specifically, it’s not a stomp at all, but an explosion. This is also the reason why the suit briefly darkens.

The darkening effect is to visualize to the player that an entity has taken damage in some way. As a result, every entity that appears in the GIF takes damage in some manner, including the prop.

The two Daves change animation states because they have entered what’s called a pain state (sometimes referred to as “flinching”), with both being pushed aside by the hitbox of the police cruiser. One of the Daves that’s still visible dies as they fall over backwards, losing the HP bar in the process.

The car’s inertia after impacting the prop carries it forward a small distance more before eventually rolling to a stop.

Now for the fun and penultimate part - here’s what’s going on in terms of behind-the-scenes systems.



Some of these systems are holdovers from our first game, some of them are new to Brigador Killers. In action in this GIF are:

• Impulse
  
• Wheeled vehicles
  
• Trample
  
• Reverse trample
  

Impulse is how the police cruiser gains velocity and is pushed sideways into the Daves. The impulse comes from the explosive “stomp” kick of the Carmine suit.

Due to Brigador Killers’ new wheeled vehicles implementation, cars can better act like four-wheeled vehicles. We spoofed wheeled vehicle movement in Brigador for vehicles like the Pantry Boy treadbike or the Varlet tuk tuk by taking the tank movement and making the treads very “narrow” to give the sense of a bike/trike-style movement. Currently in BK, wheeled vehicles don’t have the handbrake on, meaning they can be pushed around easily just from NPCs bumping into them. The Carmine suit’s kick delivers more than enough impulse to send the cruiser sideways into the Daves.

Trample is a means of causing damage that already exists in Brigador - it’s how mechs are able to stomp through buildings like with the Touro or ramming through enemy vehicles with your Killdozer.

Reverse trample is different. Reverse trample is a system new to Brigador Killers in which trample damage can be self-inflicted. A simple way to think of it is how you can get hurt because you went very fast into something solid. However, in BK, reverse trample can kick in from both rapid deceleration and rapid acceleration.

So finally with all of the above in mind, here’s the detailed play-by-play of the GIF

1. The player in the Carmine suit hits the police cruiser with an explosive “kick” that gives the car impulse.
   
2. The police cruiser immediately takes damage from the kick and the impulse sends it in a direction away from the source of the impulse.
   
3. Almost instantly the first Dave takes reverse trample damage due to the rapid acceleration it inherits from the police cruiser. The police cruiser may also be inflicting a small amount of trample damage on the Dave.
   
4. A frame later the second Dave takes damage for the same reasons as the first (reverse trample and trample).
   
5. The police cruiser continues towards the yellow impact attenuator prop, inflicting trample damage on it.
   
6. The Dave on the right exits off screen and survives, but the Dave on the left, after rapidly accelerating and taking both damage from reverse trample and trample, takes a second bout of reverse trample damage because it catches the corner of the prop and rapidly decelerates. This makes the total interaction lethal to the Dave on the left.
   
7. Leftmost Dave’s HP is fully reduced, its death animation plays out, and the NPC flops backwards onto the ground.
   
8. The police cruiser still has inertia and continues to roll forwards before stopping.
   

All of what you just read is about 1000 words explaining what happens in roughly a second of gameplay.



Why we bothered to write that all out is because at the time of capturing this GIF we didn’t even expect the second Dave to have been killed by the interaction - we would have been content enough with the police cruiser shunting into the NPCs and inflicting some reverse trample damage, which it did.

Instead, we’ve found ourselves in a much more exciting place, because we now know that such player actions have the potential to be “messy” in ways that means players won’t see the exact same thing over and over if they replay certain combat scenarios. The reason this has happened is because it’s a combination of multiple overlapping systems that, in some cases, have taken several years to develop, and can now be expressed in Brigador Killers.

If you enjoyed this post, you can find quite a few more in-development GIFs on our discord server’s #brigador_killers_chat channel.

One of the major advances that we made the past month was changing how the aiming works in the game’s engine for Brigador Killers along with some new animations. We’ve recorded some footage of the new aiming system in action and put together this post as an explainer for what you’re about to watch. A reminder as always: what you see below is not indicative of the final product, and there’s plenty still left to do… but it’s starting to get much closer to the game we want to make.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Combat Glide (0:00)[/h2]
We briefly talked about an earlier version of this system in November's post. By holding down right mouse button, which is the current bind for “Ready Weapon” and moving with WASD we can see the player-controlled Dave do a Combat Glide. The yellow dot at Dave’s feet indicates his current orientation, while the green dot is where the mouse cursor is in screen space that the player has line of sight to. While Dave can spin around in a circle while stood up, crouched down his “upper” can only rotate so far in either direction until he reaches a maximum turning radius.

Dave moves over to a white panel van to then demonstrate what happens if something gets in the way of the player’s free aiming. As the aim sweeps across the van, the green point changes position and a second red dot appears. This red dot is to indicate where the mouse cursor is, but that the player does not have direct LOS to that point and is instead getting “caught” on the van’s hitbox.

The player then shoots the white van with a gun that’s slightly overtuned.
[h2]Lock Target (0:56)[/h2]
When not aiming like in Combat Glide, the purple dot on screen is currently an indicator of where the player’s cursor is. Lock Target is a new form of aim that automatically locks on to the hitbox of an NPC that is closest to the player’s cursor when the player presses whatever Lock Target is bound to. In this case it’s bound to the side button of a mouse.

Once locked on, the player can freely move around the targeted NPC and maintain aim until the NPC is either destroyed in some manner or the player decides to aim at something else. The player practices on some dummy NPC units that also shoot out some new blood squibs when shot. The NPCs don’t fall to the ground like the enemy Daves will later because animations have not yet been set up for them. The player-controlled Dave, who is currently invisible to enemy NPCs, shows off the tracking of this new form of aiming by locking on to a few wandering Daves and following them around before unloading a shotgun a few times.

The ability to lock the aim is an important addition to the Brigador aim scheme for a couple of reasons: for some Brigador players, the combination of manual aiming with maneuvering and tactical awareness required too high a cognitive load. Being able to slow the game down alleviated that, but could still be frustrating as a single-stop solution. Lock Target provides another option for players while making both controller play far more viable and adding a major accessibility option for impaired players. Returning Brigador players may choose to eschew aim locking entirely, and that's fine. The idea isn't to require a certain style of play, but rather to open the door to as wide an array of playstyles as possible.
[h2]Level Aim (2:52)[/h2]
Some context is required before explaining the footage of this section: one of the biggest things that we wanted to have with infantry-scale combat was the ability to crouch behind walls and shoot over them, but there were problems with doing this. The main one was due to the legacy of Brigador’s own method of aiming, in that the player’s arc of fire usually shot downwards into the ground from the position of a vehicle’s weapon mount point. That meant that crouching a unit also lowered the position of a vehicle’s weapon and thus the height at which the fire would emanate. This meant that weapon fire could easily “catch” on the top of environmental props, but it wasn’t really a problem in Brigador because of the general scale of things and most props being easy to destroy. However, in BK the props are sturdier and we’re trying to do infantry-scale combat.

That’s why this footage starts with the player Dave crouching by a barrier and appearing to shoot at the red sports car, but doing no damage to it even though the green aim dot is clearly over the car. When Dave stands up to take a shot, the shots connect because the rifle bursts are no longer “catching” on the top of the barrier and can connect with the vehicle.

At the 3:24 mark, the area is refreshed and the player crouches down to shoot at the same car... except now the shots connect. The sharp eyed will notice the aim lines have changed ever so slightly – this is what happens when the Level Aim button is held down, and in this footage is bound to a second side button on the mouse. When used in conjunction with Ready Weapon with right mouse button, it allows the player to shoot at a flat angle, parallel to the ground. So even while crouched, the player can shoot over and make their hits land.

Player Dave also returns to the group of standing NPCs we saw earlier to show off Level Aim while crouched, and shoots at a couple of wandering Daves from behind a barrier.

[h2]Flop, Drop & Prone (4:45)[/h2]
In addition to new aiming, several new behaviors have been added to make enemy infantry more “alive” and animations to go with them. The first is “Prone”, which is when an NPC Dave drops to a chest-down position in response to a frag grenade being thrown nearby. The main effect of this prone behavior is to give the enemy infantry a defense bonus as well as the player a sense of agency. After taking enough damage, one of the Daves flees, before being dealt enough damage to enter a “bleed out” state that eventually kills the NPC after a specific amount of time.

Player Dave then proceeds to show off other Daves flopping over on their back or dropping to their front due to small arms fire. It’s something that needs to be fine tuned, but what we want to do with this system is similar to the pain state of monsters in Doom, wherein the player is able to briefly stun mobs of enemies by doing enough damage.

[h2]Death Animations & Gibs (6:29)[/h2]
We also decided the past month that the Daves needed to better demonstrate when they’re incapacitated. In addition to blood squibs from being shot at, enemy Daves now fall over dead in various positions. Also, corpses can be gibbed by the player with explosives like grenades and generally make a mess of things.

The graphic content of BK is something we are able to configure. For instance, corpses can be made to immediately fadeout on death. So, if screens full of blood and limbs is a bit much then you’ll be able to turn such things off.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider wishlisting and following Brigador Killers on Steam to get the latest news in your Steam library feed.

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

Back in July 2022 we wrote that we wanted to put some form of Brigador Killers out in 2023. We have recently decided that the game will come out first as a build on Itch.io in the coming months. Assuming that period on Itch goes well, BK will then come to Early Access on Steam in 2024, and then eventually 1.0 with post-release support.

The Itch page is up though there are no builds of the game to get your hands on just yet. You can take a look at it here. Price is still TBD.

[h2]🤔WHY WE’RE DOING THIS[/h2]
We’ll limit the list of reasons to four broad points. First, expectations. As indie developers go, we’re old and remember what Early Access on Steam used to be like and what the public accepted as early access. If we were to repeat with BK on this storefront now what we did with Brigador back in 2015, we’re confident a lot of people on here would be disappointed because the game simply won’t be at the expected quality level of an “early access game” in 2023.

Second, risk. When a game is released on Steam, the platform puts your game in front of a lot of customers every second – but only for a limited time. Also, Steam is still the most widely used platform for PC gaming. We want to make sure we can make the biggest splash possible.

Third, scale. When BK is released to the public, dull yet highly important things like bug reports will shoot up. We already know that keeping Brigador functional on current operating systems like Windows 10 has been bumpy, and with Windows 11 we expect more of the same for both Brigador and BK. By exposing BK to a smaller pool of players first, the hope is that we can prevent ourselves from being overwhelmed by the number of people with technical issues, as well as the occasional player that is somehow able to run our game on a government-issue laptop from the early 2000s running Windows 8.1.

Fourth, burnout. We appreciate the hype from a lot of you for BK but please also understand that we don’t want to destroy ourselves in the process of making it. Brigador already went through that process in 2016 with its initial release, and it’s not an exaggeration that it took years to undo the damage that it caused.

Brigador Killers is not only meant to be a sequel to Brigador but also internally is the end result of a lot of lessons learned – and what we learned with the first game was we enjoyed the community feedback, which Itch will help us with.

We realize Itch isn’t going to be for everyone, and that’s okay. It’ll still come to Steam and GOG regardless.

[h2]🙋‍♂️ANSWERING THE QUESTION OF “IF I BUY IT ON ITCH FIRST, WILL YOU GIVE ME A STEAM KEY FOR IT LATER?”[/h2]
Yes. Itch even has that functionality built in. When the game is ready for Steam, Itch owners will get their Steam key.

[h2]📰WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING WITH BK[/h2]
On the programming end of things, lua scripting has been added into the engine. This is going to significantly increase what we’ll be able to do with the overall gameplay of BK. If you’re familiar with Brigador, everything about the in-level maps in that game is decided the moment a level loads. That means a level will always have the same layout of buildings, the same spawns in set locations, the same music, and so on. We now have the ability to change a lot of that, though we’ll save an explainer post on this topic for later.

Design wise, with the new systems like morale and infantry movement, the amount of game data that needs to be audited is substantial. To give you an idea, here’s a glimpse at the current list of values that can be configured just for the morale system, and that these are things that can be set per AI-controlled unit.



Because there’s so much data to deal with, things like the armor & pierce system mentioned in the August 2022 post are going to be pared down from eight tiers. As much fun as it is to have a broad range of numbers to play with, BK is ultimately not going to be a hyper-detailed MilSim like the Arma series.

In terms of visuals, our lead artist Jack recently put up a twitter thread explaining how to signal to the player which wheeled vehicles are going to be drivable and which ones are not. Consider these two as an example:



Which one do you think you can drive as the player? If you chose the one on the left but not the right, congratulations – but pause for a moment and consider why. The obvious go-to is that the roof has been taken off, but also note that where the driver would usually sit is now occupied by an optical array, meaning there’s no space for a human to sit. The intention is that this wordlessly tells the player that, although this is identifiable as a vehicle, it is not intended for you. In addition, it serves as a tease for the loreheads out there to speculate as to the function of the vehicle on the right and what implications that has for the Brigador universe.

[h2]🏃‍♂️BEFORE WE GO…[/h2]
We are surveying our userbase to see what kinds of computer hardware and software they are using to play Brigador with. Participation in the survey is anonymous. The information gathered isn’t very exciting but it will be incredibly helpful to us as it will tell us what benchmark to aim for with BK. Click here to take the survey and get your response in before March 31st 2023.

[h2]🎧NEW MAKEUP AND VANITY SET TRACK[/h2]
Considering people enjoyed the Makeup and Vanity Set tracks from November’s all props tour video, here’s the extended version of Strange Bedfellows from the Brigador Killers OST as its own upload on our YouTube channel. [previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]More tracks to come.

[h2]📅OUR PLANS FOR 2023[/h2]
Our intention remains the same as what we said back in July 2022: BK will come out in some form of early access this year, and we’ll have more details on the specifics next month.

Between then and now we’re currently settling on the minimum feature list for that early access build. The biggest task for the programmers is overhauling the menu interface. Rewriting how the engine handles the menus is a complicated affair, but it will be necessary to make the game we want to eventually release.

[h2]📝OTHER THINGS OF NOTE[/h2]
In other news, animations for enemy infantry flopping over were completed. Here’s a group of Daves falling over to demonstrate.

People who have played a lot of the original Doom will be familiar with the term Pain state. Our intention with the flops above is largely the same, in that it is both visual reactivity for the player’s actions, and is a means of controlling enemy NPCs.

Why we have this is part of what we talked about before with “finding the fun”. With a vehicle-only game like Brigador, we didn’t have to worry about the enemies having pain states, because their vehicles weren’t “alive” and it was enough to make them go boom and end up as hulks on the ground. Doing the same with human NPCs won’t work, because players will want to see human-like behavior.

Our hope is that combining flops with death animations and the new gibs system we have in the works will lead to satisfying gameplay.

[h2]🥶STAY WRAPPED UP TIL NEXT MONTH[/h2]
If you’ve missed any of our previous dev streams or other dev-related videos over the past seven months, you can find them as their own playlist on YouTube.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]As a parting gift for 2022, here is the first chapter of the next audiobook written by Brad Buckmaster and read by Ryan Cooper. Titled Brigador Killers: Pilgrim, it is a direct sequel to the events of the first book and will serve as a companion novel for the game Brigador Killers. We are thrilled to have worked with both Brad and Ryan again on this project. As we state in the novel’s foreword:

Be ready: this is no mere "tie-in" novel. We gave Brad the go-ahead to run, and he ran all the way into the dark.

As for Brad's own blurb:

Solo Nobre fell in one night.

Those loyal to Great Leader were pushed to the edge of oblivion, yet remained unbroken, and now they turn their gaze skyward towards a new world, jewel of the corporate oppressors that now reign over them.

It is there on the rich colony of Mar Nosso that the hated Brigador mercenaries enjoy the spoils of war, basking in newfound celebrity status, lionised as heroes to the ignorant masses.

They think the fight is over.

For the members of Kill Team Pilgrim, they haven’t even started.

Pilgrim will take the fight to the enemy, on their home turf, where they think they are safe and protected.

It’s time for the Brigadors to die.

We’re looking forward to you learning more about both Zhe and Kill Team Pilgrim when the novel is released in full in 2023.

P.S. Our merchandise store is still running its sale all December long. You can get 20% off your next merch order by entering promotional code HOLIDAYS2022 at checkout, or clicking here.

P.P.S. Like the splash art? An album of all our splashes to date for Brigador and BK can be seen over on this IMGUR album.