BRIGADOR KILLERS is coming to Itch first

Welcome to the inaugural Itch.io post for BRIGADOR KILLERS. We'll now be posting devlogs here at the end of each month to keep you informed on the status of our next game as it progresses (you may have seen a few already over on Steam). Right now it's just a page with some early screenshots and a description. There are no builds to get your hands on or price to announce at this time, but that will change in the coming months.

🤔WHY WE'RE DOING THIS

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 over on Steam 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 other storefronts regardless.

🙋‍♂️"IF I BUY ON ITCH FIRST, WILL YOU GIVE ME A STEAM KEY FOR IT LATER"

Yes. Itch even has that functionality built in. When the game is ready for Steam, Itch owners will get their Steam key.

📰WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING WITH BK

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 over on Steam 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.

🏃‍♂️BEFORE WE GO…

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.