Designing a SWAT Vehicle From The Wheels Up

Courtesy of our lead artist, August's post is a look into the design of an armored vehicle belonging to NOSPOL, which is one of the enemy factions you'll be facing off against in Brigador Killers. Without further ado...

Brigador Killers deals in part with the question of militarized police and police violence. How to approach this in the design and presentation of the world of Mar Nosso and its inhabitants? It is not enough to present to the player an MRAP [Editor's note: Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle] with police badging. While obscene, absurd, it is also perfectly ordinary to Americans. We are inured to it.

So, the initial point of departure for the SWAT vehicle was to go back to the source: the Los Angeles Police Department and their SWAT Team. This department’s escalation of weapons, tactics, and equipment would I believe set the template for militarized police presence in America for years to come.

Which brought me to the Cadillac Gauge V100/Commando:

While iconic and fitting for the technical restrictions of our engine (wheeled vehicles can only have four wheels), we run into a similar problem as the MRAP: too many associations, many of them positive. The player can’t “see it with new eyes,” which to us is one of the crucial aspects of good science fiction.

So we’ll shift to an older, and much more loaded point of departure: German wartime armored cars.

While the associations vary, the baggage is unquestionable. WW2 German hardware should be unambiguous enough of a reference. Not so simple! German wartime hardware is the background radiation of popular cultural designs in film and videogames for decades, everything from Star Wars to Killzone. These design elements are powerful, but so much so they can easily overwhelm your own design intention and muddy your intended comment.

Another particular difficulty with referencing German wartime designs is that one can end up on footing to that of say, Jin Roh– where the loving depiction of German wartime arms and armor could be read as uncritical devotion. This is not what we mean to suggest with NOSPOL, the corrupt and gang-ridden police force you face in Brigador Killers.

Early on, I switched from the Cadillac Gauge basis to this idea of roughly approximating the Sd.Kfz 222. I wanted to echo the angular hull shapes, but the overall design shouldn’t map too closely to any original wartime design. Rather, I wanted to design my own vehicle to invoke, rather than recreate a wartime vehicle explicitly that might distract or muddy the player’s read for the vehicle.

Again, let’s have the player see it “with fresh eyes”. There are myriad other pitfalls with fascist police force design. Travel too far in a given direction and you retread others’ work, like Viktor Antonov’s brilliant Combine APC design for example was something I wanted to avoid.

The best way to do this was to design the vehicle in a way that made sense to how NOSPOL might commission the vehicle in the setting: a retrofit from an existing truck chassis.

I had this Russian tanker truck model on hand. Perfect!

“But it’s Russian, not German, how is that helping your association?” Good question. Just as with the Loyalist military gear was largely but not exclusively Russian in origin, we don’t want any one single source. When the viewer sees a design that is by turns subtly heterogenous in character it’s my theory that it aids in, to introduce a metaphor, slower digestion.

An obvious design is like a piece of candy–it can be very sweet, but it’s gone and eaten quickly without a second thought and without a lasting impression. We want this design to be somewhat… chewier. More complex flavor notes. We want the taster to think about what flavors strike the palate.

So we begin from a Russian truck chassis to execute a German influenced armored hull design to talk about American militarized police. Simple enough, right?

Let’s chop off the back wheels and introduce a magenta box to remind us of the package space required by the engine. Whatever else goes on in the design, we’re going to need ample clearance to house the engine.

While we’re at it, I quite like those big, high clearance front fenders. Let’s turn them around and put them over the rear wheels.

Now we’re getting somewhere. We haven’t really had to design anything yet, actually–but by using a real world truck, notice how confident and realistic the scale read is. Provided we keep it consistent with our chassis here, the scale read will be more or less an automatic bonus, and will keep our work from getting too outlandish.

[Side note: one such problem that science fiction designs from scratch will run into is that when designing a ground car the designer fails to take into account the legal width limits for road legal vehicles. While military machines can be bigger, they are also still expected to travel on the confines of established road infrastructure. Get those dimensions dialed in first and you’ll get a lot “for free”.]

All we need to do now is start fitting an angular hull on top of this chassis, while still keeping in mind our other core requirements. How many people can it hold? Where does the driver sit? Does the armored car actually have a front and back driver, as some armored cars did? What engine limitations for a sprite-based and isometric game do we need to cater to?

In the interest of time we’re not going to walk through the rest of the design in detail, but with the major hull shape established, much of the rest would be about adding the hull detailing consistent with armored vehicles, stowage, searchlights, etc. Once we’ve got our goal in mind for this design there’s not a lot of quibbling over different shapes and thumbnailing different looks–one of the great pleasures of independent game development is that we can dispense with a lot of tiresome Art Director behavior most of the time.

Here’s the finished render of the armored car, in two flavors. First we see it as it will first appear to the player:

Beyond the police colors, something that always distinguishes overenthusiastic purchase of surplus military equipment by police departments in America and the former military service these vehicles saw is plainly their role. In the military, an armored vehicle is maintained but often subject to a lot of wear and tear. Once an MRAP is back home in America, emblazoned in SWAT livery, it seldom has to “work”. Its purpose is intimidation and peacocking for the department by and large. This is the initial guise I wanted to see the SWAT armored car deploy in BK as. A little “underdressed” compared to its military companions, seen elsewhere in the game.

Then, as the game progresses, and the player’s fight against the Concerns and their attendant police and mercenary forces intensify, updates and changes are made. Even a SWAT vehicle is forced to “work” under something more akin to active combat conditions. It needs to keep ammunition and fuel and spare tires with it.

It might even need to get semi-improvised slat armor for the wheels, a repeated weak point for ambush attacks from the player character (or other parties?). We highlight for the player that the slat armor is definitely newer by giving it fresh, dark paint compared to the more sunfaded exterior of the main hull.

Hopefully you’ll agree that at least some of the above is more than bluster and the design principles as established are borne out in the final design, and that the up-armored variant makes it clear to the player that the fight is escalating. See you, killer.

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