Upon launching the game the two main modes of play available are Campaign and Freelance.

To make up for the lack of something like a printed instruction manual here is a breakdown of each mode.

Campaign is our challenge to you as developers but we start you off gently. The first thirteen missions are explicit tutorials that restrict you to just one loadout.

[Sidenote: all mission names are song references - [b]here’s a spotify playlist as an alternate listening experience to Makeup And Vanity Set’s excellent electronic music[open.spotify.com][/b]]

Campaign missions are all single-map endeavors that have one of three main objectives: kill the captains, destroy marked buildings, or eliminate enough of the hostile enemies on a map. Objectives are visible in the top right of the screen. When the main objective has been fulfilled, the exit gate will be open.

As you complete missions, names change from blue to pink, with a diamond indicating that a loadout for that mission has been successfully completed.

Mission names in dark red cannot be accessed until the preceding mission has been completed. Only one loadout completion from a mission is required to access the next one in the list.

As you get further into the campaign, sets of missions will become available, but keep in mind to access the next set you will still need to clear all mission names in blue at least once for the next set to open up.

The Mission menu will tell you what sort of objective you will have to complete and comes with a short briefing, sometimes from characters within the fiction who only ever appear in these short snippets.

Double-clicking a mission name or clicking Loadout will take you to the loadout screen. Unless you go to the trouble of modding the game, mission loadouts are all preset and cannot be altered. For the mission FRENCH MAID, there is only one loadout available: Ripley Snell’s Canavan.

Completing a map with any of a mission’s available loadouts will reward you with the loadout first completion award on your earnings statement after successfully exiting.

This is a one-per-loadout bonus. Loadouts that have been completed already in a mission will be marked with a diamond icon on the loadout selection screen.

In the screenshot above, the diamond indicates it has been completed with the Touro, but not the Huss, Rounder or Chook.

In most missions you will get up to four different loadouts.

It was mentioned earlier that vehicle loadout choices in Campaign mode are preset. This is because they act as a sort of difficulty modifier. For example, the Treehouse is a very straightforward option since a stack of cars on tank treads is not at all subtle. To make up for being a massive target, the Treehouse has large amounts of health and shields to tank incoming fire, plenty of ammunition to flatten most of the map, not to mention the Audio-Kinetic Pulse available on cooldown. Choosing the Mongoose for the same mission, however, means players will have to avoid direct assaults and instead get better at flanking and mastering the use of Active Camouflage to get the drop on unsuspecting enemies.

Take note that if you want the second rarest achievement in the game, you’ll need to clear all loadouts from every mission.

Previously this achievement was much easier to attain because the campaign originally ended on “I’m Always In Love” but we kept updating the game over the years and added more missions that made the campaign much harder to finish. If you manage to get Diamond Collector in 2024 then this is a much tougher accomplishment since the D, E, F and powersuit mission sets have been added.

Freelance is a roguelite mode where you get to make your own challenge with content you unlocked via all that money you earned in Campaign. Though you can play Freelance exclusively to earn cash, running through the tutorial missions will give you plenty of spending money to get you started. Unlike Campaign, Freelance lets you choose your own loadouts and play around with weapon and vehicle variety.

Freelance-exclusive maps all use spawn nodes instead of Campaign’s placed NPC spawns. What this means behind the scenes is that the enemies that can appear are pulled from about a dozen spawnlists per faction - not counting the special wildcard spawns. By contrast in Campaign, any time you enter a mission, the same number of units will always appear because they have been manually placed. When a Freelance map is loading, the game checks what difficulty you are at, and fills in those spawn nodes based on whatever the spawnlist happens to be. In addition, some freelance maps will start the player from one of several points.

When you click Freelance for the first time you’re presented with this screen:

Freelance presents you with six tabs:

• Pilot
  
• Vehicle
  
• Primary
  
• Secondary
  
• Special
  
• Operation

Each of these tabs contains a list of things that can be bought with the money earned in game by either double clicking an item in the list or clicking the Requisition button.

Pilot is your chosen Brigador for the run. The pilot determines the overall difficulty of an operation as well as what multipliers get applied to your Earnings Statement when you finish an operation. Fan favorite(?) Norman Osberger starts at difficulty 1 and is capped at difficulty 1, meaning the hostile units that spawn are very weak (or perhaps the three factions are too scared to send their best…). As a result of the lack of any meaningful opposition, Norman will receive no victory bonuses or multipliers.

Efigenia Tseng, on the other hand, starts at difficulty 1, caps at difficulty 4 and with each successful map in an operation the spawn difficulty increases by 0.5.

This means that by the sixth map in an operation, Tseng will reach the max difficulty of 4 and the max payout multiplier will kick in. All the pilots have different bonuses and multipliers. Note that if you decide to use Johnny Five Aces in a Freelance operation and want to make a profit, choose the shortest operation possible, because he earns less and less with each successive map and will reduce his victory bonus.

Vehicle is where you choose whatever vehicle you want to deploy on the operation. By default, you have the choice of one loyalist mech (Touro), tank (Prowler) or agrav (Buckler) - each with different weapon hardpoints.

Depending on the vehicle chosen, successful operations will also apply the vehicle’s payout multiplier to the earnings statement.

The Primary and Secondary tabs are where you choose what weapons you want to place on your vehicle’s hardpoints. What fires from the Primary is by default bound to left mouse button, and right mouse button is for the Secondary. In the Touro’s case it has a Main and Turret hardpoint, meaning it can equip the Zeus railgun on LMB and the Bully laser on RMB.

Other vehicles have different hardpoints. The Buckler has two auxiliary hardpoints, meaning it can dual wield Jerichos if the player so chooses.

Special is where the player chooses what they want on their middle mouse button. The Smoke Projector is given for free but many players might opt to purchase the Audio-Kinetic Pulse for its ability to delete units, even at the highest difficulties.

The last tab is Operation. Operations are “runs” of maps. Your objective in any Freelance map is to either destroy all the orbital guns, kill the marked captains, or remove ~70% of enemies. Once you do any of these, find your exit and progress to the next district.

In Campaign you only have to contend with one map at a time and you don’t have to worry about how much health or ammo is left when you exit. Freelance instead tasks you with completing operations. Most operations are two or more maps, and the player’s remaining health, shields and ammo carries over between them. Depending on your chosen Brigador pilot, each successive map may increase the difficulty, pitching you against more lethal forces. Be warned that if you get eliminated, you’ll still get some money, but the SNC’s funeral expenses will take the majority of your earnings from any operation.

Like the other tabs, a handful of operations are available for free, but more complicated operations are gated behind a fee.

Some Freelance operations like the three-map Outer City allow you to exit early. This means after clearing the first map you can proceed to Estrela Verde Spaceport, which is marked with a dollar sign in the map selection menu, and you can attempt to cash out.

If you instead clear as many districts as possible while also not taking too much damage, then this will be reflected in your earnings statement at the end of a run.

The rarest achievement in the game is found in Freelance mode and to obtain it you need to clear Closed Casket Special, which is a run of 39 different maps. CCS does not have an early exit option. Good luck.

[N.B. From watching our more experienced players, a CCS run on the highest difficulty pilot will take you somewhere between 60-90 minutes to do. [b]Resign & Resume was added to Freelance back in 2021[/b] making it possible to actually quit the game midway through an operation and return later. This save system is very limited, so be sure to read the post for details on how it works.]

Since you can choose your loadout and difficulty, Freelance mode lets you create whatever challenge you feel like. Want to turn your brain off and watch destruction unfold? Pick any ultra class vehicle and let the auto-firing weapons do the rest on a single random district. Up for a challenge? Try Precursor James in a Varlet with twin Donkeys.

While players are able to choose the overall difficulty of an operation via pilot and vehicle choice, there are a few things they cannot fully account for. Below is a screenshot of the same map of the same operation with the same loadout on two different occasions.

Visually, each map’s lighting will alternate between a couple of variants to change the mood of the space. In terms of gameplay, depots will randomize what ammo they dispense. In the first image above, it will refill cannon rounds; in the second it will refill machine guns. Though the ammo depot locations are fixed on a map, the ammo type they provide is not. If you’re short on rounds during an operation - be careful! The next map might not have the ammo depot you need.

To determine the enemy opposition for a map in an operation, the game flips a three-sided coin and picks one of the three factions. This means even in something short like Outer City you can face off against Loyalists, Corvids and Spacers over the course of one operation. What units turn up in a map depends on the current difficulty level. Exceptions are pilots that have exclusive spawnlists like Hugh Armbruster, who only ever fights against Loyalists.

However, even this has an exception: there’s a roughly one in six chance of a map loading an alternate spawnlist. These alternates can be… interesting, depending on the difficulty. We don’t want to spoil the surprise as to what spawns in, but for those curious: since the alt spawns are all only a single “faction”, each difficulty level of this “faction” is made up of either Loyalists, Corvids or Spacers. This means pilots like Armbruster can still fight non-Loyalists if an alt spawnlist containing Corvids or Spacers is chosen. It is possible to remove the wildcards entirely via the debug panel if you find this immersion-breaking.

Finally, all spawnlists, even the alternate ones, were designed by Stellar Jockeys so that the experience is at the very least manageable. If you have successfully taken on the F-set of campaign missions, you should be able to comfortably deal with MAX difficulty freelance operations.

The following is a list of things in Campaign and Freelance that don’t come under one easy category:

• Artillery weapons are barely tutorialized in the campaign and not even available for most of the preset loadouts. However, since artillery weapons have both a high arc and inherit vehicle momentum, they can be flung very far and cause tremendous damage from a distance completely from behind cover. This means by the time the enemy AI comes to investigate where you fired from, you can easily reposition somewhere else out of sight.
  
• The Smoke special has more utility than you might expect. Enemies do not fire blindly, and what smoke grenades do is temporarily block enemy line of sight (but not enemy pathing). This means the more advanced option is to not spread smoke at a distance but as close as possible to your vehicle, allowing you to hide still within your smoke clouds and calmly take on enemies swarming you.
  
• All campaign missions are also available to play in Freelance mode with any loadout you choose, free of the constraints of the loadout choices. The mission names are all listed in ALL CAPS whereas operations are not. Campaign missions in Freelance mode still use the placed spawns, meaning they are exactly the same as the campaign version. Yes, we know you can abuse this to make obscene amounts of money very quickly with specific pilots and missions.
  
• Looking to get into the games industry? While the D and E set were made by the original developers, the F and powersuit set of missions in Campaign (and the Grave to the Rave operation in Freelance), were created by experienced community members, some of whom now work with us full time.
  
• Closed Casket Special combines all freelance maps and most of the campaign maps into one operation. So long as you can get past all the freelance maps, the campaign maps should be less stressful since they do not use spawnlist nodes.
  
• Want more tips? This-user made guide goes into full detail on the game’s mechanics.

In addition to being part of Steam’s Endless Replayability fest until May 20th, our merch store has gotten a fresh coat of paint. Take a look at our wares[shop.stellarjockeys.com].


https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/

In a post from last year, we wrote about how Stellar Jockeys began as a company and what eventually led to Brigador. This time let’s look at concepts for a prototype of the game that dates from around late 2013 to early 2014. At this stage in development, the ability to make 2D sprites with dynamic lighting had been established, but the overall gameplay loop and plot had not yet been settled on.

An early prototype of Brigador was inspired by the gameplay of a very old game called Choplifter![en.wikipedia.org] for the Apple II from 1982. The idea was the player and their units would emerge from a space elevator and attack a central station somewhere on a map.

The menu flow for this prototype was mocked up like this.

[[i]Ed: “Matador” was the original early title before being renamed to Brigador[/i]]
Before launching into a mission, the player would go through loadout selection. One variant of this was also mocked up. Players who know what the loadout screens for Campaign and Freelance mode look like may notice some similarities.

The prototype’s idea would be that crew choices would affect aspects of the vehicle such as how accurate certain weapon types are, reload speeds, vehicle turning speed and so on. Had we gone down this route, once you loaded into a level you would be presented with a scene like this.

The pips around the selected captain for the vehicle in the lower left were in the style of Wing Commander’s shield/hull integrity readout, which would show you from what direction you had taken damage.

This crew system and hull UI didn’t survive past concepting – but directional damage did. In Brigador, damage to the side or rear of a vehicle in most cases is much more effective than hitting the front.

Anyone who has played World of Tanks might be raising their hand right now – ultimately Brigador does not seek to be a simulative experience. Instead it was made to be something you’d want to get straight into and play rather than fret over your choices in a menu. The loadout screen for Freelance mode was eventually pared down to the following:

• Pilot, which decides enemy spawn difficulty and payout
  
• Vehicle, which affects payout and what weapons can be equipped
  
• Weapon hardpoints, assigned to left and right mouse button
  
• Special, which are things like the EMP, audio-kinetic pulse, smoke or active camouflage

While Campaign mode reduced all of these down even further to a choice of up to four different preset loadouts, which roughly align to different proposed playstyles (hit and run, sneak and peek, just smash everything, etc.).

The game’s opening slogan came after various iterations of the game’s plot. Initially the player took the role of the “Captain” and one idea was to have a screen like this as an opener, which may seem familiar to those who have played the first level “Awake On Foreign Shores”.

It might not be as snappy or as impactful as a pitch-shifted Dr Sbaitso informing you that GREAT LEADER IS DEAD, the point is that it takes a while to eventually land on a line like WELCOME BRIGADOR.

Around October 2013, prior to the game going into a closed early access period, the game looked something like this.

In February 2014, the game was revealed publicly with the following trailer.

In May of 2014, Brigador was successfully greenlit on Steam (back when Steam Greenlight existed). Then in August that same year, Makeup And Vanity Set came on board and lent their electronic music skills for the Contract trailer.

Aside from the major shift in music, notice that all the captured footage uses the “old” aiming lines.

Come October 2015, the game launched into Early Access on Steam and with it new aiming lines, though some assets like the orbital cannons and the objective indicators had not yet been reworked.

Though the game initially went into 1.0 on June 2nd 2016, it would take another year of updates to the game to finally settle into what we now know as Brigador: Up-Armored Edition.

If you enjoyed this short retrospective on Brigador, let us know. Better yet, give us your money and we’ll do more of them. It’s on sale as part of Steam’s Dinos vs. Robots Fest.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/

[shop.stellarjockeys.com]The latest addition to our merchandise store is four new pewter miniature sets from Brigador at 1:144 scale. They are:

• 2x Buckmaster[shop.stellarjockeys.com]
  
• 2x Fork[shop.stellarjockeys.com]
  
• A powersuit selection of 4x Mongoose, 2x Dorothy & 2x Pellinore[shop.stellarjockeys.com]
  
• 24x Loyalist Infantry[shop.stellarjockeys.com] AKA "Daves"

These new models were made by one of our community members, who makes minis as part of their day job at Mindworm Games.

Like before, the miniatures are being sold at introductory prices for the first month, which are:

Prices are not the same for the four miniatures due to the different amounts of pewter required. In addition, you will receive 15 USD off when adding three of any miniature to your cart.

Please note that this introductory period will last until Thursday February 29th, after which they will go up to their intended value. The sums indicated above also do not account for shipping.

We learned a lot from the previous run and have taken precautions to deal with any potential influxes of demand or delays. If it so happens that you see a miniature to be out of stock on our store, it should be back in stock within about two weeks. In addition, the latest run of minis will come with new stickers on the blister packs.

Since the spincasting process was already detailed in this post from August last year, the rest of this article will detail the contents of each blister pack, along with a few pictures from the workshop. All models come unpainted and unassembled. The images of painted models we provide in this article and on our merchandise store are for demonstration purposes.

If you’d like to buy a pewter mini right now - head on over to our store[shop.stellarjockeys.com]. Otherwise, please enjoy the rest of the article.
Buckmaster on the right, Fork on the leftThe Buckmaster loyalist light mech has a Zeus railgun for its main hardpoint and a choice of three weapons for its small hardpoint: a Bonesaw machine gun, a Faker fragmentation mortar, and a Pinch rocket launcher. Each blister pack contains two Buckmasters, unassembled and unpainted.

Assembled, the height of the Buckmaster is approximately 1.275 inches tall, or about 3.24 cm.

Buckmaster on the right, Fork on the leftFork on the left, Buckmaster on the rightThe Fork loyalist light mech has two turret hardpoints and a choice of four weapons for those slots: a Scimitar gatling mortar, a Disco disruption laser, a Confessor HE cannon, and a Crambo machine gun. Each blister pack contains two Forks, unassembled and unpainted.

Assembled, the height of the Fork is approximately 1.171 inches tall, or about 2.97 cm.

Fork on the left, Buckmaster on the rightFront: Mongooses, Middle: Pellinores, Back: DorothysThe Powersuit pack contains a squad of four Mongooses and two pairs of Dorothys and Pellinores, unpainted and unassembled. The Mongooses have two small hardpoints and are provided with a duo of the following small arms to mix and match as you see fit:

• Carlos cannon
  
• Garigari rotary percussion drill
  
• Democlaw
  
• Bonesaw machine gun (two pairs)
  
• Temblor laser
  
• Donkey recoilless rifle

The Dorothy can place a Balao mortar or Duchess MG on its main hardpoint, and for its small hardpoint a Faker mortar, a Pinch rocket launcher, a Bonesaw MG, or a Donkey recoilless rifle.

The Pellinore has a choice of Preacher cannon or Galinha laser for its auxiliary hardpoint, and can use the same set of weapons for its small hardpoint as the Dorothy to go with its shield.

Assembled, the tallest powersuit is the Dorothy at approximately 0.89 inches tall (or about 2.26 cm), followed by the Pellinore at 0.84 inches (~2.13 cm) and then the Mongoose at 0.814 inches (~2.06 cm).

Pellinores front, Dorothys behindThe Daves are in 24 different poses. Nine of them are carrying Zweenie lasers, eight of them are equipped with Nobrelite AR18 rifles, four are holding Pinch rocket launchers and three are wielding Bonesaw machine guns. The image below is how the Daves were posed in Blender prior to 3D printing and subsequent molding.

The Daves come unpainted and require no assembly as they are already attached to a pewter base.

Here are painted versions of the Pinch Daves...

Here are the Nobrelite riflemen up front and machine gunners in the back...

And here are the Daves armed with Zweenies.

The height of each Dave varies depending on pose, but they are roughly 0.7 inches high, or 1.77 cm.

Lastly, here are the final weights for each set of miniatures.


If you are newcomers to miniature assembly, we have updated our assembly guide to include the new models for people just like you.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3018909970
Finally, Stellar Jockeys thanks everyone for the positive reception to (and patience waiting for) the initial run last summer. To both celebrate the response and in anticipation of the new models featured in this article, our community discord ran the Olive Drab Everything mini painting contest from September to October and received a wonderful set of responses. The winners of that competition have already received their pick of the new models. You can view a gallery of the various entrants and winning submissions here[imgur.com] and we look forward to seeing what people do with the new store additions.

[shop.stellarjockeys.com]

Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is on sale this week as part of the War Child Game Action 2023 Steam Sale along with several other titles. This year’s Game Action is once again bringing together the gaming industry to highlight the importance of protecting, educating, and standing up for the rights of children living in war zones. War Child work in the hardest to reach places to support those who are hardest hit, to protect, educate and stand up for the rights of children, when they need them most.

The promotion will run until August 23rd and a percentage of each copy sold will go to War Child UK to fund projects in Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Iraq, Ukraine, and Yemen.

The full list of participating games can be found here. You can read more about War Child's work here[www.warchild.org.uk].

Even if you’ve already acquired a copy of Brigador, please consider telling a friend.

[shop.stellarjockeys.com]The latest addition to our merchandise store is three pewter minis of vehicles from Brigador: the Canmore[shop.stellarjockeys.com], the Broadsword[shop.stellarjockeys.com] and the signature Touro[shop.stellarjockeys.com] at 1:144 scale. They were made by one of our community members, who makes minis as part of their day job at Mindworm Games, and ran us through the creation process that you can read below.

As this is a first run, the miniatures are being sold at introductory prices, which are:

Prices are not the same for all three miniatures due to the different amounts of pewter required. In addition, if you add all three to your cart, you'll get the whole set for 55.00 USD.

Please note that this introductory period will last until Monday July 31st, after which they will go up to their intended value. The sums indicated above also do not account for shipping.

If you’d like to buy a pewter mini right now - head on over to our store[shop.stellarjockeys.com]. Otherwise, please enjoy the rest of the article.
[Editor’s note: Our community member was provided with the original 3D vehicle model files from Brigador - they did not reproduce the entire original model themselves from scratch. In other words - what you see in these minis is pretty much what they should look like in game, no longer bound to a fixed isometric perspective. We say “pretty much” because there are things we can get away with in a video game where the laws of physics don’t apply so some alterations have been made in order to be printed. Mostly this is filling in gaps inside the model the player would never see in-game.]

“When I first get the model it's made of a bunch of individual overlapping parts. Here’s the Canmore turret split in half.”

[Ed: This screenshot is from Blender.]

“As you can see, it’s not in one solid piece. I have to take all this and boolean join everything in Blender into a single mesh so that print software will slice it correctly instead of making internal voids where parts overlap. After I join everything together and add the cutouts and tabs and stuff it looks like this.”

“The turret is now one continuous mesh instead of a bunch of separate pieces. After that all the parts get printed out on the 3D printer into masters, which are put into a black rubber mold.”

[Ed: We’re not going to show a boring timelapse of the 3D print process - if you’ve never seen one in action, here’s that scene from [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD6r3h_n8QQ]season 4 episode 5 of Mr. Robot where Darlene and Elliot create a 3D print of a security guard’s fingerprint[/url].]

“The mold comes in two halves. I position everything in the can like in the image above, then put the second half of the mold on top, and put it in the vulcanizer. The vulcanizer heats it up to the appropriate temp while it's under pressure to make the rubber soften and flow all around the masters to make impressions of the small details. The uncured rubber has a texture similar to bubble gum, but once it's vulcanized it's like a new tire. Here's that same mold can in the vulcanizer. ”

“This is the small one I have at home in my shop that doesn't apply pressure to the mold can, so I have to screw it down instead. It's basically just a fancy hot plate that draws a lot of power and has a timer. The vulcanizer at the minis shop below is a press type so I can more precisely control the pressure if I needed to, but it also weighs over 500lbs so it’s not portable.”

“The Broadsword mold was put in this one at the shop. It also has the advantage of heating up the top and bottom plates so it doesn't take as long to get up to temperature and takes about an hour less to run. The molds are held at vulcanizing temperatures of 350F (approx. 176 C) at about 2000 psi for two hours. Then they cool down and I take them out.”

“This is the Canmore mold immediately after coming out of the vulcanizer.”

“I then have to pull the mold apart and remove the 3D-printed masters from it, leaving hollow cavities where they were.”

“Above is the top half, and the ring in the middle is the sprue that metal will flow into. Below is the bottom half of the mold, and gates have to be cut into it with a hobby knife so the metal can get from the sprue to the actual mold cavities.”

“If you look closely you can see I also have to cut thin vents on the sides of the molds so that air can escape the cavity as it's being filled with metal. They are angled inwards so that metal doesn't go through them and get slung out of the mold all over the inside of the spincaster.”

“To cast it I dust it in talc powder for mold release and to help the metal flow, and run it in the spincaster. Here's the first run.”

“You can see the track isn't filled in all the way. This means that the vents need to be adjusted.”

“The spincaster clamps the mold shut and spins it. As you pour metal in, centrifugal force pushes the liquid metal into the cavities more effectively than just gravity casting would. The fine details would otherwise be lost without the additional force.”

“The Canmore tank mini takes almost a full ladle of pewter metal to cast.”

[Ed: The pouring temperature from the crucible is around 620 F/ 327 C.]

“After I tweak the molds to get everything casting right, I'll run them a couple of times to get sprues with attached parts.”

“I pull the parts off the sprue, inspect them to make sure everything has cast correctly and sort them.”

“Overall this run used about 20lbs (or over 9kg) of metal.”

[Ed: Here’s the final weights for each vehicle that were made in this initial run of 50 vehicles each.]




[Ed: With all spincasted vehicles sorted, they are then placed into clear blister boxes with a foam insert. Two stickers are then applied to the packaging - one indicating the vehicle loadout, the other a foil Stellar Jockeys sticker - which are then all put into a box to be sent on to our fulfillment center.]

[Upon reaching the fulfillment center, they get barcoded, added to our inventory and are ready to be sold and processed into packages... and that's it! Thank you for reading, and many thanks to our community member for running us through the spincasting process.]


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3018909970

[shop.stellarjockeys.com]

Once upon a time Stellar Jockeys’ first game was going to look something like this…

…and not this.

Upon reading that you might be wondering how, so it’s high time we actually made good on a post from June 2012, wherein studio CEO Hugh Monahan wrote the following in a since-dead blog:

This isn't the retrospective of some proven developer, full of knowing speeches about their path to success or platitudes of hard work and discipline. We don't have the luxury of hindsight, or the comforting knowledge that everything will work out in the end, at least not yet.

...This is about helping future studios as encumbered as we are with inexperience to succeed. This is about all the pain, patience, frustration, creativity, sacrifice, and love that go into making games.

So with about a decade behind us, in this post we’ll recount a couple of the first key events and the people that led to where we are now, or at least the start of it. We’ll be unable to recount the whole story – certainly not in one post – because so many people have touched what you now know as Brigador: Up-Armored Edition in those past ten years. And no – we're not just talking about how the game’s name changed from its original title of Matador.

It might not be as riveting as this excellent retrospective on Diablo II[www.vg247.com] but if for some reason you’re wondering how someone even gets into game development, this was how (some of) that happened.


Before talking about Brigador, we ought to talk about the origins of the company and where its name came from.

Back in the fall of 2009, at the University of Illinois, the second meeting of ACM GameBuilders was held wherein people could pitch game ideas. ACM GameBuilders[gamebuilders.acm.illinois.edu] is a community of student game developers at the University of Illinois and is a spin off of the ACM (or the Association for Computing Machinery[www.acm.org]) which has a number of chapters both across the United States and the rest of the world.

In attendance among others at this 2009 meeting were three people: Hugh Monahan, Dale Kim and Harry Hsiao. Both Dale & Harry were the original engineers of Brigador's custom engine and were studying Computer Science at the time. Hugh, meanwhile, was working at the high school associated with the University of Illinois, which granted him credentials to use academic facilities. Hugh was there at that 2009 meeting to pitch - Dale and Harry were there to listen.

Reminiscing on the event, Dale explained that out of the majority of the pitches, Hugh's idea was not only clearly described but also actually achievable. A small group formed to work on the project for the rest of the school year, culminating in them managing to show off the project at the university's engineering student showcase event called Engineering Open House. Given the team had managed to pull off the project, Harry, Dale and Hugh realized they could probably make more games in the future, so they stayed in touch...

...But what even was that game? Unfortunately, we don't have any images of it. Effectively it was a clone of the original Star Control game from 1990[en.wikipedia.org]. The title of this student project? Stellar Jockeys.


Roughly two years after that fateful 2009 meeting a fourth figure comes into the story: Zach Reizner.

In the fall of 2011, Zach was a freshman at the University of Illinois studying Computer Science and also attended ACM GameBuilders. At the same time, Dale Kim was graduating and, following another pitch by Hugh in 2011 for a project called That Thing You're Searching For (or TTYSF), Zach was also signed on to work with Stellar Jockeys.

TTYSF was originally concepted as a Castle Crashers[en.wikipedia.org] clone, an image of which we showed at the top, but here's another for good measure.

Now who - or what - is Toby? Toby, or rather The Toby Game was one of the first things Stellar Jockeys ever produced. It was an internal game jam project that took place in the first three months of 2012 created with the intention of Hugh having something to show for his first ever Game Developers Conference later in March that same year. Pictured below is Zach in the office space Stellar Jockeys used in 2012, grinning with both the finished Toby and their first ever paycheck (image provided courtesy of Zach).

Unfortunately, despite the first iteration of Stellar Jockeys shipping Toby in time for GDC 2012, due to a variety of factors, not only did Hugh go to the Game Developers Conference without The Toby Game, but also Hugh's entire portfolio website was brought down and wasn't functional at all prior to attending the event - so the game never ended up getting shown to anyone there.

...Yet it was not all bad. At Hugh's first GDC, he ended up meeting several other developers who would later go on to either directly join Stellar Jockeys proper later down the line, or have a significant impact on Brigador's eventual development.


We’re going to close this post out with this last detail, because if we don’t then several thousand more words would be needed to recount what took place during the rest of 2012 alone.

Hardly anything has been said about the elephant in the room: the game’s engine. At one point the Brigador engine was briefly codenamed Ziggy, though it never took off with the other team members. As a result, it’s just called “the Brigador engine” internally nowadays.

If you aren't familiar with what a game engine is, it's typically defined as a software framework that's used to make and run games, and comes with a suite of development tools. One such example is Unreal Engine, which comes with its own physics engine, renderers, animation and scripting among other things. For anything a game engine can't do, there are also proprietary tools that can handle such things - like how Brigador uses FMOD for its audio.

The other main thing about the Brigador engine is that it is entirely custom made and the result of years of work mostly by Dale & Harry. We should also note that at the time of the Brigador engine's creation in late 2011, the game engine landscape was not how it currently is. Using engines like Unity (Escape From Tarkov) or Unreal (Fortnite) came with steep license fees that would typically either require a lot of money up front or significant publisher support. That has changed drastically in the past decade. Although there are open source projects like Godot (Cruelty Squad), it only came into being in 2014.

While money is an important factor, the other bonus of not using an off-the-shelf engine is you effectively get to control your own destiny. Most of the above mentioned engines are created with a specific genre of game in mind. If you decide to make a game in an engine that doesn't support a feature you want to have in your game, you are effectively at the whims of the engine's creators as to whether such a feature is important enough to ever get supported. If you've ever read stories about game studios switching engines mid-development, it's likely because the engine they were using wasn't able to support their design goals.

So making your own engine all sounds great... except for the part where you have to write the blasted thing. While we won't be going into precise detail behind all 118,435 lines of code that are currently in the Brigador engine, in future posts we will explain how a few things about the game came to be. In fact, we already gave a brief overview of the art pipeline back in January’s post.

Because if you read that previous article carefully, you’ll get clued into the fact that this…

…and this…

…are actually running in different versions of the same game engine.

This post was based on several monthly newsletters that were sent out back in 2021. Click here if you’d like to check out our newsletter archive[stellarjockeys.com].

You probably know that each game on Steam has a community hub section where players can post their own artwork. What you probably don’t know is the vast majority of these types of posts for Brigador don’t ever appear on Steam or other spots on the internet like our Twitter account or r/brigador – they're on our discord server[discord.gg] and we even have a hall of fame gallery channel dedicated to them called #becks_best.

Given just how many there have been over the years, we asked a few of our most frequent contributors recently whether we could showcase their various work on here. What follows is a list of community creations ranging from sketches, writings, videos, mods and scale models grouped mostly by category and author, reposted with their permission. Enjoy.


by Zi
by Zi
by Zi

Prism-kun
Light Mechanized Vidstar Platform
Hardpoints: 1x Heavy, 4x Micro

Supple synthetic skin, the best hair a vat can produce, bleeding edge multi-micro-camera optics, and more facial muscles than the original human body for that extra sadistic expression.
I want to say the braincase is for a real brain, but I feel like if that were a thing, we’d be seeing way more insane mannequins piloted by cephaloids. Probably just no expense spared for these physical models of beloved synchstars.
Looks light on its feet (if you can call them that) due to the agrav leg setup. In reality, these models are just about as armed as a Sledger. Drops any significant semblance of armor for the sake of a compact high-rating power plant. Shielding ends up fantastic, holds up to more than you’d expect for someone so small.
Arm-mounted HF blades and caseless submachine guns come baked in standard, but the heavy mount is clearly modular considering the variety of footage involving unruly worshippers getting pasted by so many different weapon types. Nothing quite like seeing someone get flashed with a healthy dose of radiation.
Oh, and the skirt’s a heat sink for the heavy. Naturally.

Do I like it? The hell do you think?

- MB

p.s. Annotations aren't mine. Neat, though.

Zi can frequently be found doodling in #design_bureau and takes commissions on Twitter.

by Flyingdebris
Flyingdebris’ images frequently cause hysterics and can also be found posting mechs on Twitter.

by ceriseCisilipp
ceriseCisilipp is one of our moderators and is often seen in the #welcome_brigador channel.

by Flyingdebris (inspired by ceriseCisilipp)
by Flyingdebris
Flyingdebris’ images frequently cause hysterics and can also be found posting mechs on Twitter.

by Juntti
by Juntti
by Juntti
When Juntti is not depicting Norman as more miserable than the paparazzi photos of Ben Affleck, he can be found dropping sketches in #design_bureau.

by Lowkek Ops
In addition to sharing sketches in #design_bureau, Lowkek Ops takes commissions on Twitter.

by shoho
by shoho
by shoho
When not attaching legs to a Zed, shoho takes mecha commissions on their Twitter.

by ArcticST6
by ArcticST6
ArcticST6 is a server regular and can usually be found sharing WIP sketches in #design_bureau.

by ceriseCisilipp
ceriseCisilipp is one of our moderators and is often seen in the #welcome_brigador channel.

by SCOREGOBLIN
by SCOREGOBLIN
SCOREGOBLIN is one of our moderators and is frequently sighted organizing community game and movie nights.

by chasiubao
chasiubao’s antics became so powerful that we figured it would be safer to just hire them to help us make Brigador Killers.
by mellonbread

Dennis purchased a cup of affogato from the JUST ICE vendor and walked, carefully spooning the gelato into his mouth, wary of backsplash from pieces that fell off the tiny spoon. There was one cloud in the sky and he wished it would occlude the sun, because his hands were full and he couldn't take off his jacket without putting his ice cream down. Which would have required him to awkwardly balance the cup on the boardwalk railing, or set it down on the ground, and he didn't want to do that. The wind might knock it over.

The tac rig came through the glass wall of the Companolo outlet. It burst out through the smiling dog's head and hit the boardwalk running. There was a long machine gun in its hands and before it hit the ground it was already firing. There were no appendages in that suit, Dennis knew by looking at it. A torso and a head suspended by powered armor, mechanical legs thrashing inhumanly, robot arms bouncing at the shoulders so the elbows and hands stayed perfectly level, holding the stream of bright colored tracers on the NOSPOL plainclothesmen exiting the DEALSLAVE. In a moment it was on top of them, then over them, turning briefly at the waist to hose down a straggler without stopping.

Faber wasn't far behind. They piled out of the prowler like spiderlings from an egg sac crushed under your thumb, wrapped in armored swaddling. The flinch reaction was well beaten out of them and they didn't cower under the hail of 8mm FMJ, counting on their rigs to protect them as they lined up their shots.

The van behind them exploded. Their suits did not protect them against that. The armored phocomelus catapulted him(?)self over the edge of the boardwalk, down to the beach below. Dennis wished he had a gun, or some other way to participate.

Then he stopped wishing for that, disappointed with himself. Nothing he could do would improve this already perfect moment of catharsis.

mellonbread is a long time member of the discord and can also be found on Twitter.

by Eschaton

Solo Nobre did have a few libraries. One of the best was the Vorebey Book Reliquary, which fulfilled a triple museum, mausoleum, and book-haus purpose. All quiet stone and death, like the Necropolis - I used to go there for a sleep when it was raining. Out in front of it, the Corvid moleques were usually hawking used books and samizdat, their wares laid out in blankets on the street - ready at a moment's notice to run. Later, we'd make a joke of gunning our engines when we turned that corner; watching them run, though none of us really cared to enforce anything. Inside, you could enjoy the echoes of fine heels on fine polished marble in the lobby; an enormous cross whose arms are the reliquary on the left, toward the west, and the library at the right.

I'm not much of a reader, but it wasn't that big a library, and they don't let someone like me leaf through the relics. After a while you start rereading the titles that are worth reading and thinking about all the stuff that's not in there. I hear back in the Center worlds, they have archival libraries going all the way down to the beginning of history, without lacunae. That's what happens, I guess, when your culture hasn't been repeatedly burnt to the ground and encrusted with new layers of censorship every changing of the guard. You could probably lob a balão in any direction down there and erase something priceless - culture steeped on culture, eons of memory suffocating the ability to feel anything new. Think of it. Maybe the real answer is in the middle. Some stuff's got to be forgotten, some kept. Someone has to decide.

The foot of the lobby's cross was a pre-colonial church; I have read when they picked apart the ruins after the “Noite Longa,” they actually found a congregation in there, bits of communion mixed with plaster still in their teeth.

- Griswold Ficke, "Brigadors of Solo Nobre"

Eschaton has an AO3 account[archiveofourown.org] containing more of their writing in addition to their many posts in #lore_boar.

by heroin chic-fil-a

As Solo Nobre progresses through its economic and social rationalisation, I am reminded that not everyone is in tune with our mission. For those that recognise us as what we are - liberators, bringers of prosperity and stability - the fruits of Concern investment are eagerly harvested and enjoyed, the seeds replanted so that they may grow again and tenfold. But there are some among our native business partners who do not fully understand the purpose of the Concern's system, and their particular greed must be pulled by its roots before it can spread.

In the past few months I have become acquainted with certain high-profile natives who have extensive private investments in Solo Nobre, permitted under trade agreements and licensing fees with the SNC. While they have been a useful source of information and business opportunities, I and my fellow Informatics departments have noticed a disturbing trend of irrational economic activity among the local tycoons: IP infringement, unsanctioned trade and dividend evasion, to name but a few of their sins.

We do not work for individual profit. We are part of an organisation, and our first and foremost priority must be the wellbeing and prosperity of that organisation. Going into business only for ourselves makes us all weaker - do our limbs and organs fight each other for nutrition, or do they work in concert for the health and development of the whole body? I cannot fault anyone for private enterprise, but I draw the line at business which directly impacts the Concern's profits, and among the native investors I see that kind of business running increasingly rampant.

For the centralismos that continue to keep the Concern out of their business, I remind them that one man went into business for himself, and took this entire colony with him. I hope they remember how that ended.

-Svati Vadekar, SNC Informatics Division
-Operations Director, 2nd Station

heroin chic-fil-a is often found honing their craft in the #lore_boar channel.

by ArcticST6

Own a Zweenie for home defense, since that's what the 4 Founders intended. Four separatists break into my house. "What in Martim’s beard?" As I grab my tanker cap and Zweenie rifle. Blast a searing armor-piercing laser through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my Nobrelite on the second man and fire a burst off, miss him entirely because
"It’s an assault rifle
-MB"
and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the Parliament cannon mounted on my Betka loaded with canister shot, "For the NPA lads" the cluster shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off the district alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified Corvid. He bleeds out waiting on the MPs to arrive since district comms have been jammed, Just as the founders intended

ArcticST6 is a server regular and can usually be found sharing WIP sketches in #design_bureau.

by Eschaton and ceriseCisilipp

That's it. I'm sick of all this "Masterwork Graser" bullshit that's going on in the War Council OpFor Threat Evaluation system right now. Black Hands deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.

I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine Black Hand from Clade Vocc for $20,000 dollars (that's about 400 of our “raincoats” to the SNC – you are keeping up on OpFor mercenary bonus programs, right?) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 planetary cycles now. I can even cut slabs of Ed's Solid Meat Product™ with my Black Hand.

Spacer weaponsmiths spend years working on a single Black Hand and fold its lens up to a million times to produce the finest grasers known to mankind, in any species.

Black Hands are thrice as deadly as dirt-eater grasers and thrice as focused for that matter, too. Anything tubarao can chemically disassemble, a black hand can melt better. I'm pretty sure a black hand could easily dissolve a Citadel sporting full ERA with a simple full-spectrum pulse.

Ever wonder why colonial militaries never bothered with space forces? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined Vidstars (you are watching OpFor holovids, right?) and their black hands of destruction. Even in the Siege of Andros, colonists targeted the spacers with the black hands first because their killing power was feared and respected.

So what am I saying? Black Hands are simply the best weapon that the galaxy has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in the OFTE system. Please find enclosed a binary file attachment with the proposed changes.

- Colonel Travis Martin, NEP

Eschaton has an AO3 account[archiveofourown.org] containing more of their writing in addition to their many posts in #lore_boar. ceriseCisilipp is one of our moderators and is often seen in the #welcome_brigador channel.

by the huanglong

BRIG'ARDCORE is a mod which aims to promote a more tense and tactical sandbox gameplay with more diverse enemies and weapons including flamethrowers, sabots, proximity mines and time bombs. Many aspects of the base game have been modified to achieve this. BRIG'ARDCORE plays best at difficulties 2-4 for light vehicles, and 5-8 for heavy vehicles. It's not even remotely fair and death can come suddenly, so long runs and campaign missions are not recommended for beginners.
FEATURES AND CHANGES:
[expand type=details]
More than 30 additional player weapons
2 additional player abilities
All vehicles in Brigador made playable
Modified enemy vehicle destruction effects (faction/unit specific gibs, turret gibs, persistent wrecks etc.)
Modified weapon firing and impact effects (dustclouds, shockwaves, smoke trails, richochets, etc.)
Increased visual range
Increased enemy visual range and engagement distance
Health greatly reduced on all player vehicles
Altered loadout on some player vehicles
Weapons as horns for some player vehicles (Prowler, Rounder, Hound, Operator)
Unique fixed primary/secondary weapons for some player vehicles (Oxybeles, Prism, Butcherbird, Hun, Roadie, Actias, Operator)
Performance and functional changes to many existing player and enemy weapons
Rolling coal and burnout horns on certain player vehicles (Fatshoe, Propter, Hannibal, Rolston)
New enemies
New enemy weapons
Altered loadouts on several enemies
New enemy actions including taunts, sick burnouts and rolling coal
Revised spawnlists for greater enemy variety at lower difficulties
New Easter Eggs
Brother Cotton Boss fight mode
and much more.[/expand]

As of time of writing, BRIG’ARDCORE is in version 1.09 and can be downloaded via the #uploads channel in our discord server[discord.gg]. Please be sure to pay attention to the installation instructions that come with the zip file!

by the huanglong
the huanglong has a habit of confusing our designer by showing off things they modded we weren’t sure were even possible in the #maps-and-modding channel.
by Loki
Loki frequently tinkers with various noises from the game in FMOD and can be found in #maps-and-modding explaining how to do so.
by thedanyourmancouldsmelllike
by thedanyourmancouldsmelllike
thedanyourmancouldsmelllike has put together various vehicle packs over the years, such as this one for the Loyalist roster.

- Billman Assault Mech: An aggressive mech with modest aux/turret armament but a reinforced ramming prow and a boost ability instead of its stomp, ideal for ramming through enemies or obstacles alike.
- Antoninus Light Mech: The NEP's overliteral answer to the Chook, a durable but somewhat sluggish twin aux light mech.
- Scuttleray Powersuit: A recon powersuit that sits somewhere between the Mog and the Pellinore, faster than the latter and better armed than the former.
- Flathead Medium Tank: An astoundingly conventional MBT, main/small armament, decent speed, decent HP, just a capable, if unremarkable machine.
- Escorpião Light Tank: A better armed and armoured Betushka variant with poor speed but a powerful and long lasting boost to allow for burst agility.
Vicar Light Tank: A Betka with a Marlowe turret. Slightly worse handling and shields, but you can run a Galinha.
- Caçador Assault Gun: A boxy light SPG with a main/small armament. Durable for its size, but its fixed forward armament hurts it outside of gunnery duels and ambushes. Hit and run.
- Caesar Combat Car: A Loyalist ball-tread test bed based off an old armoured car. Fragile, but with high forward and reverse speeds and a twin aux armament it's still a capable combatant in the right hands.
- Throne Attack Agrav: A floating Monarch upper with twin aux, a devastating belly slam and deceptively high mobility, the Throne's a consummate brawler.
- Ravager Grav-tank: A Raider derived grav-tank, trading its long operational range, heavy armament and some performance for a turret and extra durability, better suited to the direct combat roles they find themselves in inside Solo Nobre.
- Viking Grav-tank: Another Raider variant, this one an intended outrider for the parent vics, with higher speed but a lighter aux/tur armament in a turret.
- Hussite Heavy Grav-tank: A massive combat vehicle intended for infantry support and assault across broken terrain, the Hussite uses a heavily modified and up-armoured Huss chassis as its basis, switching the two fixed forward Heavies for a casemate Main hardpoint in the lower hull and an Auxiliary weapon in a dorsal, fully traversable turret.

The vehicle packs by thedanyourmancouldsmelllike can be found in the #uploads channel[discord.gg]. Be sure to follow the installation instructions.

by chasiubao

Stellar Jockeys note: The following two videos were made possible in-engine because chasiubao had been given access to a fork of the engine and could (re)write parts of the game's code as needed. This is why things like spawning in new units at runtime, faction infighting, weapon switching and various other things not achievable with the modkit are possible.

chasiubao’s antics became so powerful that we figured it would be safer to just hire them to help us make Brigador Killers.
by Briggs

Satellite Mind is a large and fairly difficult map set in a high-end district that also just happens to contain one of the NEP's largest communications arrays. You've been contracted to destroy various NEP structures in the district because they are ruining the client's view.

This map was also very much built with powersuits in mind, and more or less functions as my love letter to the Juke, which I would very highly recommend using here (regular boring non-Juke loadouts are included too). Or, if the Juke isn't your thing, feel free to play it in Freelance with your powersuit/small vehicle of choice instead.

by Briggs

This zip contains two maps, Black Fairy and I'm Not In Love - both have been improved on since their original versions last year, such as a slightly larger map, a new area, changes to enemies, new enemies, and even a playable version of one of the new enemies, complete with custom sprites. Of course, this time around there are more than just Spacers lurking in the forest...

Briggs’ maps can be found in the #uploads channel[discord.gg]. Please be sure to follow the installation instructions. When not making maps, Briggs can also be found making other things. Speaking of…

by Briggs
Briggs has also recreated a number of Brigador vehicles in LEGO form. Can you name them all?
by themerchantofbenis
Last and by no means least are the 3D printed works of themerchantofbenis
themerchantofbenis can usually be found in #design_bureau sharing their latest work

Many more such posts can be found in the #becks_best channel on our discord server. You can join it by clicking here[discord.gg].

[[url=https://i.imgur.com/oSEaVG1.png]Teen Spacer Squad cover image[/url] thumbnail by flyingdebris, ED’S header image banner[i.imgur.com] by ArcticST6]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/Brigador_UpArmored_Edition/

You may notice a brief download for Brigador: Up-Armored Edition if you are on Windows. This is because we have marked the Visual C++ Redistributable 2022 (also includes 2019, 2017 & 2015) on the backend for download. Previously we marked the Visual C++ Redistributable 2019 (also includes 2017 & 2015) on the backend for download.

A redistributable is a library of components required to run Windows applications developed with Microsoft Visual C++, such as the Brigador engine.

Assuming Brigador already runs fine on your computer, no action is required on your part.

No changes to Brigador: Up-Armored Edition have been made (sorry).

In this article a number of words are linked to Wikipedia’s glossary of computer graphics[en.wikipedia.org] so that you can follow along without too much interruption.
Often we get feedback from players who wish the camera in Brigador could be moved to see different angles of the various models of the vehicles or buildings seen in the environment. We don't wish to disappoint those players but within the game engine this isn't possible because what you are seeing rendered in the game is not a 3D model[en.wikipedia.org] that can be rotated along any axis. Instead, what you are seeing are sprites[en.wikipedia.org] (more specifically, you are looking at 2D quadrilateral shapes, and what you are also looking at right now is a flat, two-dimensional screen upon which is a moving image that can create the illusion of depth[en.wikipedia.org] through particular techniques).

Ironically, how we even make these sprites is initially by creating 3D models, typically through the process of kitbashing[en.wikipedia.org] (this part of the process we won't go into, and we'll ignore animation rigging[en.wikipedia.org] too, but feel free to check out this timelapse video for the Pantry Boy vehicle from several years ago that you may not have seen before) usually in 3DS Max. The part we're concerned with comes after a 3D model has been decimated, which is a process that reduces the size of the polygon mesh[en.wikipedia.org]. Once this happens, we can give the mesh a texture map[en.wikipedia.org], which is the point where the model starts to more closely resemble the final product.

Before we do that we'll need UV maps[en.wikipedia.org] first. A quick way to explain UV mapping is to imagine an animal that has been skinned: our 3D model is the animal and the skin that has been removed from it and can be laid flat is our UV map. Or if you refer to the cube below.

The program we'll use to do this to our 3D model is called Houdini.

To give our UV maps texture information what we then do is take them from Houdini along with the 3D model that was made in 3DS Max into another powerful program called Substance Painter that allows us to detail the materials[en.wikipedia.org] of the model (for example, how rough a stone looks or how glossy a metallic surface is). We don't have footage of us working on Substance Painter but you can get a good idea of what it's capable of just by looking at this short official video that touches on a lot of what we've just written.At this point we have crafted the shape of our model, peeled off its skin, given it materials to make it resemble the final object, and now we have to take it into a fourth program: Blender. Why we take the textured model into Blender is to do three things. The first is lighting[en.wikipedia.org], which we only do a little of. Blender allows us to influence the light-matter interaction[en.wikipedia.org], or how 3D models are illuminated – a process that is often referred to as baking[en.wikipedia.org]. The second thing we do in addition to this is framing the 3D model from an angle of our choosing – in other words we recreate the same view frustrum[en.wikipedia.org] that the player will see when playing Brigador. The third and final major thing in the Blender step is we also get depth buffer[en.wikipedia.org] information, which tells us how far away the model is with respect to the camera's perspective.
We said at the top that in the game you were technically looking at sprites, not 3D models. The basic reason for that is because the game engine is told to display sprites, which in turn spoofs the appearance of 3D models in an apparent isometric perspective. How we get from 3D models to sprites is via open source software – a version of which comes included with the Brigador Modkit & Map Editor called SJSpritePacker. What this does is takes the original 3D model and (depending on the model's level of detail) captures up to 64 rotations of all that model's positions and animations at a particular resolution[en.wikipedia.org] and creates not one but two sheets of sprites along with the XML data for the sheets. Below you will see the sprite sheets for the loyalist infantry NPC (AKA loy_foot_01 AKA “Dave”), which if you own a copy of the game you can find in the folder Brigador\assets\units\loyalists\foot.
This is where things start to get complicated. In addition, the purpose of the second sprite sheet is it provides z-depth[en.wikipedia.org] information. The XML data that's outputted for both of these sprite sheets by SJSpritePacker is "pointer data" - this is information that tells the sprites to face the correct direction but before it can do so, it's fed into a .json file, which is the file type the game engine reads for the majority of the game's data.

Let’s use another example of how we both use pointer data and slip in an optimization while we’re at it. Here’s a gif of the Arlo agrav from Brigador at twice the usual zoom seemingly turning 360 degrees on the spot. Every single angle of this shot is its own individual sprite, but it is *not* a 3D model rotating in space despite appearances.

Within the game’s own data you’ll find rotations of the Arlo, aka spc_agrav_05. However, the sprites below only point to the right. Why? Because we mirror the left-hand side to save on those frames.

Meanwhile what the XML data itself looks like is a list of coordinates that tell which parts of the images above point to where.

Fun fact: at one point early on in development all of this data had to be manually inputted. Fortunately, our artists nowadays have scripts that export the required rotation data automatically.

Careful readers might be asking why did we go to all the trouble of putting together 3D models, give them detailed materials for their textures, bake in some lighting and not just use those models in the game instead? This question was asked many years ago and was finally answered around the winter of 2012. While Brigador does have a 3D look, it is not 3D. Games that are true 3D are extremely complicated because once you go 3D, now you really are in a situation where the player can view a model from every conceivable angle in a game's environment. Creating such a thing is a considerable undertaking for any studio's engineers and technical artists to deal with, who essentially have to figure out a way for models that are exported in a particular format to be understood by their game engine and also be optimal (i.e. not grind to a crawl and run at single digit FPS). In other words, everything we've talked about so far took five different programs alone: 3DS Max > Houdini > Substance Painter > Blender > SJSpritePacker – and that was only for 2D sprites. So, knowing this, and with respect to the amount of time, people, money and energy it would take to make a true 3D Brigador game, hopefully it's clearer now what some of the reasoning was for Brigador's look.

So Brigador's not true 3D and yet visually the game still looks impressive - so what else is going on? Recall the sprite sheets from before that look black and white. Let's look at another one that's only ever seen at one rotation - the orbital cannon (AKA battery_01 in the game data).
The first variant of the orbital cannon you can think of as the diffuse[en.wikipedia.org] version, while the second is the z-depth[en.wikipedia.org] information visualized as a grayscale image (where the brightness can be considered as an indication of how close the model is to the camera). The purpose of the latter is to inform the lighting[en.wikipedia.org] of the Brigador engine against the sprite, which you can see in the final version of the game itself.
Or in motion...

What should be apparent from the above image and the gif is there is additional lighting being displayed on the sprite itself. As it turns out, the Brigador engine is doing two specific things: deferred shading[en.wikipedia.org] and with it dynamic lighting[en.wikipedia.org] and this is what we've been building up to this whole time.

We encourage you to read up a little on both topics, because it's a rabbit hole of its own, though we will point out here how even for the mid-2010s, applying deferred shading and dynamic lighting to 3D models was a very expensive thing to do in terms of hardware... except we are not using 3D models in the engine! Remember: the sprites are fundamentally just two-dimensional quadrilateral shapes – they are not polygons where every facet would have to be lit properly and because we are able to decouple a scene's geometry from its lighting. Also, because we have the depth information from the z-depth sprite sheet in the XML data, this allows us to put in a bunch of lights into the levels without causing major performance hits and allows the engine to apply dynamic lighting to those sprites. Or, in other words, we can do things like this such as when the effects of an EMP wear off...

Or dynamically light up the player when they fire a railgun shot with the Zeus...

*This* is where the payoff is and why so many people have asked over the years “is this 3D?”. This might also prompt the question of why other developers don’t do this nowadays if it’s so visually effective. The main culprit is the games industry’s pursuit of graphical fidelity in the early 2000s, which meant most people moved on from sprites in favor of full 3D.

So, in summary:

• Nothing is 3D in Brigador – we make spritesheets out of 3D models instead
  
• Brigador's custom game engine draws 2D quadrilaterals on screen which are inexpensive to light
  
• Sprite z-depth information informs the lighting and helps spoof a sense of 3D despite the fixed isometric view

What you've read so far is an abridged version of what goes into what you actually see on your screen when you play Brigador and why it looks the way it does. For our next game, Brigador Killers, what we are changing about the visuals is we are doubling the output resolution of all sprites from their 3D models. In the next two images you will see the first game's masthead Touro Loyalist mech. The first image is from Brigador with the camera set to a 3x zoom...

While this is an image of the Touro at the doubled output resolution at 1x zoom.

...And together in the same scene within an early dev build of Brigador Killers.

We realize that this article may not end requests from people asking for different camera angles, but we hope players will be able to better enjoy a new level of detail that goes into each art asset in both our sequel and our current game. Speaking of which, Brigador is currently on sale.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/

Thanks for reading.
[N.B. [i]This article is based on a previous newsletter from September 2021[stellarjockeys.com] and a Twitter thread on the same topic from June 2022[/i].]