👋WELCOME CAVEAT
Please note that at this stage everything about Brigador Killers is still subject to change. Or, in other words, this is a statement of intent and not a series of bold promises that we may not be able to keep. We also want to point out that we think it’s fantastic that quite a few of our regulars have maintained a level of enthusiasm for a sequel after so long, but it’s important that a) expectations be kept in check and b) where possible, we be transparent about what we’re doing as we go along.
📜FOR CONTEXT: A VERY BRIEF RECAP
In 2014 Brigador (then “Matador”) started as a closed alpha.
In 2015 Brigador went into early access.
In 2016 Brigador went into 1.0.
In 2017 Brigador was re-released as Brigador: Up-Armored Edition (hereafter just “Brigador”).
In 2018 Brigador received a number of updates.
In 2019 news about a Brigador Killers (hereafter “BK”) demo at BitSummit broke.
In 2020 a well-known YouTuber covered Brigador, which contributed to us switching from BK dev back to Brigador dev.
In 2021 Brigador received three notable updates, after which we returned to BK dev proper.
In addition, between 2021 and 2022, thanks to the renewed success of our first game, we were able to grow our team to include an additional programmer and another artist. Chances are you already know of them. The programmer is the same person responsible for the Spacer Commander video you might have seen, while the artist impressed us by reverse engineering the sprite production pipeline to make stuff like this. Their addition has dramatically affected what sort of game we think we can make.
It’s now the middle of 2022 and it’s an understatement to say a lot has happened over all those years, but the short version is this: there were a number of false starts on Brigador Killers on which we won’t dwell. However, the past eight months of work has been extremely productive, so let’s get into some of it.
💭SO WHAT IS THIS GAME?
Last month we put out a call for your questions about BK over on our Brigador page – thank you for leaving them! We’re going to lean on one such question for this section and answer some more further on:
Doctopus asked in a discussion thread:
What’s the difference compared to the first brigador game?
There are a number of ways to answer this, so let’s try to do so as fully as we can.
🎨VISUALS
Here are some images from a recent BK test build. The environmental props and ground tiles are entirely new assets, while some of the vehicles are uprezzed versions of models from Brigador. We’ve still to redo various effects sprites – which are things like smoke, explosions, craters and debris – so those of you with a magnifying glass will recognize “old” effects assets from Brigador still in use in this test build (click to enlarge).
🔧TECH SPECS
Brigador Killers is using an iteration of the same custom engine we used for Brigador. “Iteration” here means “several changes made to engine code in order to implement new things”, which means that, compared to our first game, hardware requirements have gone up. We don’t know about recommended system specs at this time but we are confident in saying that if your computer could only just barely run our first game, it will be unlikely to run BK at all.
One of the reasons for this increase in hardware requirements is the major graphical change that occurred early into BK’s recent development. In recent months we have doubled the output resolution of sprites, meaning you can see things in finer detail. For example, here’s the original Brigador signature Touro at three times the standard zoom on the left and the BK Touro at the standard zoom on the right but cropped (click to enlarge).
Or together in the same scene within an early test build of BK
In order to pull off this increase in visual detail the old limits on the game’s packfile were lifted. In plain terms, BK is going to take up more hard drive space than Brigador.
Other new things include complicated systems like wheeled vehicles or new variants of existing ones like gunfire influence maps. What this all fundamentally means is more math is going on – therefore a more powerful CPU and/or GPU than what you would need to meet our current minimum spec for Brigador will likely be required. We will (loudly and repeatedly) broadcast what these requirements are when we know them.
🎮GAMEPLAY LOOP
In terms of gameplay, a frequent criticism of Brigador was something along the lines of “Cool mechs, but what else is there to do?”. This is because, once you get past the sights and sounds, Brigador is a fairly simple, arcade-like experience. Yes, there’s a strategic layer of learning how to manage enemy mobs at higher difficulties, but for a large chunk of the Brigador campaign you’d enter a level, destroy up to three types of things and leave. Progression was also fairly limited: successful missions in Brigador earned the player money, which they could spend on unlocking vehicles and weapons in the Acquisitions menu for use in Freelance mode or buying lore entries to flesh out the overall story. That’s all there was to it.
Needless to say, abstracting this way of acquiring new stuff via menus wasn’t very exciting for particular players, hence the criticism of “what else is there to do?”. So what we intend to do in BK is three broad things:
- Scale the initial combat down from vehicles to on-foot
- Merge Campaign & Freelance into a single mode where any loadout can be used
- Let the player acquire unlocks during in-level play
Mechanically, the elevator pitch is akin to something like Hitman: Contracts meets GTA2. Your initial loadout will be limited but when we set you loose within a level, you as the player may find vehicles, weapons or items that can be acquired for current and future use. However, in order to add them to your permanent arsenal and use them in subsequent forays you will need to get out of the level alive. In addition, such vehicles and weapons will influence the force posture of enemy forces and affect a type of escalation system.
For example, you can go into a level incognito on foot with discreet weaponry and local security will not consider you a threat nor will they attack you on sight. Or, assuming you’ve unlocked it, you could strut in with a Touro sporting a Zeus and a Mãe Dois and it’s safe to assume local security are going to call HQ. Why you would go down either route depends on your objective. Maybe you’ll want to scout things out or simply jack a vehicle and book it before Nospol gets wise, or maybe you’ll need something with enough oomph to break into a Faber compound to either acquire or eliminate a high value target.
Regardless of how your recon goes, the idea behind combatting this “lack of things to do” from Brigador is to let the player take an active hand in the acquisition and behavior of weapons and vehicles within a BK level, rather than just buying things from a menu. In addition, the implication of all of the above means we need to make new weapon types suitable at the infantry/squad level, along with damage models and enemy behaviors to compliment this style of play.
🎵MUSIC
Makeup And Vanity Set has already composed about 40 new tracks for BK. A few of them were already posted to our YouTube. Here’s the playlist of the tracks we’ve already made available.
📖LORE/PLOT
Spoilers for Brigador but in case you missed it, in that game you were playing the bad guy. All the Brigador pilots were mercenary contractors for an intergalactic corporation called the SNC that disrupted Solo Nobre’s government so that it could take over the planet.
The action this time around takes place some time after the events of Brigador. You’ll largely be playing as the Nobreans that survived the mess the SNC caused. The action will initially take place on the planet of Mar Nosso, which is an SNC colony and new home for several of the Brigador pilots, but you’re not just coming for them.
With BK, the wider fiction is going to be fleshed out. You’ll learn more about the enigmatic Spacer clades and the intercorporate politicking with various security companies, as well as find out what happened to your favorite Brigadors from the first game.
📚(AUDIO)BOOK
Both the text by Brad Buckmaster and audio version recorded by Ryan Cooper of the next book is done but there's still some cleanup required on both to make everything presentable – specifically, making sure the page layout on things like Kindle is good, and double checking the mastered audio. It is also a direct sequel to the events of the first book.
🤼OBLIGATORY RESPONSE TO “JUST ADD MULTIPLAYER”
We realize it won’t stop a particular set of people asking so here’s our response – you give us at least ten times the amount of our lifetime revenue from Brigador, and cover the costs of increasing our staff to about 50 people, then maybe we’ll talk about the idea of making a functional multiplayer mode in Brigador Killers. That’s our proposal: give us a lot – and we mean A LOT – of money up front and maybe we’ll consider it.
💻PLATFORMS AT LAUNCH
- Windows ✅
- Linux ✅
- Mac 🤔
Mac OS in recent years has become an extremely hostile environment for developers. For us there are two big reasons:
- Apple declared in mid-2018 that it has stopped supporting OpenGL which is the graphics library that the Brigador engine relies on
- In 2020, Apple announced it was making a major shift from Intel processors to ARM-M1 CPUs
Both of these together mark a fundamental change in how Mac machines function. It is only a matter of time until OpenGL itself disappears from Apple's operating systems, and with it the ability to run Brigador’s engine. Though projects like MoltenGL exist, the amount of work that would be required to make a Brigador engine game functional on a modern Apple machine will likely be unjustifiable.
That said, if BK ends up doing well, we’ll reconsider our current attitude towards Mac.
🏆ACHIEVEMENTS
Given the new systems we’re making, we’ll hopefully be able to make more interesting ones beyond “Kill X of Y” or from acquisition unlocks.
📆ACTUAL RELEASE DATE
We want to put some form of BK out in 2023 because at some point we have to pay for the roofs over our heads. We may go down the Early Access route like before but that’s still TBD. Regardless we intend to produce a demo for people to play as well so that no buy-in is required for those on the fence.
📃ANSWERING YOUR OTHER QUESTIONS
AdeptOfHellLife asked:
Will there be any WMD's in BK? I wanna nuke the establishment.
Modding weapon values and explosion radii will still be possible in BK via the F1 debug panel just like in Brigador. You’re more than welcome to mess around with weapon values and make screen-filling explosions, though if you crash the game as a result of doing so don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Also, any plans for trailers or demo-version, even?
There are plans to make a demo. A trailer is going to be a major marketing beat and we don’t have enough of a game yet to make one.
Will there be multiple endings to Campaign?
Telling you how it ends before it’s even started is a bit premature.
Will I pick my loadouts for Campaign missions from set options like in original Brigador or will it be like Freelance?
Like we wrote above, the intention is that Campaign & Freelance are going to be merged into a single mode. Unlocks will be tied to your actions and progression through this mode. The current idea is that the things you acquire in later levels can be used for deployment in early ones.
Will Freelance mode make a comeback?
We are not ruling out a sandbox mode of sorts, but whether such a thing will be suitable for the game we’re making remains to be seen.
Kris in a discussion thread asked:
Are we still a lone mech/vehicle or will we have allies?
For now, the idea is you’ll initially play as a member of the Nobrean hit squad, but other members will be recruited into the fold. Our plan is that each person will have a certain effect on gameplay in that some will be better at using certain vehicle types or weapons. It will be vaguely reminiscent of Hotline Miami’s mask choice system. Though it’s a direct inspiration to this game, a Syndicate-like party-of-four system is not on the cards.
Omni asked:
Is BK going to be evolution of the first game, more of the same but polished and iteratively improved, or do you plan some revolutionary changes in gameplay? Not that I expect to outright share them at this point if you do.
Aside from being able to switch between vehicles within a level, one of the most significant changes is the pierce/penetration system. Our design lead discussed it along with some other in-progress features in a June stream you can watch an archive of here
The short version is weapons will have varying pierce values while vehicles and environmental props will have penetration values. Example: shooting a handgun at a tank won’t do anything because of its thick armor plating.
Is BK going to take place on one planet, or many?
We intend the player to start on the SNC colony world of Mar Nosso, but who knows where you might end up…
Are you sticking to Tank-Mech-Agrav trio, or are we going to see some new type, flier maybe?
In terms of things you can drive around, we have added wheeled vehicles. Physically modelling the physics of driving a car is one of the most complicated things in game dev (there’s a great GDC talk from the Rocket League devs on this subject that we recommend watching) but is necessary in order to get the right feel. We do not expect to add any sort of “flying” vehicle to the roster.
Are you planning for the game to have some kind of coop capacity of any sorts (as implied by Brigador Killers)?
No.
…I always felt like AI can be its weakest link in its chain, and I often wished it was bit smarter about things, communicating better, trying to use its numerical advantage, contain, encircle and flank me, behaving bit more like actual combat force, are you per chance aiming for development in that area?
Yes. One of the issues presented by infantry-scale combat versus vehicle-scale is people do things like take cover in response to suppression. It’s still early days but we’ve been making systems to try to reflect this sort of behavior. Please refer to this newsletter from January for additional details.
A number of people asked about the topic of melee weapons
Melee weapons aren’t being considered currently, either for mechs or on foot. There will still be a melee attack/stomp for on-foot and vehicles but we don’t intend to extend this system out.
Leif asked:
What faction will the player be working for in Brigador Killers?
You’re not working for the SNC in this game. Primarily you will be part of a Loyalist cell that survived the devastation of Solo Nobre sent to Mar Nosso to get payback.
zwzsg asked:
I know it's the future and that the spacer one uses balls not treads, but still, drifting tanks???
(Yes we are aware that a tank drifting is generally a terrible idea, usually for the treads, but we'd like to find an entertaining middle ground between players looking for cathartic release and those with lifetime passes to Bovington)
Once again, thank you for the questions. Next month we'll give an overview of what happened with each of the recent BK test builds. Until then feel free to join our Discord server and maybe check out the #becks_best channel.
