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[Christian]

Well, finally preordered. Been following this long enough.
Love seeing how it has progressed since the early posts

[HughSJ]

Thanks mate! We'll have a big update coming up soon-- posting fell by the wayside once we starting crunching to hit some of these milestones in time, but rest assured plenty of work is still going into the project.

[HughSJ]

That's right! Brigador will finally be playable come Oct. 20th, and for those who are attending PAX Prime this year we'll be demoing the game in the Minibooth area, so please come say hello!

The plan for EA is that it should be almost entirely for fleshing out content and polishing / reacting to input from a larger audience-- the game itself shouldn't change much. Latest you can release as a non-AAA is end of October, and if you miss that window then you need to hold off until the end of February; anywhere between that is suicide. So for us the choices were to either sit on the game until March and keep working in isolation, ship as a full release in October being short on content and polish, or go EA. After a very long chat on the team side as well as getting advice from the PR guys who are helping us, we decided to go the EA route, mainly because I think the whole team would paint the walls with our brains if we had to go another 7 months without releasing anything. So there's that. But mainly we're really excited to finally get the game in people's hands and hear what you have to say; polishing and balancing a game can very much be a collaborative endeavor.

We have two weeks left before PAX, so most of that remaining time will be spent getting all our ducks in a row and making sure the section of gameplay we'll be showing shines nice and bright. And never, ever crashes (knock on wood).

We've just added new effects for explosions and for shielding, which you can see in both the trailer and in some of the gifs posted here. Additionally, more work has gone into producing new maps and refining the existing ones. We now have the neon signage in after a very laborious several days of rendering, as well our first complete suburbs map, which is highlighted in parts of the trailer above. Here's a few new shots of the game in action (click for full size):



A quick note about user content and modding the game. We'll be releasing our tools for building maps either with the EA release or soon after, and the game supports live editing of almost all the game data, so it should be very easy for curious players to begin fiddling with the very fabric of the game.

We built the game ourselves in C++ & allow for live-editing values:


And thanks to Omar we used ImGui, fantastic bloat-free immediate-mode type UI library for C++. Seriously, it's awesome.
He has a patreon at https://www.patreon.com/imgui?ty=h

The Tiled map editor:


All credit to Thorbjørn Lindeijer over at http://www.mapeditor.org/ -- couldn't have done it without him either. Excellent tools like these are the life-blood of independent development.


Finally as a recap, it's just 4 of us building the game, and we started back in 2011 so it's been a long haul. Hope you folks like what you see. We've got a bunch more gifs and webms (which don't show on TIG) posted here, and if you want to catch us we're on twitter and twitch respectively at:

(design) http://twitter.com/HughSJ - http://www.twitch.tv/stellarjockeys/
(art) http://twitter.com/gausswerks - http://www.twitch.tv/gausswerks/

[HughSJ]

Making maps while getting ready for the EA release Oct. 20th. Come visit!

[HughSJ]

Hey we're still alive!

Went to ground for a while in preparation for the final push, and if all goes well I'll be back to charting the progress on the game here as we go along.

In the mean time, we're streaming map development again:

http://www.twitch.tv/gausswerks/

[HughSJ]

Something we realized was an issue with Brigador is that the levels themselves aren't dynamic enough when the player makes their way through. In particular, going a more cautious, quiet route and not sounding alarms isn't incentivized beyond how many enemy units the player aggros, but as louder weapons are generally more powerful we felt we needed to add something else to the mix. Cue "panic walls":


(click for full size)

We still need to do a little work on the code side to get them properly implemented, but the idea is they'll raise up on the alarm being sounded, and possibly on objective destruction as well-- we'll have to see how things go during playtesting. Like everything else in the game they're destructible, but they'll take quite a pounding so they're particularly scary for player units that aren't specced for environment damage (lasers for example tend to have a damage bonus vs shielding but a penalty vs environment). To keep the game from just completely bogging down when panic walls get raised though, they'll still be passable to AI units. This way the player isn't just insulated from enemy units, and also fast player vehicles should also be able to juke through gates that have been lowered by enemy units passing through.

I'll post footage once this stuff is animated and in the game.

[marcgfx]

great progress, the explosions not match the lighting in awesomeness 

[DifferentName]

This game looks cool! I really like the vehicle/weapon variety, the destructable environment, and the light effects.

[HughSJ]

great progress, the explosions not match the lighting in awesomeness 

The explosions currently aren't lit-- it's one of those "we plan to do it, know how to do it, but it's low priority" things. Beyond that, because Brigador is a sprite based game with a huge variety of assets we couldn't dedicate as many frames to explosions as one might normally be inclined to do, on top of the fact that we wanted to keep explosions short for the sake of the player's visibility.

This game looks cool! I really like the vehicle/weapon variety, the destructable environment, and the light effects.

Thanks man!

--

So in a few minutes I'll be streaming again, this time with our new unit spawning in place. This might seem a bit odd, but because of how the core game was originally planned we couldn't actually spawn individual units; instead a spawnlist was called and distributed between various spawnpoints placed on the map. While this works fine for gameplay, it made iterating on units and balancing a bit of a nightmare, and looking back I realize how ludicrous it is that we waited this long to implement something like this. What we have now not only includes the ability to place any unit at any point on a map, but also to live refresh a level while maintaining player position and loadout. If I want to try out a particular engagement multiple times, all I have to do now is press F4 and the map will reset to its original conditions, and if I need to update that map I can just make the tweaks, export it to the game, and on hitting F4 those changes all go live. No need to restart the game or even the loadout.

You don't realize how desperately you needed tools/features until you've got them in place...

Anyway, come watch if you'd like:


http://www.twitch.tv/stellarjockeys/

[marcgfx]

haha, sorry that "not" was a typo, I meant to write "now". interesting to see that you actually have more things planned to make it look even better :D

[zombieonion]

Options menu needs "absolute controls" toggle, for that sweet sweet controller support!
Otherwise this is great.

[HughSJ]

Options menu needs "absolute controls" toggle, for that sweet sweet controller support!
Otherwise this is great.

Controller support is still in the 'experimental' stage, but yeah once we get that resolved we'll get all the proper settings added in.

haha, sorry that "not" was a typo, I meant to write "now". interesting to see that you actually have more things planned to make it look even better :D

Thanks marc! And yeah, while there's no guarantee that we'll get them in (performance is a big concern, lights are exponentially more expensive the larger they get) it's definitely something we want to do.

[HughSJ]

How 'bout a saturday afternoon round table? I'd like to pick people's brains for a bit if you'll indulge me.

Keeping the late game on a run interesting is definitely a major concern for us. The main problem right now is that no individual unit really poses any kind of a threat besides the kamikaze, except maybe the boss agrav. Units are too inaccurate and deal too little damage. Something I'm thinking about is just increasing lethality across the board; slugfests are boring and right now it's too easy for the player to just wade into a group of enemies and tank damage. We'll see.

Another consideration is that most other games increase player power side by side with the difficulty-- Binding of Isaac, FTL, Nuclear Throne etc. The only game of that stripe I can think of where player ability doesn't change, only the difficulty escalates, is Luftrausers. The reason that works though is because most runs in that game are <2 minutes, and after a cursory search the longest I've seen is ~5 minutes. Unless you're hauling ass 5 minutes is typical for beating a single level in Brigador, not completing a top score run. For most of these games the moment to moment combat is buoyed by the continual accumulation of resources that you can spend upgrading your build later in the same run. So my main worry is maintaining player interest over the course of a run that could last up to 30 minutes, possibly longer, without resorting to the same kind of bread-crumb tactics of xp gain/leveling.

The main alternative is to put all of the emphasis on the metagame component, where earning money during a run doesn't net you anything for that particular run, but it's used to unlock new content between runs. Luftrausers also does this, but rather than center it around total accumulation it uses single benchmarks for specific builds. What's both the advantage and the disadvantage of that system is that it precludes score grinding-- the only way to hit those benchmarks is to be good enough to hit them during a run. If we were to use money exclusively as a score system, the way we'd handle new unlocks is by having a giant checklist of conditionals-- beat 4 levels without taking hull damage to unlock 'x', kill all captains on a 6 map run to unlock 'y', etc.

We're currently building the story mode for the game, levels where the player's loadout is already selected and the mission itself is more scripted. Completing those missions is definitely a possible vector for unlocks, the question there being how much do we want to tie in these two separate modes. For example, the plan is to integrate the tutorialization of the game into the first few levels of the story mode. It would make sense then to not even open up the free play/contracts mode until the player has completed that tutorial set. When we first released on EA I can't tell you the number of review videos I watched where people complained about concepts that were clearly laid out in tutorials-- they just never bothered playing them.

This is something I actually wanted to poll you guys about, particularly high skill / high playtime players. Would you rather have an unlock system based around accrued money that you can spend as you want, or achieving specific benchmarks like "kill 200 units on a run" or "don't take any hull damage". Another option is to just do some combination thereof. Call it money vs challenge unlocks. The advantage of money unlocks is that anyone can get them eventually, the downside is that it can just feel like grinding, especially for a good player. But with challenge unlocks you basically lock a portion of a game out for lower skill players, and there's always going to be some challenge unlocks that people aren't going to like at all, so it's more a chore than a fun thing to do.

Thoughts?

[oyog]

So I saw your post on the Steam Community forums via Rock Paper Shotgun, and I have to know:

Was the link to the 30 pack of Budweiser just chosen at random? Are you guys located in the 413 area?

I lived in Amherst, MA nearly 10 years (though I don't now) and I've been in the Hadley branch of that liquor store quite a bit so it was an incredibly bizarre coincidence for it to show up in a post by a developer for a game I've enjoyed watching the development of for years.

[DifferentName]

Yeah, looks like your post on the steam forums is making the rounds among game developers. I saw it twice before realizing it was about this game.

[HughSJ]

So I saw your post on the Steam Community forums via Rock Paper Shotgun, and I have to know:

Was the link to the 30 pack of Budweiser just chosen at random? Are you guys located in the 413 area?

I lived in Amherst, MA nearly 10 years (though I don't now) and I've been in the Hadley branch of that liquor store quite a bit so it was an incredibly bizarre coincidence for it to show up in a post by a developer for a game I've enjoyed watching the development of for years.

That's a funny coincidence, but no we're based out of Illinois. That just happened to be the first page that came up with a price attached when I searched for a case of Bud Light.

And thank you, we really appreciate that. I haven't been nearly as regular with TIG because we just stopped getting any kind of traffic through here so it was hard to justify the time, though I realize that's also a chicken and the egg kind of scenario.

[oyog]

That is so outstandingly weird!

Yeah, now that you guys are in Early Access I figured your fanbase is mostly through Steam and your own forums. In fact the only reason I posted here was that my off topic post to the Steam thread got buried almost immediately. 

[Mark Mayers]

Didn't know you guys had a TIG DevLog.

Will you be posting a retrospective/postmortem of the game?
I've been following progress after your post describing release.

Hope all is well!

[JobLeonard]

Shit guys, I didn't know you had released the game! Where can I get it? At least I can buy the both of you a meal after all this effort you put in

EDIT: Done

[Capntastic]

How come no one's posting about how good this game is