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[Jaysen]

Yes, helmets block your view and the very heavy ones decrease the view range by a couple of tiles. They also make you exhaust more quickly and shooting bows and crossbows costs a lot of fatigue so better go without heavy helmets for your ranged guys.

We just finished a new dev blog article on random character generation, hiring and shopping. check it out:

Dev Blog #33: Progress Update - Character Generation, Hiring and Shopping

With the Early Access release coming up early next year we try to step up our game and make a lot of progress each week. This week we have for you a complete rework of how Battle Brothers are generated and rendered. Get prepared for uniquely looking Battle Brothers with no less than 80,640 possible combinations for heads currently!

On the worldmap we also added two more core features - hiring new Battle Brothers and the buying and selling of equipment. Let’s take a look...

Character Generation Rework

We took a step back and reworked the whole process of how Battle Brothers are rendered in the game. First, all heads have been separated into hair, face and beard and made freely combinable. Second, we added a massive amount of faces, hairstyles and beards in different colors so that we ended up with a staggering 80,640 possible combinations of unique looking Battle Brothers - and that isn’t even counting in all the different equipment they can wear. For every campaign, all Battle Brothers will be randomly generated so that every player will get their very own set of mercenaries. Let’s take a look at this in action:



As we now have hair and beard on separate layers, helmets no longer need to be extra large to cover all hair. This allows both for more creative hairstyles and also to decrease helmet size by roughly 10%, resulting in more realistic proportions.



What is more, we also separated the armor from the bodies so that they also have a layer of their own and are rendered ontop of bodies. This makes it easier to show broken or damaged armor with parts missing and also allows Battle Brothers to have unique skin colors for more variety.

Hiring

A core mechanic in a game about mercenaries is hiring them, of course, which we just finished implementing.

When approaching a village or city you can visit the local tavern and have a look at all the volunteers offering their swordarm for coin. Each volunteer comes with their own background, like being a farmhand or a retired soldier, a procedural background story, and their own equipment. Both the hiring fee and the daily wage they request depend heavily on the character’s background. A skilled and seasoned sellsword who brings a chainmail and sword with him will cost as much as 10 times or more compared to a sickly beggar with a club. We want you to make some tough decisions here when deciding which volunteer to hire. Would you rather hire a few well equipped and battle hardened fighters, or a wild bunch of cheap beggars, thiefs and outcasts with no combat experience?



Like everywhere else in the game we don’t want to reveal more stats here than necessary. You won’t see any numbers besides the costs, but based on the background you’ll have a good idea of what to expect. Want a strong and sturdy Battle Brother? A farmhand or lumberjack is a good bet. Want someone good with ranged weapons? Try to hire a hunter. Need someone with combat experience? A sellsword or a retired soldier should do, although the latter might not have the stamina of a young man anymore. What is more, all characters come with traits, good and bad, which are also linked to backgrounds. Characters used to hard work are more likely to have the “strong” or “tough” traits, and while you won’t find any insecure adventurous nobles, they can be as brave as they can be cocky and overconfident.

There is also a chance of characters having a title based on their traits, like an especially large and sturdy character being known as “the Mountain”, which should give you a hint. You’ll have to hire them to find out what hidden traits they have exactly. If you want to know more, you can read up on character backgrounds and traits in an earlier dev blog article.

All in all, our goal is to have all the characters have a lot of, well, “character” despite them being randomly generated. Their unique looks, their background stories and their traits all come together for this. Some players won’t care about this, but if you don’t want a fisherman who strangled his wife to death in your band of mercenaries, you better take a close look at who it is that is applying to join you.

Ye Olde Shoppe

What do you do with your freshly hired Battle Brothers? Get them some weapons for bashing in heads of course!

In villages and cities, but also in military locations like watchtowers and strongholds, you can spend your crowns on equipment like weapons and armor and also sell surplus equipment to fill up the piggybank. Shops have different equipment for sale depending on the wealth of the location and the type. A civilian village will sell different things than a military stronghold, and some pieces of weapons and amor will only be available in one of the two.



The wealth of a location also determines the quality and quantity of available equipment, as well as its price. Villages that are bled dry from bandit raids and lost a lot of wealth will have little to offer you, whereas rich cities will have a great selection of equipment for you to purchase at kingly prices. If you make it your mission to protect a village for some time, even if the village isn’t able to reward you much at first, you can see it grow and stock up on better equipment.

[ANtY]

careful, there's a zombie hiding among the battle brothers!

/

I like the fact that you'll have to read the characters' backstories to judge if they'll fit your group or not, like if you were really hiring troops in a tavern and asking candidates about their bios to learn something about them. Cool stuff

[Jaysen]

A zombie? Humbert never was the talkative kind but that explains the moaning and groaning he has resorted to lately!

With not giving too much information when hiring Brothers:
The idea behind it is, that we want the player to use even suboptimal Battle Brothers he would never hire when having all the information. We think that fighters with flaws make for way more interesting stories, characters and events instead of all the polished shining knights (we have those too though;) ).

[ANtY]

exactly, I love this approach!

and I can't wait to hire my not-as-good-as-other troops 

[Jaysen]

Another week and another update. This time we have been working on new armor, a helmet rework and custom banners:

Dev Blog #34: Progress Update - New Armor, Helmet Rework, Banners

As every week, we have some sweet new stuff for you. We went back to take a look at all the armor in the game and reworked all helmet appearances and armor values. What is more, we added some missing body armors to get a nice progression of armor values into the game. To round things up, a banner generator is in the works that will allow you to create your very own custom banner when starting a new game of Battle Brothers.

Lets explore this in more detail.

New Body Armors

We want to have a smooth progression of both the protection that armor offers, as well as their price and how rare they are in the game. Until recently, there were some big jumps in armor values - for example there was little inbetween a simple mail shirt and the heavy coat of plates. With some new armor added, we filled these gaps and now have a great and steady progression.

The heavier armors are quite expensive and hard to come by, so you’ll likely only be able to afford them later in the game. They’re also quite rare so that you’ll never find them on offer in great quantities and only in rich cities and strongholds to begin with.



The protection from armor is crucial though, as a Battle Brother with little or no armor may be struck down with a single lucky hit. Before you know it you’ll see heads flying about left and right if you don’t get your guys some protection. Just take a look at our last gameplay video showcasing a tough and gory fight against orcs: Orc Line Battle Video.



The new armors from top left to top right are

Heraldic Coat of Plates: Two layers of leather with heavy metal plates rivetted inbetween on top of a full mail shirt.
Coat of Scales: A heavy armor made of overlapping metal scales covering most of the body.
Scale Armor: A body vest with overlapping scales.
Heavy Lamellar Harness: A lamellar armor that covers most parts of the body with thick, overlapping metal plates for maximum protection.
Mail Shirt: A mail shirt with shoulder guards providing excellent protection against most weapons.
On the bottom row we have a variety of linen tunics to get some more flavor into that early game when you’re hiring farmhands, lumberjacks and fishermen that don’t own any armor of their own.

Reworked Helmets

Until now all helmet variations within the same category were just visual flavor. This led to the odd situation where a helmet with a complete mail coif underneath gave the same amount of armor points as a helmet with just a piece of cloth underneath.

To remedy this we split all visual variations into items of their own and gave them individual levels of armor points, malus to maximum fatigue and to sight range. This way we now have a ton of unique helmets and you’ll be able to instantly recognize which helmet will grant more or less protection or inhibit your Battle Brothers’ field of view. What you see is what you get, basically.



We’re happy now with the variety of armors and helmets in the game and feel that they’re ready for our upcoming Early Access release. For the final game there’ll also be unique legendary items that come with their very own visuals, name, background story and sometimes even magical properties. They’ll be very hard to get and we’ll do a dedicated article on them in time.

Custom Banner Creation

When starting out with your brand new mercenary company you’ll get the opportunity not just to name it, but also to create a custom banner for it. Just like the player, all locations - villages, watchtowers or orc camps - will have their own banner, as will the parties that originate from there. This way you can quickly identify a party’s affilliance and know where they come from.

The banners will be composed of a banner shape, a pattern, a main emblem and additional secondary emblem. You’ll also be able to choose from a variety of colors, of course. These are just some possible color combinations:



There will be a variety of banner shapes to choose from.



Here are some examples we created to show the possibilities of the banner generator with included main emblem and secondary emblem. Note that these are still in development and not implemented in the game yet.



 

[aamatniekss]

This reminds me of Blood brothers on android, too much. It's the same game style, the same graphic style, with the heads, and even the title. For me it's too much similarity. Just somethig to think of.
But anyways it looks really great! Something i'd definitely play.

[Louist]

I really like the look and concept of Battle Brothers. Strikes me as Mount and Blade-esque company building meets gorgeous 2D tactical battles. The bust figures are also really growing on me.

This reminds me of Blood brothers on android, too much. It's the same game style, the same graphic style, with the heads, and even the title. For me it's too much similarity. Just somethig to think of.
But anyways it looks really great! Something i'd definitely play.

This strikes me as an odd comparison. I've come across Blood Brothers before, and while I haven't played it, I did go back to look it up again and it's has a highly-stylized Gothic anime minifigurine aesthetic. The heads are rather large, it's true, but that's not uncommon in anime, and no one would mistake it for the more "western" and "representational" look of Battle Brothers. I can't speak to it's gameplay, but turn-based tactical games are all fairly similar, hence our ability to collect them all under one genre.

[ANtY]

This reminds me of Blood brothers on android, too much. It's the same game style, the same graphic style, with the heads, and even the title. For me it's too much similarity. Just somethig to think of.
But anyways it looks really great! Something i'd definitely play.

You mean this game?
If so I don't agree at all

Cool new armors btw

[Jaysen]

The distinction to other games will become more obvious once we can actually show some worldmap gameplay. I think good comparisons are Mount & Blade as well as Shadow of the horned rat.
I have become really reluctant with using the comparison to JA and especially xcom as everyone and their mother refers to their own game as "inspired by xcom" just because it is turn based. Thats a little sad.

[Louist]

The distinction to other games will become more obvious once we can actually show some worldmap gameplay. I think good comparisons are Mount & Blade as well as Shadow of the horned rat.
I have become really reluctant with using the comparison to JA and especially xcom as everyone and their mother refers to their own game as "inspired by xcom" just because it is turn based. Thats a little sad.

I can see what you mean. So many games make those claims, and many of them are, shall we say, less than amazing, that the "Inspired by X-Com/Jagged Alliance" has lost all positive connotation. It must be frustrating to have what should be a positive aspect of your game be tainted by the slew of unrelated titles. I mean, nothing about you or your inspiration or your game has changed, yet being open about such an inspiration can now be harmful to you. That's messed up.

[Jaysen]

We are putting a lot of work into the worldmap right now so not that much to show, just a quick update this week:

Dev Blog #35: Worldmap Progress and Feature Lists

Finishing all core mechanics is our top priority right now and a lot of work is getting done on the underlying mechanics of the strategic worldmap. Unfortunately, this also means that we don’t have anything flashy to show you this week.

In the meantime we gathered all the most important information of previous blog posts into 3 detailed feature lists. Each feature comes with a status so that you can see at a glance if it has already been implemented or is yet to come, which should give you a good idea of where we are at with the game.


Worldmap Progress

The worldmap is in the center of our attention right now as we implement all the core mechanics. Most of the work is already done and we now focus on the strategic AI that guides individual factions and the mercenary contracts that will be offered to the player on various occasions.



At the same time, we’re doing a rework of the worldmap visuals. The look we had for the worldmap wasn’t entirely satisfying to us, and neither was it flexible enough for our more ambitious goals. We’re still experimenting with a new style, but it will look something like in the image above. Instead of trees and similar being painted directly onto tiles, those tiles now only cover the ground while objects are independently placed on another layer ontop. This allows for more natural and less repetitive looking landscapes and transitions between different terrain types. More importantly, it also gives us more flexibility for dynamically changing the world, such as forests slowly becoming corrupted or fields being burned as the nearby village is raided. We should be able to share the final look with you in the next few weeks.

Detailed Feature Lists

With no less than 34 blog posts to read so far, gathering information about the game can be quite a bit of work. Since our Early Access release is also coming closer we think this is an opportune time to get all the most important information in one place.

We’ve therefore extended the “Features” category on our website with three additional feature lists containing more detailed information about aspects of the strategic worldmap, the tactical combat and the factions in the game. Even more importantly, you’re also able to see what feature has been implemented so far and what is still to come. The feature lists will always be updated when a new feature is implemented so that you can follow the progress we make. Every feature that is marked as “implemented” will be in the Early Access release guaranteed, so the list can also help you to decide whether to get the Early Access version or not.

Head over to the three feature pages to learn about where the game is at and what is still to come:

Worldmap Feature List

Tactical Combat Feature List

Factions in Battle Brothers

If you have any questions or ideas we are always looking for feedback

[Jaysen]

Finally we have the first video of the worldmap in action for you! In the vid i explain the core functions and mechanics and you will get a pretty good idea how the worldmap works. Have a look and let me know what you think:

[EdFarage]

real impressive stuff, can't wait to play this

[Jaysen]

Thanks man! Hopefully youll be able to do that within the next two months - we are on a pretty tight schedule here though

[Jaysen]

A new year, a new update This time we talk a little about what you can do in villages and what mercenary contracts are already in the game:

Dev Blog #37: Progress Update - Village Screen and Mercenary Contracts

We hope you all had a great holiday time and a happy new year!

After the holidays it’s back to work - and we’re happy to announce that our last missing core mechanic, the mercenary contracts, has now made it into the game. From now on it is adding meat to the bones, that is content, polishing and eventually secondary features. Read up in our progress update on villages, castles and mercenary contracts to learn more.

Village and Castle Screens
As your mercenary company roams the land there are a number of friendly locations you can interact with. Both civilian locations, such as villages and larger cities, and military locations, such as watchtowers and mighty strongholds, can be entered.

As you enter them, you’re presented with a screen that acts as both an atmospheric backdrop, giving you a sense of where you are, and a hub for all actions there. From here, you can reach the shop to stock up on equipment or sell surplus items, you can hire new men to fill your ranks, and you can bargain with potential employers over mercenary contracts and collect your pay for done deeds. Of course, depending on where you are, you’ll have more or less options. For example, the selection of goods is far greater in a rich city than in a poor village - but so are the prices. Castles will offer different equipment, more suited to professional war, than villages which often have to use improvised weaponry and armor - not any village smith will be able to forge you a masterwork armor, afterall. On the other hand, you’ll find potential recruits more readily at villages and cities than at a lonely watchtower along the road.



This is how the new village screen looks. You can see the merchant on the left, mercenaries for hire in the middle and potential employers on the right, each with a contract offer of their own. The people are placed on a different layer and only shown as there is a reason for them to be there; the mercenaries are only shown as there are actual people to recruit, and the number of potential employers shown depends on the actual number of contract offers available at that location.



As you can see, castles use the same general layout, but have a different backdrop for atmosphere. In addition, we aim to have different soundscapes for individual locations to convey the vibe of a living and breathing village, or a busy castle readying itself for war, respectively.



During night time, both villages and castles will close their shops until morning. Ultimately, we want to have more and different backdrops for a number of locations, so that villages and cities feel noticeably different not just by the options available there but also in atmosphere. For the time being, however, villages and cities share a backdrop, while castles and watchtowers share the other.

Mercenary Contracts
A core mechanic of a game simulating a pseudo-medieval mercenary company is the idea of mercenary contracts. Basically, your men being hired to fight for coin. We’ve talked quite a bit about how contracts are issued and how they work in the past, and even if your’re familiar with the details, you might want a refresher at our previous blog article here: Blog Post on Contracts.

With the basics out of the way, we can announce that mercenary contracts have finally made it into the game. We’ve started with a few simple ones to ease us in, such as the classic errant (someones hires you to safely bring an item to another location) and the less classic discovery of a location (someone hires you to venture out into the wild to find a particular location, with varying degrees of clues to point you into the right direction). Now, let’s take a look at how the whole contract process works by using the example of another contract type, the hunting down of wild beasts.

As a party of werewolves roams across the worldmap and dwells in the vicinity of a village for a time, snatching a villager as meal every so often, that village will get alarmed and try to get rid of the looming danger in the area. It can muster a militia force if it has the resources to do so, but militia fights poorly and is ill-suited to tracking a pack of dangerous werewolves in the forest. A better course of action is thus for the village to offer a mercenary contract to exterminating these beasts, that is, offering payment for the player to track down and destroy the party of werewolves which has a very real effect on the village by slowly draining its resources.



As the player enters the city, an individual will offer the contract to the player in the form of a short story, looking something like in the image above. The details of all contract offers are proceduraly generated, making use of a variety of interchangeable pieces. Two contracts to hunt down beasts can therefore have very different descriptions - different employers, motivations, payment and potentially helpful details, such as where the beasts were last seen heading. A poor village may not be able to pay you much in terms of coin, but may instead offer to pay with bread and dried meat - is it still worth it for you to risk the lives of your men? Although, realistically speaking, we can’t really avoid repetition here, our aim is to provide enough variety to have these texts be interesting, informative and succinct enough to be read well into a campaign and provide atmosphere, context and light roleplaying opportunities. We purposefully decided not to go with a bare billboard list of tasks with nothing but rewards attached but want the player to pause if only for a brief moment and consider what his or her actions mean in the context of the world.



Upon confronting the beast party and killing the werewolves the player has to return to the village to collect the promised pay. Here again we use the same screen with a short procedurally generated story to give closure to the contract, pay out the player and provide a bit of atmosphere.

At this time we have four different contract types in the game, all relatively straight-forward. We aim to have several more for the initial Early Access release, including escorting caravans and defending a location from raiders. After the initial Early Access release, we aim to experiment with more complex contracts, including contract chains where one fulfilled contract can sometimes lead to another. We feel that a large number of varied contracts, both simple and complex ones, will go a long way to keeping things entertaining and diversified.

[Jaysen]

We are looking for some UI programming support, so if you know a guy tell him or her about the project! In other news, youtuber Writing Bull just published a great Battle Brothers preview/interview - unfortunately it is in German. Here are some more details:

Hiring a UI Programmer & Game Preview (German)

Due to a recent change in our team we are now looking for a UI programmer to support us in the development of our project. If you are an experienced UI programmer, this can be a chance for you to become a part of Overhype Studios and develop Battle Brothers together with us! See below for more information.

Also, the venerable Writing Bull was nice enough to sit down with our very own Jaysen yesterday and do a guided Let’s Play while interviewing about the game, our development and our future plans. The interview is in German only and well worth a listen. Take a look at the first of three parts here:


Also, you may want to check out his Blog (German) on game culture and strategy gaming. Thanks again!

Hiring a UI Programmer - HTML5/JS/CSS, C/C++ a plus

Join us to work on Battle Brothers - a turn-based strategy RPG mix developed for PC, Linux and Mac. The gameplay and setting are inspired by such classics as Mount & Blade, Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat and X-Com.

We are Overhype Studios, a small indie company based in Hamburg, Germany. The three of us, an artist, a programmer and a producer, all have previous professional experience in working on games. Now, the first game we’re developing as a team is Battle Brothers. You can find more information, including gameplay videos and a developer’s blog, at www.battlebrothersgame.com.

Battle Brothers is close to ready for an Early Access release, scheduled for the end of February 2015. The game was successfully greenlit on Steam back in autumn of 2014 and has received press coverage from several online magazines, including Rock, Paper, Shotgun where it made the Best Games of 2015 list. We have a fully playable combat demo available here which was met with very favourable reviews.

What we’re looking for in you is a programmer mainly responsible for the game’s UI. The game is based on our engine written in C++, using Squirrel for scripting most of the gameplay and Awesomium for a HTML driven UI. As such, you’d need advanced knowledge of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS to create the UI for Battle Brothers. A good part of the game’s UI is already done, but as our former UI programmer will be unable to continue his work, you’d have to take over and work with an existing code base. Further, knowledge of C/C++ would be a huge plus and would allow for possible other programming tasks beyond the UI in the future.

We’re interested in a longterm relationship with you, a professional and reliable individual, for the development of the game for the whole Early Access period and also beyond. Although we can not offer much compensation up-front, with the game close to public release, monetary compensation is not just an idle promise. Currently, only one of us works fulltime on the game, the other two doing it in their spare time, and we’re flexible in discussing with you how much time you can invest into the game at this point and how best we can compensate you.

Requirements

• Advanced knowledge of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS
• Experience in UI Development
• Experience in Game Development
• Ability to quickly learn new C-style languages
• Ability to quickly get your bearings in an existing code base
• Fluency in English and/or German
• Advanced knowledge of C/C++ would be a huge plus
• Knowledge of Awesomium is a plus
• Knowledge of the Squirrel Scripting Language is a plus
• Knowledge of Linux and Mac development is a plus

What’s in it for you

• Valuable experience from working with a professional team
• The opportunity to work on a great game that actually gets finished
• The opportunity to have creative input on the game
• Monetary Compensation

If you feel you are the right man or woman for this job, send us your résumé to [email protected] - we look forward to hearing from you!

[Jaysen]

A lot has been added to the game over the last weeks so here is the latest progress report:

Dev Blog #38: Progress Update - Bandits, Militia, Rivers and more
We’ve been busy this past week adding a whole bunch of smaller features and new assets to the game. Bandits are now available for you to fight in tactical combat - our first opposing faction that consists almost entirely of humans. Also, militia is now desperately defending their homes in tactical combat as well. But that’s not all.

The Bandit Faction


The first almost entirely human enemy faction is now in the game to cause mischief and terrorize the poor civilians until they cry out for help to the Battle Brothers. The Bandit faction consists of society’s dropouts, reckless outlaws, desperate refugees, wanted criminals and all those that want to make a quick crown by taking what is not theirs.
Bandits  Battle Brotthers tactical rpg

They usually hide somewhere in the woods, be it abandoned huts, old ruins or makeshift encampments. When they head out they look for trade caravans und unaware travellers to rob them of their belongings. If they’re strong enough, they may even raid whole villages for valuables, supplies and prisoners.

In combat they have access to the same equipment, weapons and perks that Battle Brothers do, so be prepared for a match at eye-level. They usually rally behind an exceptionally strong, skilled or brutal leader and have some really experienced archers in their ranks. Their melee combatants range from poorly armed and malnourished thugs to battle-hardened raiders.

Bandits will usually be among the first enemies you encounter on the worldmap as they tend to stick close to settlements and trade roads.

Militia

Militia is the makeshift fighting force of civilian settlements like villages and cities. These are basically citizens that arm themselves with whatever weapons and tools available to them as soon as danger approaches. That is why they will only show up on the worldmap when there is an enemy party closing in on a settlement.



As these are not professional soldiers they lack in equipment and experience compared to other forces - but do not underestimate their determination to defend their homes and their loved ones against whatever enemy.
In combat, militia are usually led by an experienced militia captain, perhaps a professional soldier or sellsword when he was younger, that coordinates all the fighters and distributes weapons and armor among them. The militia captain boosts the morale of all others by some margin, and if he falls, it can spell disaster.

Cities and Trading Caravans

Besides the small villages we’ve shown before, we’ve now implemented cities into the game. The city is a civilian settlement like the village and has a militia force defending it. However, the city is much bigger and presents better opportunities for a mercenary commander. More potential recruits are available for hiring, more and different contracts are on offer, and a larger variety of weapons, armor and supplies can be found. As prices in general tend to be higher in larger settlements, everything may be a little more expensive here, though.



Cities are important hubs for trading caravans and for your mercenary company to restock supplies. Speaking of trading caravans, we’ve replaced our placeholder caravan with an actual asset of a little wagon pulled by a donkey also pictured above.

Worldmap Additions

The worldmap has seen some other additions, as well. Rivers have made it into the game, snaking through the lands and creating some natural borders, much like mountains do. Rivers can not be crossed unless at bridges or natural crossings. They still need a polishing pass but look like this now in the game:



Also, the orc faction got new assets for their hideout and warcamp - finally they won’t have to share the sprite with the bandits anymore and have a style of their own.



Tradeable and Lootable Supplies

Mercenaries are a needy bunch. You need to feed them so that they don’t starve or desert you, their armor needs repair after battle and their quivers need to be refilled. The supplies necessary for this can now be bought at allied locations - villages, cities, watchtowers and strongholds. Of course, food is more readily available at villages that live off of farming, and tools to repair armor with are easier to find at a military stronghold or larger city than at a small and peaceful village.

[Jaysen]

Here is a first let's play video of Battle Brothers. Although the version we show is still in development it will give you a pretty good idea about the campaign gameplay:

[oldblood]

I really enjoyed the Let's Play. Looking forward to playing this.

[Jaysen]

Great that you like it!
We still have a lot of work to do before early-access but we are crunching like crazy

The second part of the video is already done and will be up in the next couple of days.