This month’s post comes courtesy of our lead artist who also helped write the previous posts about the Mar Nosso SWAT vehicle and the spacer redesign.
Brigador is not a transhumanist or tech utopian setting. For as much as technology serves and eases human life, it can and is used to undervalue and enslave. We want to reflect this in Brigador Killers with designs like the Lobo.
Early in the story we discover specialized cyborgs used as soldiers, known as Lobos. This is the Spanish word for wolf, but is also suggestive of the word “lobotomy”. These soldiers did not volunteer; the fuller scope of the why and how for the Lobos came to be is part of the story.
Some key design goals for the Lobo:
- Real world style design revisions over time, and
- Those design revisions depicting escalation over time
Let’s talk about these two in turn.
Design evolution over time
Optimal design seems intuitive or even obvious, but only in hindsight. For example: the first minivans were smaller, passenger comfort-focused versions of cargo vans, which only had a single large sliding door, so the first minivans also only had a single slide door.
Minivans initially only had a single sliding door on the passenger side (source)
It took two generations of models in Chrysler’s case to introduce sliding doors on both sides, after which all the major auto manufacturers quickly followed. Obvious in hindsight, yet it took time to actually occur.
When we seek to reflect how designs change over time, we have to remember that the ultimate goal is not always in sight from the beginning. Designs evolve, clarify (or obscure and devolve!) over time. For a more realistic approach to design, we want to show iteration over time.
Top: 1st & 2nd generation minivans with no driver sliding door (1984-1995). Bottom: 3rd & 4th generation minivans with a sliding door (1996-2007) (source)
Design escalation over time
This leads into our second point: technology is not value neutral; it reflects the values of its creators. Shirley Cards tell us a lot about whom Kodak’s film stock was intended for, and who were not considered.
In the fiction of BK, between the Mk1 and Mk2, the designers of the Lobo stopped seeing the pilot as a person, only a design problem to be eliminated. Whoever the Lobo client is, it is not the pilot. The Mk1 is a half measure of hobbling and forcing a person to drive a suit of powered armor. With the Mk2, the awful logical conclusion has been reached: the person is another component to be streamlined, optimized.
Where the Mk1 is designed around a quadruple amputee with at least some allowances for the pilot, the Mk2 Lobos are maximally dehumanizing (an armored head enclosure with life support).
A (brief) annotated visual history of the Lobo
The Lobo design began in 2012 with a design I called “Company Man” for my game Animal Memory, which is the precursor to Brigador and the origin of the world setting. The goal was an unsettling robot/cyborg type enemy. The “empty helmet with optics” motif was seized upon.
Cyclolucidites’* particular head-in-a-can design is over a decade old at this point. The following image is also from 2012 and the same time period. In a world without, or few advanced computers, human brains would substitute.
[* For true Doom murderheads of The Lore, read up about cyclolucidism.]
A few years later I would revisit this design circa 2015 as a sketch, adding the dress shoes which is my favorite element of the design.
In 2023 The Mk2 would be modeled. Other than being given a 20mm cannon the design is quite faithful to the 2015 concept.
Original head canister design as per 2015 concept sketch with rear wheel, suggestive of these wheeling around on their own like Star Wars mouse droids. Which I think is a little too cute.
Here is the revised canister design, which is much more like the 2012 original cyclolucidite canister sketch:
This is how the Mk2 finally looks after being animated and exported into the game engine:
Mk1 Design
Seeking to land the “design evolution over time” theme, I went back and designed a more primitive Mk1 model. Cutting off and using only the head for a cyborg is a severe move; it would take time to arrive at that. First, they would use a quadruple amputee and more primitive coercive methods of controlling the brain.
I did not particularly like the ape-like aspects of this design. While it was meant to look as though he was stooped and wizened from forced labor, it mostly just made you look at his butt. Not the design intent.
Some revisions later we arrive at the Mk1. Here it is in action in-engine:
Death flops are among the many animations made for this unit.
Notable influences on the Lobo are Ted Backman’s Stalker designs for Half-Life 2...
...And The Sequester by Keith Thompson, whose story vignettes also inspired the lore entries in Brigador.
It’s Steam Summer Sale time again, which means our first game is currently on discount for the next two weeks. If you would like to support our development, please consider telling a friend.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/