Locational sound emitters | Vehicles as resources | FAQ

We've shot for the moon, and we're almost there. Brigador Killers is an order of magnitude more complex than our first game: BK has cars that can handbrake around corners. You can travel freely between levels, you can talk to NPCs, and you can get in and out of vehicles. We've listened to the features you wanted and now we're close to the game of our dreams. We're just making sure that we unveil it when it's ready.

Thank you to all our fans and everyone that has shown interest in Brigador Killers. It will be worth the wait. If you’d like more details for any of these sections, check out our monthly posts (like this one) or watch our YouTube uploads (like this one).

SO WHAT HAVE WE BEEN UP TO? PROGRESS IN 2024

To catch you up, at the start of February 2024 we made the SECRET ALPHA 1 build of Brigador Killers available here on Itch.io. We updated that build a couple of times over that month to fix some issues: Windows Defender didn’t recognize the game and flagged it in a false positive, we had a few crash bugs that our dedicated players helped us discover, and our freshly-made playlist system sometimes failed to play music across level transitions. After solving those bugs and releasing fixes in March 2024, there have been no public updates, but in response to the feedback from SECRET ALPHA 1, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes:

• March also saw the addition of brutalist-themed cinema building props, the configuration of the pierce resistance values for smaller props (referred to internally as “minis”) and their hitboxes, as well as making the storylets system friendlier to modders and designers. After SECRET ALPHA 1, player questions revolved around progression and a sense of purpose, and we’ve spent the rest of 2024 addressing this feedback. More on that later.
• In April, more props were added, we streamlined our story and world progress tracking systems, and made it much less likely for the player character to unintentionally run themselves over with their own vehicle after exiting it.
• During May, many art assets were rendered out, such as scrap gibs and other debris, various street minis and the first variant of the Lobo, an early-game enemy type (pictured below).
• In June, the second variant of the Lobo was added, along with the “TV trees” and other lights you may have noticed from last month’s dioramas video.
• July was very big on the audio front. We’ve been working closely with our audio people to better take advantage of FMOD’s features. Where Brigador was straightforward in its soundscape, mostly focusing on gunfire, bullet impacts, and stompy mechs, we’re adding a lot of detail to the world of Mar Nosso. As a result, the sound bank has grown and several sound events have been added, while more are coming. New lighting (or “weather”) files for levels were also authored.
• The sound bank changes continued into August, with the addition of locational sound emitters - think a buzzing neon sign, or a leaking water pipe burbling into a storm drain. Now, designers have the ability to enrich their levels with these ambient spots. Also, we added the ability to display text comments in the game that have been placed via the map editor. Brigador Killers’ systems are much denser than the first game, which can be hard to keep track of as a map designer. We needed a clear way to signal how the levels work in-engine, both for our own use and for future modders. Finally, we’ve enabled the player to pick up and drop weapons while in infantry loadouts, which is easy to say, but required fundamental changes to the engine.

This is not the full list of things we’ve been working on, but we do want to go into detail on a few other things that are currently cooking.

REFINING THE CORE LOOP

As we mentioned above, players enjoyed SECRET ALPHA 1 but wanted to know more about their progression: how they could develop their characters’ abilities, and what challenges they would be working to overcome. We wanted to answer these desires while keeping in mind Brigador’s strong cast of vehicles, which many players have come to love. Only a subset of vehicles will return – Mar Nosso is on a different planet than the first game, after all – but we wanted to make sure to keep vehicles at the core of Brigador Killers.

One of the ways we’re doing that is to present vehicles as resources – not just a means to get around, or to shoot things with, but something you’ll want to hunt down so you can work towards a goal.

Now, what does that mean? The image above is an example – it’s a development tree that describes what you can do with a motorbike. Once you find and unlock it, you’ll be able to use blueprints and parts to turn it into more specialized variants.

Many players wanted more customization from Brigador, and ever since 2017, we’ve been keeping that in mind as we work on Brigador Killers. It would have been simple to add a looter-style progression to vehicles (“swap engines for +5% movespeed” - that kind of thing), but we wanted to really dig into what players wanted and come up with a satisfying system.

Along these lines, we’ve been working on identifying player types and giving each type options that are interesting and rewarding. In real life, someone who restores vintage cars doesn’t have the same priorities as a performance-focused hobbyist racer, even though they both work on cars in their garage. So, going back to the image above, a mobility-focused player can turn their motorbike into a Corvid Skate, and then a Rope Kid. A more combat-focused player can turn it into a Troubadour, and then a Pantry Boy, and even a Doorman.

In order to create these variants, the player needs to venture out into Mar Nosso and discover their blueprints, and then track down the parts needed to complete them. For example, a wandering SNC Ad Buddy™ might drop an agrav impeller, which is the drive unit you need to begin Corvidizing your motorbike into a Skate.

Anyone familiar with modding vehicles from our first game, kitbashing model parts, or, say an episode of The A-Team…

…will have a good notion of what we’re after.

We aren’t yet able to visualize this in-engine because what sounds like a “simple” idea (smoosh parts of vehicles onto another vehicle) is a lot of work. Brigador is a data-driven engine, which means that at its heart, mechs were described whole cloth in a JSON file. We don’t have to get into the details, but suffice to say that it was not designed to combine and change mechs like this. In 2018, when we started BK, we couldn’t even dynamically spawn units in a level. Everything that would be in the level had to already exist at level load time. Much of the code work since then has focused on making the engine more flexible and modern.

Even easy-seeming tasks like adding returning vehicles involve a ton of work: we have to import and re-render the required models at BK’s higher sprite resolution, as well as redoing their animations thanks to all the additional features we now have. These are problems we know how to solve, but they do take time.

THE SOUNDSCAPE

Another major change to the in-dev build of Brigador Killers is to the audio. Previously in Brigador, when you’d load up a level, the map would have a pair of music tracks associated with it. Once they finished playing, it wouldn’t start up again, so players were in for a quiet experience if they were on a particularly long or difficult run. Sound effects like gunfire and engine noise still played, but our implementation didn’t really allow for anything “dynamic” to happen during a level, like changing music tracks. We’ve focused on addressing these gaps from the first game in Brigador Killers. For instance, it’s much easier for us to specify the material of a ground tile. This means units can make different footstep noises when they traverse those tiles. This system existed in Brigador, but was only really used for grass tiles and railways. Now that we have infantry gameplay, footsteps are much more central to the world feeling alive, so we’ve expanded the surface audio system. Here’s a demonstration of what we mean: listen carefully to Dave’s steps as he traverses over each labeled strip.

Audio emitters can also be placed to play whatever sounds we want within a certain radius to the player. Later in the same video at the 1:59 timestamp you will see Dave teleport closer and closer to one of these emitters. It’s subtle, but notice how the volume of it increases as Dave gets closer, and the direction it plays in your headphones.

There is still plenty of work to do on the audio front, but we’re excited at the possibilities of what we can do with these fancy tools, especially in terms of making maps feel less static. Speaking of…

THE MAPS

The areas you can access in the current Itch build are, even with a vehicle, kinda time-consuming to get across. For the next public build, we expect to change the scale of the playspace, dividing these areas into smaller chunks. We also plan to add level transitions which can be unlocked or opened up via the world state, along the same lines as Dark Souls’ droppable ladders and unlockable shortcuts. The way you move around Mar Nosso will evolve and grow as you do.

THE STEAM PAGE

The images and content on the Steam page are not what BK looks like at all. Those images and GIFs are from the long-since retired build that was available to play if you saw us at PAX in 2019 or 2020. We’ll be updating the Steam page to better reflect what BK actually looks like. This might mean that certain units, like the Vocc Doll or Gravesend Pinball, are no longer showcased in the art on the store page, but don’t worry. They’ll still be in BK – they just need to go through the sprite updating and re-export process to be featured once again.

ANSWERING A FEW OTHER BURNING QUESTIONS

Why the delay?

In 2003 video games were somewhat niche, making roughly 7 billion USD in total across both console and PC according to the ESA. Jump forward two decades and in 2023 alone it’s been calculated the industry has made well over 180 billion USD. That’s way, way more than what Hollywood made in 2023. In terms of the number of games available to players, last year just on Steam over 14,000 titles were released.

At the same time, in just the past couple of years major corporations have consolidated a huge amount of talent under fewer and fewer roofs. Entire media outlets with years of experience covering the games industry have winked out of existence, to say nothing of all the recent closures of studios that put out critically-acclaimed and successful games.

What’s become apparent in the past decade is that successful indie titles tend to fall into one of the following camps:

• Highly polished with a narrow scope (e.g. Hollow Knight or Celeste)
• Roguelikes blended with other genres (Hades, Noita, Slay The Spire)
• “Crunchy” world simulators and builders (Rimworld, Project Zomboid)
• Cozy (Unpacking, Stardew Valley)

More importantly, the indie titles mentioned have also spent years in development, often providing post-release support long after the game’s release. While Brigador Killers is taking a while to come together, it is no longer unusual for indie games to have project timelines that rival the AAA of yesteryear.

As established indie developers, we also find ourselves in the unusual position of being assigned the standard bearers for innovation. This is something you would hope to see out of the bigger companies that have the resources to do so (and in some cases used to do) but R&D into all-new IPs or hardware is not common. We want to do it, but that comes with the caveat of adding more devtime, especially since we’re one of the few developers making an isometric, sprite-based game in the 2020s.

Why not just do more Brigador?

The sentiment of “Why not just make more content for the first game?” has been expressed in various ways and the short answer is we consider Brigador: Up-Armored Edition to be feature complete. We may revisit it to make sure it is still functional on future versions of Windows and Mac, or make the default controls play better on the Steam Deck, but for the time being our focus is on developing this game. Brigador is kind of in a state where adding anything new would be like trying to add a pair of socks to a suitcase that you already had to sit on to close. The things we are doing with BK that we have outlined in this post are not possible with the engine that runs Brigador. We do not yet know what the minimum spec is for Brigador Killers but if you can run the current Itch build on your computer without issue you’ll probably be okay.

I have the Itch build - when can I get my hands on SJTiled?

The version of SJTiled for Brigador Killers will eventually become available - we don’t want to run into the problem we had with Brigador where when we updated that game with new assets, we bricked everyone’s maps they’d been working on. We are adding new features to SJTiled as well that haven’t been revealed in this post.

Where can I get the Makeup And Vanity Set soundtrack?

The tracks are infrequently released to our YouTube channel. The main soundtrack is about 40 tracks long, which is roughly the same as Brigador Volumes I and II. This doesn’t include the new ambient tracks that MAVS has also composed, or other music we have requested from them. As for the run of vinyl LPs of these albums, we intend to have a few of them available on our merchandise storefront, and MAVS themselves will also be selling them on their end. Judging by how well MAVS’ vinyls tend to do, we recommend that you either sign up to our newsletter over on our site or subscribe to MAVS to hear about the vinyl release first.

Are you going to make more minis for the merch store?

Yes. A new line of scale miniature models is coming later this year.

Hey! You didn’t answer my question!

Please leave your question in the comments, or in the #brigador_killers_chat Discord channel, or even email us at team@stellarjockeys.com.

Actually, we have a question - what recent release have you been playing that truly grabbed your attention?