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…

THE RELEASE DATE 

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.

Q1: AIMING REWORK, MORALE & SUPPRESSION, CLUTS AND NEW ANIMATIONS 

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.

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.

Q2: PIERCE & PENETRATION, NEW PROPS AND KICKING THINGS INTO OTHER THINGS

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”. 

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 (provided its pierce value also exceeds the target’s). 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.

Q3: DIALOG TOOLS, THE CISTERN AND OTHER ART ASSETS

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.

Q4: VEHICLE EJECTION, GIBS AND SQUIBS

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.

WHAT ELSE IS IN STORE?

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]