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Fresh from the devstream today, this is what happens when you let a designer watch an artist model something cool - DESIGNER ART A KA-50 with Harleys for wheels  An Alouette 2 turned into a battle-trike trapped in a machine shop in Solo Nobre please send help
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Feb 28, 2015 02:57
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Hey look, I even printed up that test model in the office to prove it works! not really
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Feb 28, 2015 18:18
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Gooble, so cool to see proof that dynamesh and decimate is a workable path for 3d printing, gives me a lot of hope. I think the first attempt will be the mech from the load/splash screen, in fact I could export it in exactly that pose. Very cool. Also SilentW thanks for posting those here, that was a fun stream. Still haven't finished the hilarious beast of a vehicle design, right now I need to turn my attention to long-suffering audio design. Like a lot of people, I think the very best sound design in action games is probably Battlefield. Come to find out, some of my hunches were right, though their system is even more detailed than I thought it would be. In BF3 for example, each gun firing sound effect is actually the composite of 4+ sounds, some of them swapped out contextually (IE, different sound reflections for different environments): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3462ZYJ28A&t=223s (don't know what's up with this guy's choice of background music for a video about sound production, but whatever) While we're not going to have the wherewithal to get this detailed at all, it's a really cool look into sound production and some of these elements are clearly best practice, and I will try what I can to emulate them. We've got a stupid lot of guns, so taking a component approach is a much smarter way of doing things. In other news, still experimenting with pilot image presentation, lighting/color toning. Here's a test shot, sorry the face model is so old. From ZBrush. 
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Mar 2, 2015 18:20
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Still chipping away guys. Given that Brigador has been in full time development for over two years, it's no surprise that some of the assets produced early in that cycle needed to be replaced. Over the last several months we've done piecemeal replacements and additions to fill in gaps that became apparent. The most recent changes came in today for the rubble spites. If you compare the old and new versions shown here, other than some variations in height the most important aspect is that the new tiles spill out from a single tile. Since we have really solid depth sorting thanks to the use of zdepth maps, there's no issue with props spilling into each other, and so we realized that we can have interconnecting props or in this case, rubble that spills out from the tile of destruction in which it's placed. It's a seemingly small thing but it goes a loooong way towards breaking the visual grid-- if everything is too rigidly aligned then environments can feel stiff. OLD v NEW:   In addition to the new rubble we've added farm related tiles-- crops, balers, fences, even a red barn. Gauss and I grew up in rural Illinois so it'd be remiss of us not to include a little slice of home into Brigador. The crops and hay bales have their own destruction states, so yes you can drive your tank through a cornfield and create a flat path through it now.  These little setpieces turned out to be easy and very fun to put together: 
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Mar 11, 2015 10:48
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An Illinois-home dev team? Definitely psyched now. Love the farm stuff, what's the chance of cows being a unit to blow up/milk/eat?
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Mar 11, 2015 17:49
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Ringo Star Get posted:An Illinois-home dev team? Definitely psyched now. Love the farm stuff, what's the chance of cows being a unit to blow up/milk/eat? Table everything and make this a feature, please.
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Mar 11, 2015 17:54
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dyzzy posted:Table everything and make this a feature, please. We talked over how we might add cows to the game. If there is time we can add them, and it will be awesome. In the mean time I give you the 15MW Maser, aka the Microwave Gun, aka "Mr. Crispy". Against structures and shielded targets, it's next to useless:  However, against unshielded targets like infantry, civilians, (cows), or targets that have had their shielding depleted...   
anthony patch fucked around with this message at 11:54 on Mar 12, 2015 |
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Mar 12, 2015 11:47
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It's not what you were demo-ing, but I like that fast laser firing from the tower tank thing.
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Mar 12, 2015 16:21
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Skyscraper posted:It's not what you were demo-ing, but I like that fast laser firing from the tower tank thing. We think it's pretty fun in practice, too. The tower tanks have some nasty artillery, but that's pretty easy to dodge, what's not so easy is staying out of the reach of that point defense laser, it will really shred you in short order. But it's a fixed hardpoint to the front of the hull, which means if you can keep to the sides or the back of the tank, you can take it out without getting destroyed in the process. We try and keep most of the big units in this scheme, a sort of "boxer" paradigm. Either you stay out of the reach of their big arms and wear them out, or you get in so close they can't work you over. Different vehicles are better at different approaches. Speaking of which, the "farm" type map my brother put together is a totally different beast than the existing maps, which is exciting. Wide open fields, low sight lines. Suddenly you can really open up with high speed vehicles, and even the smaller, stealth-oriented vehicles do well. It's a surprising reversal for the big guys. Heavy mechs do great in tighter, urban confines with a lot of tall buildings and walls to take damage, but also allows them to constantly bring to bear their stomp attacks and heavy weapons at optimal range. It was a pleasant surprise to walk into this cornfield piloting a heavy mech and realize that suddenly, my smoke grenades were going to be even more important to keeping me alive. We are continuing to build maps that hopefully explore other interesting challenges for different vehicles and tactics. Also, as stated, we use a freeware editor for our level editor, and we support custom maps. For anyone who's built, or tried to build a CS or TF2 map or the like, and looking down the barrel of months and months of development and tweaking... let me tell you, it is awesome to be able to build a fully polished map in 3-4 days.
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Mar 12, 2015 19:55
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gauss posted:point defense laser Does that mean it takes out missiles and suchlike as well?
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Mar 12, 2015 20:05
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gauss posted:Also, as stated, we use a freeware editor for our level editor, and we support custom maps. For anyone who's built, or tried to build a CS or TF2 map or the like, and looking down the barrel of months and months of development and tweaking... let me tell you, it is awesome to be able to build a fully polished map in 3-4 days. Please make sure level editing is available out of the gate. My only disappointment with the recent release of Hotline Miami 2 was the fact that I still have to wait for the level tools.
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Mar 12, 2015 20:30
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Skyscraper posted:Does that mean it takes out missiles and suchlike as well? This is not a thing, as far as I know. In fact 'missiles' aren't even a weapon paradigm.
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Mar 12, 2015 20:55
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Not having an Itano circus option seems like a terrible decision and humongous missed opportunity. 
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Mar 12, 2015 21:11
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Lemon Curdistan posted:Not having an Itano circus option seems like a terrible decision and humongous missed opportunity. I don't feel strongly enough to express discontent, but Lemon is correct. EDIT: But someone who likes mecha enough to have seen Short Peace probably already considered this, like, a lot. Skyscraper fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Mar 12, 2015 |
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Mar 12, 2015 21:46
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We have indeed talked about it. The trouble is that everything has an implementation cost, and we don't currently have the infrastructure in for self-guided projectiles like that-- would be a lot of new code for a few weapons at most. And just as important, the missile bloom kinda thing doesn't fit aesthetic we've established for Brigador. Only so much we can fit in a single project. So yeah, sorry 
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Mar 13, 2015 04:45
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In the dark future, nobody builds missiles anymore, because point defense lasers would just shoot them down.
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Mar 13, 2015 11:03
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Skyscraper posted:In the dark future, nobody builds missiles anymore, because point defense lasers would just shoot them down. C&C Generals, too.
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Mar 14, 2015 06:27
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anthony patch posted:We have indeed talked about it. The trouble is that everything has an implementation cost, and we don't currently have the infrastructure in for self-guided projectiles like that-- would be a lot of new code for a few weapons at most. And just as important, the missile bloom kinda thing doesn't fit aesthetic we've established for Brigador. Only so much we can fit in a single project. Ah, well, that's a shame. Maybe for Brigador 2. 
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Mar 14, 2015 15:39
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Gooble Rampling posted:Please make sure level editing is available out of the gate. My only disappointment with the recent release of Hotline Miami 2 was the fact that I still have to wait for the level tools. This is one of the benefits of using an off the shelf freeware editors to use for the game. We had to fit some round pegs in square holes, and we will need to put up a little video guide for level editing, but it'll be ready when the game ships. You could make levels with it right now, actually, same as the team. Everything you need comes with the game in its current state. And I think I already mentioned, it's so enjoyable to make a level in a couple of days, instead of months and months. Even a newbie could turn out a fully featured small map in a few days, so long as they understood the basic conventions that make sure the level loads and is winnable.
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Mar 24, 2015 06:53
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Gauss when you gonna send us a bunch of alpha keys. For YCS' sake.
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Mar 24, 2015 20:08
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Still a ways out from pulling in new testers guys, but we'll probably do so once all the content is in and we're ready to really put the game through its paces. Mean time, here's a big progress update. Someday I'll be better at regular posting ( ;._.) For starters, we're getting the last units of the last faction finished out. Really exciting to close in on having all art assets finished. Units are 95% of the way there, as are environment elements. The biggest art gap that remains are FX sprites-- we realized that we were blowing our sprite budget on big, high frame explosions, which look nice enough the first few times they're used, but when you have only a handful of explosions for every effect in the game it gets old reeeeal fast. So instead we're redoing all those sprites to consist of individual elements: shockwave, dirt kick, smoke plume, explosive blast, whatever else we think of. I'll show the new system off here as soon as we have enough of the new component sprites finished. In the mean time, new vehicles and other stuff! Like these two!   These are both Corvid units, the guy on the left being a late game brawler you can go up against, and the 'killdozer' on the right is designed to box the player in like the pink demons of olde (doom). We have directional armor in the game that works well, but realized we hadn't built enough units that really took advantage of that system. -------------------- I'm still plugging away at getting all the guns in; the various mines (4 out of the total 50 weapons) won't be going in for a while yet-- they're prototyped but the code needs to get cleaned up before going in permanently-- but everything else should be up soon. UI is still a ways out from us embedding proper breakdowns for these weapons into the game itself; the whole UI was hacked in to begin with and as such needs to be completely rewritten (which we're moving onto after the volumetric lighting gets tidied up, so if all goes well new UI should start going in towards the end of April). In the mean time, here's a sampling of the new guns... Here's a shot of the heavy mount MIRV artillery doin some damage. Long time to target, but deals the most damage of any weapon in a single volley:  Heavy mount, flamethrower type. Notice how the unit doesn't ignite while the shield is still up. This weapon has the smallest AoE size of the flamethrower type weapons, but targets hit with the weapon will continue to burn for high damage if you managed to land sustained fire. This was a fun one to design and build:  [/url]Heavy mount, another launcher/artillery type (we'll be sure the final art makes for an impressive light show, and sufficiently meaty bass when firing). It's a blunt instrument-- hit practically anything with it, and it is no longer there. It's loud, but that's probably not something you'll be worrying about if you're packing one of these. Just watch your ammunition; large shell size means a relatively small magazine. Difference between this and the MIRV is that you fire at a much shallower arc-- much shorter time to target, but you don't get the same high clearance over the environment. Which is fine, because you'll just blow up any environment in the way anyway:  Heavy mount MG. We've already got a couple weapons that are ostensibly flechette based (need new art and sound to help reinforce that), but we've yet to do a canister round variant. I'd been reading about how US forces in Vietnam deployed a "Beehive" round. From the wiki: "Intended for direct fire against enemy troops, the M546 was direct fired from a near horizontally leveled 105 mm howitzer[2] and ejected 8000 flechettes during flight by a mechanical time fuze." We can't handle 8000 projectiles, but we can approximate. Extremely high velocity, and the flechettes go through practically anything. Plus, it's fun to turn infantry to mincemeat with it:  Last one of the heavy mount weapons-- I've showed this beam weapon here before, but now we've got a nice new sparking effect added in. We realized we could tie gib spawning in to weapon impacts. By creating a secondary memory cache for those that's separate from what's used for spawning gibs off destroyed vehicles and props, we can maintain a very high cycle rate and not totally wipe environment destruction:  Moving down to the main mounts, the 240mm Siege Mortar fires Disruption rounds, aka "glitter bombs". Shells packed with a mixture of various magnetic filaments and a small explosive charge (LORE ALERT) can completely disrupt even hardened shielding with a single volley (uses the same gib spawning effect as the laser above). A favorite for combating Spacers who eschew heavy armor plating in exchange for stronger shielding and armament, though still very effective against these heavy Loyalist units:  Also, rockets. Main mount, launcher/artillery type. Art is temp, borrowed the old MG muzzle flash to differentiate it from the cannons and MGs until we render new FX sprites. It can sustain the rate of fire shown in the gif with only moderate accuracy bloom. Very high DPS, but you'll empty your entire magazine very quickly-- the idea is that you're trading total magazine damage output for really high burst damage. Great for hit and run, or if you plan on swapping out for a new weapon soon. It's possible to use it efficaciously though, esp. if paired with with a high total magazine damage weapon like an MG:  -------------------- Ok, enough guns. Let's talk about lights. Here's an old screenshot of the game (click for a full size version):  If you look at the lights, you can see that there's no atmospheric scattering-- in this old model, you could have a really bright light shining, but if no surface is hit then there may as well be no light there at all. The lights only lit other surfaces, and not the air. Compare that with our new model:  Thanks to the scattering effect, you can actually see the shape of the light in space. This gives us a whole lot more flexibility with how we light spaces, and what kind of global lighting conditions we can support in the game. Also it just looks way cooler 8) Here's an early test for the new effect. As we redo the game's lighting to account for this new effect we'll continue to refine it (again click image for full size):  Something that's been a known issue but which we hadn't thought of an easy solve for was how the 'bulbs' of lights aren't actually bright, even with the new volumetric lighting in place. Take a look here (click for full size):  The image on the left is what the lights currently look like. When you look at oncoming traffic at night you can see the beams and most particularly the headlights themselves-- we didn't have that. What we realized though is that we could just attach a tiny fill light to the same mount points as the conical beams, which illuminates the headlights themselves. The only extra step we need to take is make sure that the small fill light is color matched to the main light-- if it's just white light you get the middle example. -------------------- So that's all the progress of the last ~4 weeks. AI, UI, sound, maps, and unit balancing remains. Lots of code, lots of content authoring, but a whole lot less than we used to have. Thanks for reading 
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Apr 2, 2015 20:34
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Brendan Rodgers posted:Gauss when you gonna send us a bunch of alpha keys. For YCS' sake. More important question will Brigador feature a Slut Mech??
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Apr 2, 2015 20:38
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Hey man, I didn't want to gloss over it, but I did just put a killdozer in the game (as just posted)
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Apr 2, 2015 21:32
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Sweet Jesus this game looks good. I love the progress posts you guys make here.
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Apr 2, 2015 21:38
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Zombie Samurai posted:Sweet Jesus this game looks good. I love the progress posts you guys make here. Agreed, every post is chock-full of awesome information and gifs. I love the Corvid hobo mech and the lighting especially looks amazing. More games need crazy environmental destruction like this too.
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Apr 2, 2015 22:56
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gauss posted:killdozer
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Apr 2, 2015 23:26
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maybe, and yes.
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Apr 3, 2015 03:48
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Any game that has something called "Killdozer" in it, is a good game in my books.
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Apr 3, 2015 06:29
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anthony patch posted:maybe, and yes. Ooooooh.
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Apr 3, 2015 16:21
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Michaellaneous posted:Any game that has something called "Killdozer" in it, is a good game in my books. It even looks like the real thing!
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Apr 3, 2015 17:32
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Glimpse posted:It even looks like the real thing!  Dear god what the gently caress.
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Apr 4, 2015 00:29
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Michaellaneous posted:
 Holy poo poo this game looks incredible--the Mechwarrior 3050 vibes are doing things to me I don't fully understand.
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Apr 4, 2015 06:21
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Michaellaneous posted:
This makes me so sad. Yeah I get serious early (fun) clunky mechwarrior vibes from this as well. Any chance of a video of a mission or something sometime in the near future? I would love to see and hear it in action in one package.
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Apr 9, 2015 16:38
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Working on finalizing the core gameplay loop currently-- once that's done along with some tidying up of FX and sound we'll put out a new trailer showing a run of an entire level. As it is right now we're in this weird middle space where a bunch of elements are nearly but not quite finished... Soon though...
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Apr 9, 2015 22:07
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Good gods this game looks utterly amazing, so much boom, so many lasers.
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Apr 12, 2015 06:49
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IT IS TIME TO BUILD THE SPACEPORT. Brigador stream in 15 minutes-- 7pm Central-- for any who want to join in. http://www.twitch.tv/stellarjockeys/ 
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May 8, 2015 00:47
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I still can't believe the devs for this game are from my adopted home state of IL 
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May 8, 2015 16:36
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This game is making me very hard
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May 8, 2015 22:55
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anthony patch posted:IT IS TIME TO BUILD THE SPACEPORT. It's not just map editing, there's some really excellent gameplay in here too.
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May 9, 2015 03:36
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Let's talk about UI, starting with booting up the game. The current splash screen is final art. One thing we don't have to worry about.  Following that, something we've been throwing around is to have the entire Brigador contract come up as someone boots the game for the first time. Press space or something to cycle to the next page-- we want people to actually be able to read this if they want, otherwise they can just zoom through it-- but they can't actually go into the game unless they accept. Pressing 'N' could just kick out to desktop with a special message thrown in. I really like this idea, but the main concern of course is that we might ostracize some people either because they don't realize it's a fake contract or they don't appreciate getting booted to desktop if they decline. We'll go ahead with implementing it I think, and we can pull it if needs be.  (full contract here, yes I actually wrote this whole thing out...) From there we need a proper menu screen done in the same format as the rest of the game selection elements. Playing the game will be "Launch" or "Fulfill Contract" or something, and then there'll be the rest of the roll-out: options, credits, review contract, exit etc. Not 100% sure yet on how to put that part together, but we'll get that blocked out soon enough. Then we jump to the actual game selection elements. We'll be handling progression in a two-tiered fashion: unlocking and purchasing. You'll begin the game with 1 or 2 pilots, a single vehicle, a single set of weapons to go with it, and a defensive ability (probably the smoke launcher). Every item you can pick in this menu must first be bought, all the way from pilots to the runs themselves. Earn cash by completing objectives and collateral damage during a run, but you have to make it out alive to collect. Some equipment will be better than the rest, it's one of the ways we're allowing players to modulate difficulty in the game since we're not doing explicit difficulty levels. Pilots have no effect on combat, but function as the limiter for unlocking new elements in the game. Since we don't want to overwhelm new players with a huge variety of equipment to purchase, most of it will just show up in menus as "LOCKED" or "REDACTED", and possibly also mention the pilot that must be purchased to unlock. Buying pilots will unlock more pilots as well as unlock a set of equipment for purchase-- this way we can trickle in new variety, and shown through the pilot descriptions the players will have some degree of choice regarding what they unlock when. End of the line unlocks will be really hard vehicles like the Mongoose and Troubadour, as well as novelty profiles like the Death pilot. Final selection menu should look something like this:  Purchasing and unlocking new equipment, along with providing access to those elements for the player, is also planned as the metric for progress. The intent is to have new opponents / gameplay trickle in as you spend more time with the game. Tying this to unlocks rather than total money earned makes it easier to fine tune the system over the time and cushions it from the many times we'll invariably change the price of purchasing unlocks and the bounty payout for successful runs. Also, it doesn't punish players who save up a large sum early on for purchasing a single very expensive item.There's still a lot to work out yet but we're in the midst of building the new UI now, and as we get eyes on prototypes we'll be able to shift the design as needed. At the end of every run, successful or not, we'll have a closeout screen that spells out the various stats and rewards. A big motivation here is that we want to pay money out to the player for any skillful play. Survive a long run? Bonus. Kill everyone? Bonus. Kill no one? Bonus etc. There's few things more frustrating than coming up with a fun and compelling way to engage with a game as a player and have that either not be recognized or not be supported by the game. Obviously there are limitations to what we can handle, but it is something we're aware of. In order to enforce the risk/reward mechanic of pushing to a further level vs hitting the spaceport and banking your money, the vast majority of money a player earns on a run will be cancelled out. The "premature death fee" zeroes out everything you've earned if you die during a run-- can't take it with you. As a consolation for dying though you get a token amount added for "funeral expenses", though much of that still gets eaten by the contract processing fee and he currency exchange fee. Love having your shadowy overlords being scrupulously unscrupulous about stuff like this.  Moving away from UI, we've got some new explosions and weapon effects in the pipe. The old ones are over a year old at this point, so long overdue for having another look at it. Here's a sample of new muzzle flashes:  and in action:  In the above image you'll notice I disabled the tracers; this is another element we're mulling over, having tracer rounds actually be scattered through a magazine as opposed to giving all rounds fired that really high visibility. Personally I enjoy having barely visible projectiles for the standard ballistic weapons, but it does add additional difficulty to the learning curve. Machine guns particularly are good for teaching new players how the aiming mechanics work, but losing the tracers reverses that and makes them much harder to learn. Something to consider. We also have just added a new flare gun "defensive" ability. For when you really, really want to get people's attention. It's best paired with very fast vehicles or very large guns:  Finishing out the weapons talk, after a lot of talking and testing we've cut weapons swapping during combat. it would take a lot of time to properly balance, present the UI and make it legible, and most importantly, this is a game where you unlock more and more guns, 50 of them, and encourage you to pick interesting combinations of two of them. Makes no sense to put all that emphasis on choosing your loadout only to allow players to randomly toss one of them away in the middle of the run. Loose ammo pickups from dead enemies will remain though, because that's fun. On a final note, we've been working on new pilot portraits for the game, which fulfill a couple of roles. Most importantly they provide the player with an identification point-- cool little portraits to pick as "the person you are inside the mech". As explained earlier they also serve as a gating method, a tidy and fun way to dole out the enormous number of guns and vehicles in the game rather than just dumping it out on the player like a trash can. Each pilot should also come with their own little story vignette-- a little bit about who they are (can just be a sentence or two), and why they became a brigador, someone who sold out their city/country/planet for money. We like the idea that the first couple of pilots you unlock are just complete dirtballs; they don't cost much to unlock because they're some combination of desperate or hard up. Late unlock pilots are the more heroic types, ones more generally associated as the action hero type, but who are still traitors now because everyone has a price. Which is probably a line that will show up in a trailer somewhere... Here's a schlub who just got a fresh kicking around but then goes for a contract. "What have i got to lose?" as part of the a little story vignette. Hopefully his face says most of it already though.  Compare that with an enterprising pilot in the Loyalist military. Promising soldier who's willing to seize an opportunity when it's presented to her.  That's it for now. Still working hard on this. anthony patch fucked around with this message at 21:59 on May 11, 2015 |
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May 11, 2015 21:38
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