Restitution - Physics. the return to an original physical condition, especially after elastic deformation.

Video games are not bound by what we understand to be the laws of the universe. Objects can be given ridiculous values for their acceleration or mass and they won’t suddenly create shock waves or distort space time around them if the engine running that game doesn’t have systems trying to simulate those things. Generally speaking, games trend towards simplification when recreating the underlying chaos of nature. Note that this doesn’t mean work isn’t involved - the math for things like real time fluid simulation[en.wikipedia.org] are very complicated and resource intensive, so to get the thing running at a steady framerate concessions must be (literally) made. At the same time, this simplification process is where things that might be referred to as “jank” can appear.

Entities in the Brigador engine love to spinJank isn’t necessarily bad - in the above case it’s just an example of the Lobo inflicting pure impulse on the car with both set to deal no damage - but it looks “off”. Within the game data, impulse is the value that decides how much “push” another entity has. In this instance the Lobo is applying impulse with its arm swing, while the car is applying its own pushing force by driving into the Lobo, but it’s not quite right because the Lobo is being shunted slightly while the car bumps off it and spins nearly 270 degrees. In isolation this might look fun, but in the heat of gameplay a vehicle wildly clipping into the player might get old fast.

[Tangential: one in-game distance unit is equivalent to just over 8 ft (or 2.44 meters). A “tile” in-game is two units by two units. Mass correlates to kilograms 1:1. For example, “Dave” who has featured in previous posts has a mass of 70 kg.]

Dave standing on a tileTo keep things simple in the Brigador engine, only NPCs are affected by impulse. Props (static objects like lampposts or office buildings) are not affected by it - though that is not to say props do not have an effect as was discussed in this previous post. So how do we go about reducing janky moments like the one above? It sounds crude but in truth we just start smashing things into one another and keep changing the values until it’s right. In other words, a crash test.

Two identical Lobos at one end, with two cars going at full speed towards them. The car on the left can go faster than the other one, though in this next gif the “slower” one arrives first in frame.

In this demonstration the slower car (with all its doors) has a mass of 615 kg, the faster one (no doors) has a mass of 750 kg. The Lobos are both 1000 kg.

There is a name for the phenomenon when two bodies collide with one another: Coefficient of Restitution[en.m.wikipedia.org]. To directly quote the wikipedia article:

…the Coefficient of Restitution (or COR) is a dimensionless parameter defined as the ratio of the relative velocity of separation after a two-body collision to the relative velocity of approach before collision. In most real-word collisions, the COR lies somewhere between 0 and 1, where 1 represents a perfectly elastic collision (in which the objects rebound with no loss of speed but in the opposite directions) and 0 a perfectly inelastic collision (in which the objects do not rebound at all, and end up touching).

For our purposes, we need the COR for the bodies involved to be neither too close to 0, nor too close to 1. In the example above the COR is about 0.35.

In this next example, the Lobos have a higher COR of about 0.75 meaning they will spring back more than in the previous GIF - notice how the Lobo on the bottom being hit by the slower car doesn’t get knocked over until the second impact.

If we keep these same parameters but decide to increase the mass of the Lobos up to 1500 kg from 1000 kg, then the impact will look like this.

Neither Lobo is knocked over on the first hit and both cars bounce back pretty hard. Since there’s a greater disparity in mass between the two entities, the resulting bounce is harder.

Because restitution is basically how much inertia is preserved after an impact, this ties into another system that we’ve mentioned before - reverse trample (short version: both rapid acceleration and deceleration can be deadly). So if cars end up having a default COR of 0.35, and that at full speed that deals about 50% of their HP on impact (such as from hitting a wall, or hitting another NPC of equal or greater mass with a COR of 0.35 or lower), then hitting a unit that is both bigger (like the Lobo, or a mech, or a tank) and has a higher COR means the impact will be more destructive.

Whether that destruction is fun, however, is a different question. We expect players will want to gun the engine, but we might not want to make every impact potentially lethal to the player.

Something else discovered during these crash tests is that reverse trample damage does carry over into what’s called overkill damage. In plain terms this is what happens if you drive a 2000 kg cop cruiser into four Daves.

In other words, if you have a heavy enough vehicle moving fast enough, you will insta-gib infantry.

Over on the Brigador: Up-Armored Edition news section we’ve just announced four new pewter minis are coming to our merch store, as well as a 20% holiday discount. Full details can be seen here.

https://steamproxy.com/steamstore/news/app/274500/view/4488495001178736877

Alternatively, if you want to go straight to the store, click here and don’t forget to enter HOLIDAYS2024 at checkout[shop.stellarjockeys.com].

The video above shows off a basic implementation of two major mechanics for Brigador Killers. The first is weapon pick up and drop, and the second is the vehicle bay. Caveat as before that what you see in this footage is subject to change, both in function and especially in terms of appearance. Since the UI is very simplistic, the rest of this post is an explainer for this footage.


This demonstration takes place in a simple shooting range level. At the timestamp of 0:06-0:20, the player-controlled Dave moves next to a weapon on the ground that lights up to indicate it can be interacted with. When Dave is in range of it and the player mouses over the glowing weapon, a text box appears showing what the weapon is, how much ammo it has, what “slot” it goes into, along with the prompt of “Press E to equip, hold to place in backpack”.

For the purposes of this footage, the player presses the interact button to immediately equip the shotgun, fires off a few rounds, and then presses another keybind to drop it back on the ground.

At the timestamp of 0:26-0:52, Dave instead stores the weapon in his backpack by holding down the interact button. The player then presses the inventory keybind, which brings up a basic inventory screen that lists what the player has. From here, the weapon can either be equipped or dropped from the inventory.

The player equips it, closes the inventory screen, and shoots off some rounds before dropping the shotgun on the ground.

Moving on to the timestamp of 0:58-2:10, the player moves Dave towards a set of briefcases which lights up like the weapons do. This is a weapon “chest”. By pressing the interact button when in range of the chest, the chest’s inventory appears. Listed on the left are what the player has, while on the right shows the list of items contained within this chest.

The player takes the Heino9! SMG to add to the Rhino Stopper shotgun they picked up earlier. The player closes the chest inventory, opens their own inventory and drops both weapons on the ground. Those watching carefully will notice that the shotgun occupies “slot 0” while the SMG occupies “slot 1”.

[What “slots” means for the player is that, unlike in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition, weapons are no longer assigned to LMB and RMB on your mouse, but to slots. Depending on what the player is controlling, the number of weapon slots available will dictate how many weapon slots they can use. For the time being, Dave has only two slots available.]

The player picks up both weapons from the ground to immediately equip them like in the first example. Pressing 1 on the keyboard selects the shotgun, while pressing 2 selects the SMG, visualized by the change in ammo count in the top left of the screen. After swapping to the SMG, the player opens fire on the dummy Daves, then drops the gun to the ground, showing that it was the correct weapon, as well as showing off the reduced ammo count of the dropped weapon.

Now for the second major mechanic – vehicle bays.


This demonstration takes place in a small, screen-sized square. At the timestamp of 2:15-2:56, a Fork mech is seen parked in the top corner, while some weapons and a brain tape are scattered on the ground. Our focus is on the terminal of TVs next to a green rectangle. Like with the weapon chest in the previous section, the terminal lights up as the player approaches it, and pressing the interact button shows three options:

• Store/Retrieve
  
• Summon vehicle
  
• Store Vehicle

For the purposes of this footage, the second option is chosen, and the player selects the Forverkhuhn mech from the list since there is one available. The menu then shows a Groups option, which is intended to serve as a “choose loadout” option but is non-functional at time of recording. Upon clicking Summon, a confirmation window appears asking us whether we want to call in the vehicle…

…and it does. Dave gets in, drives the mech around, and stops it back on the same green rectangle, which changes color when the mech is parked on it. When interacting with the terminal again, the third option of Store Vehicle is available. Upon clicking this and a subsequent confirmation window…

…the Fork mech is returned to its bay.

At the timestamp of 2:57-4:10, Dave instead gets into the Fork parked in the top corner, and drives the Fork straight into the vehicle bay. Dave gets out, hits the store button on the terminal and the Fork disappears. When Dave accesses the vehicle terminal again, two Fork mechs are listed as available, so Dave retrieves both of them one after another. Dave drives both mechs around and then parks them back in the bay one at a time.


Both of these features are part of a major user interface overhaul that has taken several months to come together. We mentioned a while ago that Lua scripting had been added to the engine and this video is an example of just some of the things we can now do.

As a quick example, the chests are relatively simple. Maps that have chests need to have a file called luaload.lua which is referenced on level load. The chest itself is a simple object that references a file called rangechest_01.lua. Functionally, rangechest_01.lua is not that much different to a .json file, in that it will list out what files it’s referring to, how many can be found, and what “chance” there is of that item spawning within that chest.

However there are still limitations: Lua files cannot be live-edited like .json data - this is instead done externally in an application like Visual Studio Code, Notepad++ or Sublime Text. Lua files also require a full restart of the game in order to see the changes, but it’s worth the trade off. We no longer have to worry about levels feeling “static” like they were in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition, since we can now do things like add weapons and vehicles for the player to acquire. Lua is also what’s behind the narrative system, map connections and unlocks and now this vehicle bay and weapon pick up system.


In summary:

• Players can pick up weapons found on the ground
  
• Weapons and vehicles can be stored to be retrieved for later use

Regarding the first point, it’s expected that enemies won’t always drop weapons but some will. In addition, you might have noticed something in the text about the Heino9! SMG…

Even though this is placeholder, the functionality referred to is something called weapon stability, which was once mentioned in an older newsletter all the way from March 2022[stellarjockeys.com] that predates when we started posting these updates to Steam.

Weapon stability is a combination of two new things: a unit's "stability" and… a weapon's "chaos". As the names imply, units like infantry, vehicles, or tanks will have different stability values, while weapons like shotguns, rifles, or heavy machine guns will differ in how "chaotic" they are to fire.

In development terms, "stability" and "chaos" both have a rating between +5 and -5. Depending on the difference between the two values on those "stability" and "chaos" ranges, the game engine modifies the weapon's accuracy bloom. "Bloom" here is the rate at which bullets fired start to spread outwards from the intended point of impact.

In simple terms, if the stability rating is the same as chaos, then the weapon's accuracy bloom will act as it does in Brigador. If stability is greater than chaos, then the bloom cone will be narrower and stay accurate for longer. And if stability is less than chaos, then the bloom will grow quickly [and] start at a higher spread.

In other words, if Dave were suited up in a carmine, they’d be able to fire the SMG with better accuracy.

Meanwhile, the player’s weapon inventory and vehicle storage still needs a lot of work on the visual front, but the main point is: it works. It’s difficult to stress how much of an accomplishment this is for an engine that was never designed to accommodate something like this in the first place, and veterans of the first game are all too aware of how limited that game’s menus were.

More importantly, this system ties into what was mentioned back in our August 2024 post under the section titled “Refining the core loop”. The storage of vehicles is not just a simple garage but also meant to be part of the development tree for making more specialized vehicle variants.

If you haven’t yet wishlisted our game, please consider doing so.

https://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/903930/Brigador_Killers/

We asked one of our artists for an explainer on what they’ve been working on. This time it’s Igor again, who previously helped us write this post, and has decided to drill down on his favorite building prop.

This is me playing on Manyson. The map cs_manyson.
- Anonymous youth, circa 2000s

McMansions[en.wikipedia.org], which are called "subhouses" in the game files, are one of my favorite prop sets in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition. The moment I blasted through one of them with a Banshee MG and saw it immediately collapse, I thought to myself "Oh, they're flimsy, that makes sense!". Working on the upgraded version of the McMansion for Brigador Killers was a challenging and occasionally painful quest that asked me to reconsider what constitutes good architecture.
The subhouse as it appears in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition, divided into its constituent tiles

Subhouses, as good as they are, needed a lot of reworking to fit into BK’s design requirements. With the increased fidelity and visual scale, as well as a greater focus on infantry combat, I had to show the collision boxes a lot more respect than the previous game, effectively blocking myself from using some of the modelling techniques deployed in Brigador. Significant deviations from the tile grid had to go for a while, returning only when the code team pushed an update that allowed us to put down what are called “qprops” (as the name suggests, it’s a prop that takes up one-quarter of a standard tile in the engine).

The modularity issue also needed to be tackled. The original game's subhouses were modelled from the top down, in that they were a complete house model divided into tiles. This approach allowed for the greater utilization of half-destroyed states, where destroying one of the building tiles reveals the ruins and debris "inside" of adjacent tiles as in the image above. However, this approach significantly limited the ways tiles could be combined together.

Last, but not least, the visual scale had to be more realistic. If our player character is standing next to a building, it would be better if they could visually "fit" inside it, at least when it comes to something as spacious as the houses of the wannabe ruling elite.
The Villa La Rotonda[en.wikipedia.org], just outside Vicenza in Northern Italy, designed by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio

Since ordinary McMansions – with their seemingly nonsensical combinations of volumes – were too hard to work with from the get-go, I had to pick something simpler I could start tinkering with. The Villa La Rotonda immediately checked many boxes. A Renaissance masterpiece, I saw it has all the essential elements I could easily cut into tiles: entrance groups, corners, internals, dome... With this the basic combinatorics were born: tiles can be facade or corner, one or two storeys high, all with a front-facing sloping roof, meant to be assembled around core internal tiles.

An initial mockup of possible combinatorics

Importantly, the Villa La Rotonda also provided a general style guide. McMansions come in many different shapes and styles, but understanding that all those variations won't seamlessly click together, I had to narrow it down to just one. Italian quickly became the choice for good reason: it was thematically appropriate for Miami-inspired Mar Nosso and also worked better with more gentle roof slopes. This meant I could model my two-story pieces without occupying too much screen real estate with the jarring roof tiling.

With all the prep work done there was only one question: how do I turn a UNESCO World Heritage Site into complete shit?
First iteration of the new McMansion in BK

There were a few hard constraints left to set due to the modularity requirement mentioned earlier. The primary color has to be uniform to call less attention to the tile grid. In addition, all sets (I made three, which are differentiated by the wall and foundation design) have to share the same floor and roof heights.

As for the rest, well… one thing I noticed while looking at IRL examples of McMansions is that there is not a single architectural rule left unsullied. Rhythm, composition, using your classical references correctly – you name it, it’s disrespected. This was the paradigm I had to adopt. If a particular set corner had plain rectangular windows, its corresponding facade tiles should use ornate phallus-shaped ones instead. If one particular element had to, by all the rules of good taste, align with another – misalign them, but only slightly, lest someone think it was intentional. If the set you're making looks medieval, add one (just one) Neoclassical tile for good measure. If the tile you've made screams "entrance group" at you, conveniently forget to add a door.

And after you’ve broken everything, make a couple of tiles that actually look normal for once, just to subvert the meta rule you've set for yourself. But even then, remember: it’s "tacky", not "classy". After all, we're making a mass-produced steel-frame property investment, not some aristocratic manor. This approach came in handy when I was working on side wall greebles. Sure, I want them to have pipes and AC units just like in the original subhouses, but what's the proper nouveau riche way to do this? It's by ignoring the back-alley aesthetic and painting all of it with the primary wall color, of course.

Final iteration of the McMansion in Brigador Killers, divided into its constituent tiles

This brief article on McMansions omits many aspects of what could be a much longer story. There are other tales such as my work on actual wall and floor constructions, or the accompanying topiaries set inspired by the album cover of Supertramps’ Breakfast in America[en.wikipedia.org], or how I discovered some of the mappers were combining unfinished McMansion assets with office buildings behind my back. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did working on them, albeit without the minor existential crisis where you question how your education led you to this point.

P.S. We are running a very short survey[forms.gle] about the exact make and model of controller you use to play on your computer. We particularly want to hear from those who played Brigador on controller. Participation in this survey is anonymous, but at the end you can submit your email address to be entered into a raffle to win something from our merchandise store. You will only be emailed if you win. This survey will run until October 31st 2024.

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).

To catch you up, at the start of February 2024 we made the https://stellar-jockeys.itch.io/brigadorkillers/devlog/671691/brigador-killers-secret-alpha-1. 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.

A peek at the Lobos in-engine, an industrialized enemy type that you face early in the gameThis 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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[web.archive.org]. Jump forward two decades and in 2023 alone it’s been calculated the industry has made well over 180 billion USD[newzoo.com]. That’s way, way more than what Hollywood made in 2023[deadline.com]. In terms of the number of games available to players, last year just on Steam over 14,000 titles were released[steamdb.info].

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[en.wikipedia.org]. Entire media outlets with years of experience covering the games industry have winked out of existence[www.theverge.com], 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[www.gamesindustry.biz]) 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[stellarjockeys.com] or subscribe to MAVS[makeupandvanityset.bandcamp.com] 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[shop.stellarjockeys.com].

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 [email protected].
Actually, we have a question - what recent release have you been playing that truly grabbed your attention?

The video above is of eighteen different themed dioramas shown in five different lighting conditions, one after another. These five lighting conditions (or “weather” files) are called:

• green mood
  
• orange mood
  
• pink mood
  
• blue mood
  
• pitch black

The weather files decide the basic lighting in terms of what color the direct light is, what color the ambient light is, and what direction and height the light is coming from in the game. The first four moods also use an associated Color Look Up Table, which is a feature new to Brigador Killers. CLUTs are screenspace shaders that can change how these colors look on screen in a fashion similar to color grading. In other words, all of the arranged assets in the eighteen different dioramas are not different colored buildings. Instead, what’s changing is some basic lighting information (which is kept in a .json file) and a .png file for the CLUT that’s only ~10 kilobytes in size, which lets us create completely different moods using the same scene. Dave is included because he has a flashlight on his chest rig and gun that we use to light up some of the assets when the dioramas get darker.
Accompanying the video is an ambient track composed by Makeup And Vanity Set[makeupandvanityset.bandcamp.com]. The track is titled “Faber” and is one of several that have been composed for the game in addition to the OST.
Why it happens is because you are not seeing “true” three dimensional models - you are actually looking at flat two dimensional quadrilaterals, or “sprites”, so the engine is repeatedly casting “slices” of the sprite rather than creating a regular looking shadow. Here is a longer explanation of the art pipeline if you are interested in learning more. At some point down the line the “staircasing” effect of the shadows in the game will disappear, so please enjoy it while it lasts.
That’s all for this month, but do tell us which mood and diorama was your favorite before you head off on holiday?
https://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/903930/Brigador_Killers/

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.

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[en.wikipedia.org])
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[en.wikipedia.org])
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[www.npr.org], 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).

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.

• read up about cyclolucidism[brigador.fandom.com]

[/b].]

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:

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[combineoverwiki.net] Stalker designs for Half-Life 2...

...And The Sequester by Keith Thompson[www.keiththompsonart.com], 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://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/274500/

“Why’re they pink?” Gus asked, pointing to his chest as he struggled with the donning procedure of a Carmine in his size.

“Carmine. It’s the colour as well as the suit,” Amon corrected him.

“Fine. Why are they fucking Carmine?”

Amon rattled off his lines like an actor jumping the mark. It put Gus on edge in a way he struggled to articulate.

“The area in which these suits saw action is tidally locked. That is, the strategically important areas on Volta are cast in a permanent twilight, which casts a pinkish hue over the entire region.”

“Carmine-ish,” Gus corrected him.

[Excerpt from [b]Brigador Killers: Pilgrim[/b] by Brad Buckmaster]

Arriving at a particular design is one of the difficulties of video game development. “Just come up with something new” sounds romantic, but is often an ineffective approach. We find that the best designs are often authored in response to particular constraints; those can be story (the planet has a red star), practical (we only have two weeks to build this), gameplay (we don't have the sprite budget for this unit to animate), or even just arbitrarily self-imposed.

If you read our post on Reimagining The Spacers from last year you’ll know comes next: we went one step before that process to answer what might seem to be a simple question: why is the Carmine suit that colour? Naturally, we asked an astrophysicist to help us out.


Also known as a tactical rig or “tac rig”, the Carmine suit is less sturdy than a powersuit like the loyalist Mongoose. It makes up for this with increasing the player’s movement speed and kick power, as we have previously noted.

Within the fiction the suit comes from Volta, a mining colony planet mentioned in the text above. Voltan locals attempted a revolt with the use of these suits, though Volta is not a planet like our own.


Volta is different to both Novo Solo (where Solo Nobre is located) and Mar Nosso (where Brigador Killers takes place). There’s no specific mention of the following in the original Brigador, but if you listened to the prologue of the Pilgrim audiobook…

…At the 3:10 mark, you might have wondered what the word “terminator” means in this context.

On most planets like our own, the terminator is the ever-moving line that is the border between daytime and nighttime[en.wikipedia.org]. In Volta’s case this line does not move. This is because Volta is tidally locked[en.wikipedia.org] towards its sun, meaning one side of the planet is always facing that direction. Our own Moon is an example of this phenomenon, since it faces towards Earth.

In the novel extract, the character Amon mentions “a pinkish hue over the entire region” but most of us have experienced twilight - that period where the Sun’s light is still scattering into the upper atmosphere despite being below the horizon…

[[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight#/media/File:Powder_Blue_Desert_Twilight.jpg ]Mojave Desert via Wikipedia[/url]]
…but these periods are not exclusively pink. Missing from the extract is what sort of sun Volta has. Enter Dr. Lindsay DeMarchi, an astrophysicist kind enough to consult us on the vagaries of living on a tidally locked planet.


Our sun in the solar system is a yellow dwarf. It’s about 0.5 degrees across, or in other words takes up approximately 1/720th of the sky. Volta’s sun is a red dwarf, which is 2.1 degrees across and takes up 1/180th of the sky. If we overlaid both planets’ skies into one scene, the stars might look something like this.

Despite the yellow dwarf looking smaller than the red dwarf, red dwarves are smaller in mass, have less luminosity and are cooler than a star like our Sun. Volta is also much closer to its star for two reasons. The first is tidally locked systems occur when bodies are close to one another, such as Mercury and our Sun (another example of tidal locking... kind of). The second is that Volta’s red dwarf has a cooler temperature and is less luminous than our Sun. This means the habitable zone[en.wikipedia.org] for Volta needs to be within 0.030 and 0.043 astronomical units[en.wikipedia.org] from the red dwarf to make up for the disparity in temperature and light compared to the Earth (which is ~1 AU from the Sun).

If you are wondering whether we did the math[www.planetarybiology.com] on any of this, absolutely not. The astrophysicist who does this sort of thing as their day job did the math, resulting in the following table:

Or, as a diagram:

We are aware that tidally locked planets might not be habitable at all. Dr. DeMarchi wrote to us the following caveat:

“Astronomers don’t yet know for certain the effect tidally locking has on the development of life. Would this cause a temperature gradient that triggers very strong winds? Would the opposite faces each be too hostile for life to develop? Would an atmosphere be able to exist at all, or would the cold side condense it all until it’s too thick to be a gas?”

Yet when it comes to the realism vs. fun debate in video games, we tend to lean towards fun because it’s far more interesting to assume that Volta is (just about) habitable and all the effects that might have on a local population.

Now that we know where Volta is and what sort of sun it has, what does any of this have to do with the Carmine suit being carmine?


Since Volta has a red dwarf and not a yellow dwarf, there is going to be a difference in the range of visible light on Volta. This means that Volta’s star isn’t putting out a lot of blue or green into the spectrum, which we get a lot of from our own Sun. Put blunt, this is what a Voltan rainbow might look like.

This isn’t the full list of colors visible, just a snapshot of what might appear. If you’d like to play around with what colors appear at different wavelengths, you can use this site[academo.org].

As the name of the red dwarf implies, Volta’s environment would appear very red on the surface. We arrive then at our answer as to why the Carmine suits are that colour: camouflage. There’s even precedent for this in an actual conflict.


A few years into the Dhofar War[en.wikipedia.org] that took place between 1963 and 1976, Britain supported the then-sultan of Oman with the Special Air Service. One of the vehicles used in this conflict by the SAS was a run of 1968 series IIa Land Rovers painted entirely in pink. This vehicle can be seen on display in the British Motor Museum in Warwickshire, England.

[[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhofar_War#/media/File:Land_Rover_series_IIa_'Pink_Panther'_SAS_desert_car_1968.jpg]Via Wikipedia[/url]]
The reasoning behind this choice of colour is that it turns out pink was effective at disguising the vehicle in Oman, the geography of which is mostly desert and valley. The colour scheme would later be abandoned when it was replaced with the sand-coloured SAS 110 Desert Patrol Vehicle in the 1980s.
If you’re voracious for more physics, you might have missed this lengthy chat our designer Hugh had with another physicist friend discussing the rationality behind the proposed form of space travel in the Brigador universe. Enjoy.

[[i]Special thanks to Dr. Lindsay DeMarchi[www.lindsaydemarchi.com] AKA @stellarmorticia who also went to the trouble of explaining several other things, like why bees would not do well on a planet like Volta due to the lack of UV light from a red dwarf. Cover image is "Planets Under A Red Sun[en.wikipedia.org]" by NASA/JPL-Caltech.[/i]]

There are a few things to interact with in the Secret Alpha build of Brigador Killers[stellar-jockeys.itch.io] that generate a small amount of reactivity for the player. For this month we’ll look at the two main ones: the braintape, and the carmine suit parts. Please note that these systems are still a work in progress and what is detailed in this post is not necessarily indicative of the final product.

Both of these interactive elements have the following things in common:

• They are ITEM_PICKUP resources* in the game
  
• They have a condition assigned to them in SJTiled**
  
• They change state because of a Lua function***

[expand type=show more]* Resources are the game’s various .json files arranged by type; ITEM_PICKUP is new to BK
** SJTiled is a fork of Tiled, a map-making tool used by several games [www.mapeditor.org]
*** Lua is a scripting language that allows the game to execute code; a Lua function is a self-contained module of code[/expand]

To jog your memory, this is what the braintape looked like placed on its own:

This is what the data for the tape looks like in the Data editor tab of the debug panel:

The two things to note here are the resource path i.e. assets/data/pickups/kipple/pkp_braintape_01.json, and what’s contained in the on_pickup field i.e. UnlockTape. From here we go look at the same scene, but in SJTiled.

The three elements to pay attention to here are:

• The green key icon that is currently selected named “Braintape 01”, which is a scripting object
  
• The asset field under Custom Properties
  
• The disable_if field under Custom Properties

The scripting object is placed on an object layer within the map in SJTiled. When the map file is exported as a .json file that the game engine can read, this file allows the game to know where to place what assets, be they enemy spawns, building props or pickups like our braintape as well as what states they should be in.

The asset field tells the game what asset to use for that object. Since it’s using the same asset path as the braintape in the data editor screenshot earlier, this means the game knows to use the assigned sprite for the braintape. If no asset was assigned to this object, the game would not render any sprite at all (or possibly crash in the attempt to load the map) and the player would not be able to interact with it.

The disable_if field contains the text __IS_UNLOCKED__. This field means that the object will not appear if the object has been unlocked by the player. Recall that the on_pickup field in the Data editor tab contained the text “UnlockTape”. Reversing the idea, this means the braintape will always appear in game until the player interacts with it. This begs the question: how does the game know to do this?

The bridge between SJTiled and the game engine is a Lua function called by the ITEM_PICKUP resource. Here is the relevant Lua function in Notepad++:

This function is titled UnlockTape. In case you missed it, the text that was inserted in the on_pickup field is referring to this exact function. In other words, we can insert functions into the data of ITEM_PICKUP resources in order to execute a module of code. What this module does when the player interacts with the braintape is:

1. Increases by one the gvar labeled “tapes_delivered”*
   
2. Executes the relevant code to change the gamestate
   
3. Unlocks the resource according to the indicated filepath in the resource that is calling the function
   
4. Saves that unlocked state to a local Lua file called gvar_data

[expand type=show more]* Gvars, predicates and storylets were mentioned before and will be revisited in a later post[/expand]

So, once the braintape is picked up, it will be “unlocked” by the game engine. In SJTiled, we assigned this object to be disabled when it is unlocked. This means that when we come back to the same location…

…the tape is gone. Now that we understand how the braintape appears and disappears, we can look at the suit parts.


Unlocking the carmine suit follows the same path as the braintape but with a couple more steps. Going back to our test level, all three suit parts are laid out in a line and have the same disable_if condition as the braintape to stop them from reappearing after being interacted with. Here is what the parts look like in SJTiled:

While this is what the parts look like in the game:

And all the resource data for the carmine suit parts looks something like this:

An additional field to pay attention to here that the braintape did not have filled out is menu_unlock. When the function unlocks this resource, the intel entries on these items also become available to read. Until the pickups are interacted with, they will look like this in the game’s Intel section accessed from the main menu:

The function being called in the Data editor for all the carmine suit parts is UnlockItem. Here’s what this Lua function looks like in Notepad++:

Simply put, this function unlocks the resource that is calling it (the three carmine suit parts), and saves that state information to the gvar_data Lua file.

When this map that contains the carmine suit is being loaded, two other things are going on. The first is another function called HandleItemUnlock, which looks like this in the file called mapstates.lua:

There is also a reference script called pickup_ref.lua which contains this:

In this reference script we can see the filepaths for the three ITEM_PICKUP resources that are also placed in the map in SJTiled, and we can see the filepath for the carmine suit itself.

The reason why this script is referenced is because of something called BRIGAHACKED. This is another object layer in SJTiled that has a custom property called luaload assigned to it which contains a string called, you guessed it…

…pickup_ref.lua. Combined with HandleItemUnlock, this reference script gives the layer of this map a list to check off when it is loaded. This reference script is also meant to be copied and modified to unlock other items on other maps.

So what about the suit itself? We already know how the suit parts disappear when interacted with - how is the suit being handled?

Returning to SJTiled, the suit is just sitting there, but when we look at the custom properties for it…

…Instead of disable_if, we have the custom field enable_if with __IS_UNLOCKED__ in the field. In other words, until the three parts are acquired and trigger the UnlockItem requisites, the suit is disabled from appearing on the map. When all three suit parts are acquired and the map is revisited…

…The three suit parts are gone as we would expect, but the suit is now available for use. It should be noted that for demonstration purposes, all three suit parts and the suit itself were placed on the same test map – but they do not have to be. Since the unlocks system is being handled by these Lua functions, which are entirely separate from the maps, the unlocks can be made to appear wherever we want them.

If we look at the “Fort” map that you see when you start the Secret Alpha build, the suit is placed there in SJTiled.

However, it is only until the player ventures out and finds all three carmine suit parts that they will find this reward waiting for them back at the fort.


This unlocks system for Brigador Killers is how we are responding to some of the feedback the previous game Brigador has received over the years. While the quality of action and writing in lore entries was fine for enough players, Brigador’s unlocks system was found lacking. This doesn’t come as a surprise to us as developers, because very little time was available for that aspect of the game’s design.

Brigador Killers is in a different position and we think this new system of unlocks will address the criticism of there being “nothing to do”. Players will have reasons to return to certain locations, as opposed to the previous method of earning arbitrary sums of money to unlock pieces of text in a menu that was too many clicks away from the action.

We’re also exposing these details to give our modding community advance notice. Those who have made Brigador maps and mods in the past will likely have already thought of ways to go one step further with what’s been detailed in this post. After all, why give someone a carmine suit as a reward and have nothing to fight against? Why not place something more lethal in a map that can only appear in-game once the carmine suit itself has been unlocked? Or if entire layers of a map can be given custom properties, why not change that map entirely?

In a later post we will revisit the topic of gvars, predicates and storylets. We already talked before about how they handle dialogue, but what we weren’t able to say back then is we are also able to use those narrative systems to effect changes on gamestate in the much same way that ITEM_PICKUP resources can.

If you’d like to support our ongoing development efforts, consider making a purchase from our merchandise store[shop.stellarjockeys.com] where we sell minis, pins, t-shirts and many other items.

Before anything else, everyone at Stellar Jockeys would like to thank you for your reception earlier this month. Considering what we were up against, and how deliberately narrow we made the announcement, we were taken aback by how much attention we ended up getting for the first public build of Brigador Killers.

Yes, and we wrote a few paragraphs to prime you on what to expect[stellar-jockeys.itch.io]. Please read it, especially if you are a complete newcomer. And yes, it’s only over on Itch for the time being.

It’s called Approach and it was composed by Makeup And Vanity Set. It has been uploaded to our YouTube channel.

The loading screen splash is an homage to the title cards in Katsuhiro Otomo’s "Memories" (it’s free to watch on the Internet Archive[archive.org]).
The English text is set in Arial, regular and bold, with the Japanese set in GL Tsukiji 5go. The “haze” effect is achieved by making an outer glow and a drop shadow in photoshop with the following settings:
The text color is an off-white with a hex code of #e8f2fb. The outer glow color is #cdf4e9 and the drop shadow is #dcf4ec.

For the revised Brigador Killers logotype that can be seen on the recent Makeup And Vanity Set video posted to our YouTube.
“Brigador" is set in Cassannet bold with the color code of #e8f2fb. "Killers" is set in Times New Roman Bold Italic with a color code of #db214c. The Japanese text is set in Kozuka Gothic Pro Heavy (H) with the same color as "Killers". Here are the outer glow and drop shadow settings for for “Brigador”.
The drop shadow color is #d2f6f6 and the outer glow is #81b4d7.

The outer glow on the Japanese text uses the following settings with a color code of #ff0000.
The two splash arts and just the logotype can be downloaded by clicking these links.

• BK Secret Alpha Program[i.imgur.com]
  
• BK Auditor[i.imgur.com]
  
• BK logotype[i.imgur.com]

Things that have not yet been dealt with and that aren’t covered in detail here – for example “Why do the menus look the same as in Brigador?” – are typically because those things overlap with so many other parts of the game’s code or are connected to systems that haven’t yet been set in stone. In other words they’re not just “one thing”. Instead, they are multiple things often tangled up with even more things, so tackling “one thing” would in most cases mean doing all of them at once. This is not unique to us or to Brigador Killers, and is better known as tech debt[en.wikipedia.org]. That said, there were plenty of frequent questions or observations.

There’s a flag on the data of all mech-type NPCs that, if enabled, permits the player to “enter” it as if it were a vehicle like a tank or a mech [Side note: almost all NPCs are considered “mechs” in the game engine - even the agravs]. Usually this flag is for empty vehicles, but they weren’t set properly for every NPC placed on the maps and it wasn’t intended for people to “drive” Froggy or other non-hostile NPCs either. This is also the reason why players could enter multiple NPCs like a kind of Russian nesting doll even if it made no physical sense.

Needless to say very quickly many players in our discord server reported gleefully driving around as Froggy and setting off Froggy’s flop animation, before getting their Froggy into a Fork and stomping around.

We have since changed the data on various units including Froggy to no longer permit this behavior, but it is trivial to reenable Froggy piloting for those experienced with the debug panel.

There are three categories of things that can be changed in Brigador Killers’ settings:

1. Mech & Tank movement
   
2. Agrav movement
   
3. “Suit” (or infantry) movement

These three categories cover four movetypes, but behind the scenes each “mech” in the game can actually have one of six movetypes. This is most noticeable when driving any of the new wheeled vehicles, but the wheeled vehicle movetype cannot be altered via the Settings menu because there is currently no category for it.

It was due to a bug with the storylet system not working as intended. It has since been fixed.

The short version is “because it’s an alpha”. The longer version is that the game’s finite state machine broke in a way that stopped things from animating properly, hence why the player character could remain seated in mid air after getting out of a car.

SJTiled is the tool we use to make maps in Brigador Killers and in the Secret Alpha post it is mentioned that this tool will be made available - and that will happen. A few things need to be pointed out.

The first is that although there are plenty of props to make maps, there is little in the way of enemy spawns to make interesting combat encounters. For instance in the BK build you can acquire the Fork mech or the Betka tank, but you don't get much of a challenge with them as there is nothing equivalent in force to those vehicles to give you a challenge.

Second is that we don't want to run into a problem we had with Brigador with breaking people's maps by performing any major revisions to the game’s assets. We don't expect to do this frequently but we do want to add in some newer stuff to both SJTiled and BK first so that you can make something more interesting than on-foot gunfights before we potentially break things.

Third is the modding document alluded to in the post that helps explain some of the new features is a work in progress and will definitely be rewritten (and probably re-rewritten) over time.

Once SJTiled is ready to be distributed, it will be done so initially via our discord server.

Report it to the #bk_bug_reports channel on our discord server or email it to our team account. For the time being we are keeping any feedback to as few channels as possible. It makes our jobs much easier if we can reliably reproduce the bug you’ve encountered, so detailed explanations of the problems you have encountered are greatly appreciated.

If you’d like to support our development of Brigador Killers, consider sharing the fact that our first game Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is on sale on Steam until March 4th

https://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/274500/