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[bleek]

Congrats on being Greenlit! The visuals make me nostalgic for the original Starcraft. Keep up the good work!

[Reilly]

Just spotted a great article on kill screen. Congrats!

http://killscreendaily.com/archive/tag/brigador/

[HughSJ]

Thanks Reilly. GDC was great-- too early on for us to do a proper booth, but I still wanted to show the game so I'd just bring the laptop out on occasion and show whoever I was with.

Things are really coming along on the dev side. We're building up the last remaining systems key to gameplay, then will be able to get this thing out for early access and proper balancing. Still a long way to go, but now we have a clear path on finishing it.

[Christian]

Man....

Matador sounded really good. The name had a really nice flow to it, just sounded right. Brigador doesn't have the same ring IMO

But I'll get over it. I was annoyed when Incognita became Invisible Inc., but it's the game that matters. Can't wait to play this. Any idea when it'll be on Early Access

[HughSJ]

shooting for may

[JobLeonard]

Everybody seems to say "syndicate", but my first thought was "Crusader: No Regret"

Looking forward to try this out!

[HughSJ]

@JobLeonard -- I played the crap out of No Remorse, so you're in good company 

[HughSJ]

Hey guys! We're in PC GAMER MAGAZINE!!

[HughSJ]

So a more substantive post now...

We've just entered a private alpha. We have ~120 guys playing the game, and so far have been getting pretty good feedback. While it can be frustrating, it's also reassuring to find that much of the feedback we've been getting so far are for additions / changes to the game that are already planned or in the pipe. I will say though that having the game under this level of scrutiny is nerve-wracking at times. Most importantly though, simply hearing about how people are enjoying the game or about what they like best really helps put things back into perspective. When you've been working so closely on a project for so long you are no longer able to see it with the fresh eyes of a new player, so you end up with a kind of pattern blindness.

In addition to getting on PC Gamer Magazine, we've also officially launched preorders for Brigador via our website. It's a Humble Widget, and our corresponding Humble Store page should be going up within the next couple of days.

Something worth noting is that while the Humble Widget/Store preorders will include steam keys with them, it's looking like we won't actually be launching preorders directly on steam until early access. The gist of it is that it's an either/or scenario with Valve, so you can't have preorders that lead into an early access run.

I've also finally gotten around to launching our IndieDB page-- it's one of those things that I'd always meant to do but never got around to. It's one more thing to maintain, but should be worth it with all the traffic that site gets.

Alright, I've been going nonstop now so it's time to crash and play some Dark Souls 2, but if you think the game's cool and would like to support us, please please preorder and tell your friends about us.

[HughSJ]

Check it out!

One of our testers just posted a preview video of Brigador:




And we also did a long streaming session last night that yielded some good clips. Here's about 2 hours of gameplay + a look at working in the editor:






Mapmaking

[HughSJ]

Hey guys, long time no updates 

BUT! Here's what we've been working on of late. From the design side, I've been doing another complete overhaul of the data for the game. New additions to the gameplay as well as just learning more about what's fun has caused us to reconsider some major balancing elements. Seems like I'm doing that once every month or two, instead of just a continuous series of small tweaks and changes.

Jack (aka gauss / gausswerks) has been working hard on the asset production side, getting new props in for our freight/industrial tilesets. Check it out:






On a general note, we've decided to *not* go the early access route, for a couple of reasons. The main thing is that alot of people have been getting a raw deal with these early access purchases-- especially when you consider what's happened lately with Towns and Earth: Year 2066. We'd like our players' first experience with the game to be as positive as possible, and the best way to do that is to just release a finished, polished game. We have the good fortune to not be in dire financial straits, and so we can afford to take our time with this and release when we're ready. As a secondary concern, we're also holding off because as the community grows we have to divert more of our time away from development and towards addressing said community. Building that community in and of itself is wonderful, but we're still at a stage where we need to focus as much energy as possible on finishing the game.

To close, here's a gif from one of our testers pulling off a perfect maneuver with an a-grav vehicle, the Shrike:

[HughSJ]

We're streaming dev right now! Come visit! Jack's talking modeling, greeble, and will be doing a run-through of the game later on.

[HughSJ]

You guys who hang around on r/gamedev may have already seen this, but I've seen a lot of people fretting over their game websites, which is natural, but while people are giving plenty of good specific advice on craft and aesthetics, I'd found that no one was really addressing the fact that people (like myself), especially first time devs (live myself), have a severe tendency to focus too much on the website for the website's sake and lose the context of it's greater function; that it's purpose is to sell the game you're making. And consequently, that while a modicum of time is necessary to build one, the more time spent building a website the less time is spent making the game. Personally I've gone down that rabbit hole multiple times, and was only pulled out by more sensible developers in my acquaintance. So here's the little spiel I gave:


"Your[op] site is down at the moment so I can't give any specific tips, but there's already plenty of good advice posted on how to build an aesthetically pleasing site; how to mind your p's and q's etc. But before you even begin to worry about aesthetics you should consider the broader picture. To that end, here's some bits of advice that were given to me a while back by a wise old gamedev sage which saved me a lot of time and heartache, and helped me to rebuild our site into something far more functional and aesthetically pleasing.

People are buying your game, not your website:
This comes down to simple math-- time spent on your website is time spent not working on your game. Once your site is no longer terrible (not saying it is, speaking hypothetically here) then any work beyond that will be for diminishing returns. Game bugs on the other hand can severely damage a game or studio's reputation, even if the game is good. Just ask Obsidian. You're better off spending that time working on your game instead trying to turn an ok site into an amazing one. If your site is perfect but your game is terrible, you're still not going to sell any copies. Dogshit on a golden platter is still dogshit, and most people can see that.

There's two kinds of websites, the terrible ones and the not terrible ones:
Which is to say, it's far more important to *not* have a *terrible* site than it is to have an amazing one. A terrible site will keep people from buying your game, either because they can't find the links or because they leave before even seeing the game since it looks like you don't know what you're doing, and why then should your game be any different? To be clear, 'Not Terrible' is having an immediately accessible trailer, info, and purchase links in a combination which doesn't look like complete dogshit. A 'Not Terrible' site will sell copies of your game nearly as well as one of immaculate design descended from the heavens, because as we said people are buying your game, not your website. Additionally, while an excellent site will help promote you and sell extra copies to a limited extent, unless you're...

* A) a decent graphic/web designer able to sink a *lot* of time into building and refining your site
* B) a professional graphic/web designer
* C) willing to hire one

...then you're not getting one. In the case of A) you should be still just working on your game instead, if B) you wouldn't be asking this, if C) there's probably better ways to spend the money.

Speed is king:
From a consumer standpoint, I want what I want now, and I'll be damned if you're going to make me search for it. Minimize the amount of navigation it takes to access anything useful-- when I load your site, I should immediately see at least the game name and a trailer window or screenshots, and I should never have to do anything more than scroll in order to access links to buy, social media, trailer, game name, and company name, all on the same page. Generally speaking avoid splash pages, and especially avoid anything that takes a long time to load or requires special plugins to see. If you're going to have blog posts on the main page, make sure they don't overshadow the display of the game itself.

To illustrate, I'll use my own studio's websites. Is our current site amazing? Hell no. But it's serviceable. Front and center you have the company name, game name, trailer, and links to buy. Scroll down and you have embedded twitter feeds, while any other pertinent information (devlog, about, contact, twitch feeds) is prominently displayed at the top and only requires 1 click to navigate. I need to add a more fleshed out game description on the main page, but that's about it.

Compare that with our old site, which dates back to 2012. Aesthetically its *ok*, but functionally it's a complete disaster! What do we do? What's the website about? If we're making a game, what game is it? Are there any screenshots or trailers? Who's that astronaut guy, and why is he holding a sword!? In building the website I managed to not have any of the important elements mentioned by others here, and there was even a completely unnecessary splash page! From the standpoint of trying to advertise and sell a game, it was a *terrible* website. So don't do that. Remember, its primary function is to sell your game. At the end of the day, that's all that's important.

(Best/worst part is that our old site took ~3x as long to build as our current one did. Eeesh)"

(original context for the post can be found here)

Hope this is useful to someone, and thanks for stopping by. I'll stop talked and get back to making Brigador now, I swear 

[JobLeonard]

I thought posted a link to the metroid-camera post on /r/gamedev, in response to that perfect manoeuvre gif, because I figured it would be Relevant To Your Interests and was curious how you guys decided to handle it. But somehow that went wrong and the post didn't show

But since you already frequent it I'm sure you've seen it already anyway. I'm still curious about how you guys handle the camera though

[HughSJ]

Hey JobLeonard! I've seen that post, the guy did a good job of breaking it down. Maybe I'll get the programmers to do a detailed post on the actual implementation, but until then I can do a quick run down for you. We're very proud of how the camera functions in Brigador-- it took us a solid month of iterations to get the core idea down, and we've kept tweaking little values since..

The core of our camera is the cursor offset, which is then modified by several other values. In the current setup, the camera gets centered at 60% the distance between the player vehicle and the cursor. This allows us to naturally shift the player's view to focus on far away objects as they aim at them, but since it's based on a % modifier the movement is minimized when the player is engaging in short range combat. As a result we find most players adapt to the camera movement very quickly (combat is a different story though).

However, this setting alone isn't enough for good camera movement, as without any limits on speed or acceleration for the movement players get nauseated very quickly, so we need to soften the movement. Additionally, when players try to aim at targets near the border of the screen it becomes extremely difficult as at that distance even small mouse movements can make for major camera shifts, and since aiming in our game requires both angle and depth that basically spells death for long range accuracy.

That being explained, I'll just run through all the parameters we use for camera movement and explain them as we go.

camera_mouseweight: where the camera is located relative to the player vehicle and cursor
camera_maxextendoffset: maximum distance the camera can move away from the player vehicle
camera_maxspeed: maximum speed the camera can move (we do this to prevent players whipping the camera)
camera_stiffness: how quickly the camera can accelerate to match cursor movements. This especially is the value where if there's no limits on the acceleration then eyes start bleeding.

We experimented with a lot of different things, including an additional offset of the camera relative to the player vehicle, but found it unnecessary once we found good values for the previous settings.

Hope this helps JobLeonard!

[JobLeonard]

Nice write-up, thanks!

it took us a solid month of iterations to get the core idea down, and we've kept tweaking little values since..

  Great to see how you take the little but important things so seriously

[HughSJ]

thanks JobLeonard! We try!



Hey everyone, another asset update on Brigador. Jack has been hammering away at these new props-- there's a lot of cross pollination with assets between the various districts, but without the core assets needed for each we can't actually start building the maps for them. The train yard and spaceport are getting close though, and we also have sets for the slums and suburbia in the pipe, which I'll be posting as we finish. We're all getting really excited with how this is progressing.

On the data side I'm still plugging away. Today was devoted to addressing the speed, acceleration, and turn speed for all of the vehicles in the loyalist faction, for both the playable and AI variants. Seeing as we've build 27 units for the loyalist faction (not including infantry variants), potentially all of which could be playable units, it's a *lot* of balancing to do. Even basic passes can take days at a time.

Anyway, for those curious Jack streams his modeling process on twitch, so you can see the current assets being made via the last two videos. We've been streaming pretty regularly, so if you're curious about the game or our production pipeline please do swing by!

[HughSJ]

Round 2 on the spaceport assets! We'll get these new ones rendered out in various rotations (hooray sprite-based games) and plugged into the game. The crane itself is modeled pretty closely after the Finnieston crane in Glasgow which has a pretty cool history to it. I'm sure Buckminster Fuller will be proud of our little spaceship too...

On the data side I should have a new build ready to roll out by the end of tonight, so once you factor in the time to get everything loaded into our master branch and uploaded to Steam we should have it playable for testers come tomorrow afternoon.

Just as last time, Jack streamed his modeling process on twitch-- catch the current batch of assets being made below. And remember, if you're curious about the game or our production pipeline please do swing by! We announce it on twitter, facebook, as well as the Stellar Jockeys and Brigador Steam groups for any who are interested.

This particular stream is modeling for the first 4 hours, and then for those interested in gameplay there's about a 20 minute snipped of gameplay right at the very end. Check it out!

[Gregg Williams]

Looking good! Though rendering out rotations is so cheating... *grumbles on off about the pains of pixel art*

[HughSJ]

hahahaha yeah, being able to source the sprites from 3d has been a huuuuuge help, especially with someone as good as Jack making them. Now that he's got almost a year of working in this style under his belt, the rate at which he's able to produce final assets for Brigador is absurd.

Completely unrelated to this, has anyone seen the Jodorowski's Dune documentary? Because I don't live in a super cool city I haven't been able to get to a screening, but I'm more excited for this movie than anything else on the horizon: