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[lowpoly]

BRIGANDS

If the name looks vaguely familiar to you, Brigands was my entry for the Versus Compo long ago, taking home the highly coveted 4th place trophy. It's a shared screen, 2 player competitive game somewhere between Joust and the old Artillery games. Firing and movement speed is slower, so positioning and smart shots mean the difference between life and death.

I've always had a soft spot for this game and after years on the backburner, I decided to dust off the old girl and give her a proper run in Unity (compo version was my last game in Blitz3D). My immediate goal is to remake the original level while adding some improvements around the horn. From there, some new ships, new levels, and maybe a co-op mode somewhere down the road.


Download and play now:
http://26k.org/brigands


Here's some wip of the new version:




And some bandwith killing, gif action:

[kraed]

Epicly slick look, this is far out awesome!How are you making those particles? I've been getting myself into low poly so definitely will keep up to date with this dev log. Ace job, lowpoly!

[lowpoly]

@kraed nothing special with the particles, they're billboards with lots of color and shape changes over time. There's also a lot of them, which helps!

The original version of Brigands suffered from a couple of glaring design flaws, the biggest being how unbalanced the battlefield was for players higher up on the screen. With limited firing angles, it made sense for players to get beneath their opponents and fire straight up, making counterattacks impossible without taking a few hits before reaching their altitude. Worse, it constrained most of the game's fights to the bottom of the map and severely limited any sort of creative fighting around the floating platforms. So far I've made two pretty big changes to address this:

1. Dive! You now have the ability to quickly dive at your opponent and attack from above. I'm hoping this will open up the entire playing field and create a lot more tactical fighting in the upper parts of the map. It's also really fun to do!



2. Drown! Dropping below the bottom of the screen for longer than 10 seconds results in death now, all the more reason to stop camping and fight like a real brigand!

[failrate]

I had an issue in my current game (Mother F#$%ing Eagles: Online) where Dove players could just run away from the Eagle forever.  So, I added a fruit item they can consume to get points and potentially win the round.  It also replenishes their boost power.  The catch is that the Eagle gets a position indicator telling him where it is.  Having treasure items spawn on the platforms might get Brigands to risk attack in order to capture them.

[lowpoly]

@failrate - that's a really great suggestion! It reminded me of a mode I was planning for the old version where the players had to collect items from the platforms and deliver them back to their spawn point to score. When players get hit, a portion of their haul flies free (think Sonic's rings) giving the attacker a chance to steal some points. I'm starting to think that may be a better default game mode than straight deathmatch.

Two little visual adjustment went in this week that I think are really cool. First, I'm trying out a wider FOV. It means I have to draw more sky every frame, but it gives a bit more depth to everything and you feel closer to the action. Along with that, I added lights to cannonball trails, explosions, and each ship's engine. You can see it a bit here against the platforms and on the clouds:

[lowpoly]

I'm getting closer to having a playable version available soon, which is exciting because most of my playtests so far have been against my 6 year old (altho he's really getting a hang of it). I think the changes to scoring mentioned in the previous post have really helped the gameplay; There's these fun moments where both players have points to cash in but neither wants to be the first to go, so they end up doing this slow positional dance to try and get their opponent to over-commit.

On the visual front I added a dynamic time of day / weather system to the game that takes place over the course of a round, affecting sky and lighting color, sun position, fog density, etc. You can see a bit of how it's looking so far, here (click for fullsize):



I've also started experimenting with some ambient camera drifting/tilting to help things feel alive and tense. It's just enough in motion that you notice it, plus it makes for some nice Dutch angles like in the screenshots above.

[lowpoly]

hmm, guess I've been gone for over a month... but good news everyone, I come bearing gifts!

Download the first playable version of Brigands here:
http://26k.org/brigands

pc and osx versions available, support for two players on the same keyboard, two controllers, and anything in between.

Remember it's a 2 player game, so grab a friend (or enemy) and give it a go! I've been working on this in a bubble for too long now, so I'm looking forward to everyone's feedback. Thanks for playing!