Our first game Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is 68% off for the Steam Spring Sale 2025. This is an increase from our previous discounts meaning the game is being sold at its lowest ever price on Steam.

This discount also extends to the game's bundle which includes all four Makeup And Vanity Set albums (3+ hours of music) and the audiobook version of the game's novelization.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/13405/Brigador_Deluxe_Edition/

Speaking of the novelization, you can listen to the first half of the sequel to that novel entirely for free. The details are in this post from the Brigador Killers news hub.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/903930/view/506196542647961544

Lastly, for a limited time only, the author has kindly made the Kindle versions of both Brigador and Brigador Killers: Pilgrim completely free (Amazon account required). You have until March 17 2025 23:59 GMT to claim the free copies, after which they will return to their intended retail price.

Enjoy the Spring Sale and let us know in the comments if you've picked up something good - we're always curious to know what our audience has been playing.

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

• 1x Arlo
  
• A selection of 4x Varlet, 2x Lineman & 2x Roadie Tuk Tuks
  
• A selection of 2x Troubadour, 2x Viper & 2x Pantry Boy treadbikes
  
• 1x Treehouse

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

Here’s the price list for these models:

Prices are not the same for the four miniatures due to the different amounts of pewter required. If you add three of any miniature to your cart you will get 15 USD off per trio (this is capped at 12 minis/60 USD per order). In addition, we are running a holiday discount starting now. Click here or enter HOLIDAYS2024 at checkout to get 20% off your entire order.

Please note that the 20% holiday discount will last until Tuesday December 31st 2024, after which the discount will expire. The three of a kind discount on minis is permanent.


First, we are already aware that the Arlo build may be difficult for newcomers and ask that you please read the miniature assembly guide before contacting us - manipulation and/or trimming of a couple of parts may be necessary to complete the model.

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

Future revisions of the Arlo model will make it less difficult to insert the lower hull into the drive ring, but these are not yet in production.

Second, not only is the Treehouse the most complicated model we have ever put up for sale, but there are also only fifty Treehouses available for purchase. It is a very heavy model made up of dozens of parts. It is also very likely that any aspiring Treehouse builder will need to lean on their Corvid wits during assembly to complete it. This model is made mostly for fun (and profit) and unless there is extreme amounts of interest, we do not expect to make more of these if and when they sell out.

Finally, we are still unable to ship to destinations in the United Kingdom, Ukraine or Russia. Please do not attempt to to make an order to an address in these countries - they will simply not be processed and you will be refunded as soon as possible.

If you encounter any issues with any of your purchases, email us at team@stellarjockeys.com and we’ll sort you out.

In case you missed it, the model-making process was explained in this old post, so the rest of this article will detail the contents of each 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. Otherwise, please enjoy the rest of the article.


Arlo fully assembled, painted and mounted to a base (base not included)

The Arlo spacer agrav has a Jericho vortex cannon for its main hardpoint and a Lockdown machine gun for its small hardpoint. Each blister pack contains one Arlo, unassembled and unpainted with an optional display stand peg.


Assembled, the height of the Arlo is approximately 1.61 inches tall, or about 4 cm.

Varlets on the left and front, Roadie on the right, Lineman in the back

The Varlet corvid Tuk Tuk has two small hardpoints and a choice of five weapons for those slots: a Bonesaw machine gun, a Pinch rocket launcher, a Faker mortar, a Donkey recoilless rifle and a Carlos recoilless rifle. Each blister pack contains four Varlets, two Linemen and two Roadies, unassembled and unpainted.


Assembled, the Varlet is approximately 0.87 inches tall, or about 2.2 cm, while the Lineman is approximately 2.44 inches tall, or about 6.2 cm.

Left to right: Varlet, Lineman, Roadie

Vipers in the middle, Troubadours and Pantry Boys at the sides

The Treadbikes pack contains three pairs of Troubadours, Vipers and Pantry Boys, unpainted and unassembled. Both the Troubadour and the Viper have an auxiliary hardpoint for a Confessor autocannon, Crambo chain gun or Chuffer chemical projector, and a small hardpoint for a Carlos recoilless rifle, a Temblor laser, a Donkey recoilless rifle, a Pinch rocket launcher, a Bonesaw machine gun, or a Faker mortar.

The Pantry Boy has a small hardpoint and can use the same set of small weapons as the Troubadour and Viper, but for its turret hardpoint has a choice of either a Bully laser or a Mãe Dois machine gun.


Assembled, the tallest treadbike is the Pantry Boy at approximately 1.3 inches tall (or about 3.3 cm), while the Pantry Boy and Viper are about 1.1 inches (~2.8 cm) .

Left to right: Troubadour, Viper, Pantry Boy


The Treehouse pack contains a Treehouse with an 88 cannon and a Ploughman chemical projector, unpainted and unassembled. It is made up of 42 parts. Here are most of them.


Here is an exploded version of the Treehouse model.


Assembled, the Treehouse is approximately 2.87 inches tall (7.3 cm).

We have updated our assembly guide to include the new models and strongly recommend that you follow it. The Treehouse alone had to be broken up into three sections. Good luck.

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

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

Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is on sale this week as part of the War Child Armistice 2024 Steam Sale along with several other titles. This year is the 9th Armistice Steam Sale and once again brings 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 from November 7th until 10:00 PST November 12th and a percentage of each copy sold will go to War Child to fund projects in 14 countries across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

The full list of participating games can be found here. You can read more about War Child's work here.

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

Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is on sale until August 12, 2024. Though we are no longer in active development of our first game and are currently working on the sequel, we still put up a few posts. In that spirit, the following is a collection of things for both the newcomers and old timers.


Here is a short beginner’s guide to playing the game and becoming accustomed to the various hazards you might encounter in Solo Nobre.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/274500/view/3226274956656889915
In addition, a lot of first-time players wonder about the difference between Campaign and Freelance, which was explained here.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/274500/view/3893988945398008047
If you require an even more detailed guide, consider checking out The Solo Nobre Murder Spree Handbook by one of our users.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=535841178
If you are wondering what the Deluxe Edition of Brigador contains, purchasing it will add to your account:

• Four albums of original electronic music by Makeup And Vanity Set
  
• The Brigador audiobook written by Brad Buckmaster and narrated by Ryan Cooper

The first two albums of music (Volumes I & II) are heard in game, but the other two albums (the Uplink EP and the Up-Armored EP) were composed after release and are not heard in game. You can listen to all of the albums before purchase by checking out MAVS’ bandcamp page here.

As for the audiobook, we have uploaded the first eleven chapters of it to our YouTube channel.

Right now the entire audiobook is available at 69% off on Steam, though if you prefer you can acquire it through Audible.

The text version of the audiobook is not available on Steam, but it can be purchased from https://shop.stellarjockeys.com/products/brigador-by-brad-buckmaster-ebook. A Kindle version is also available.


For those of you that crave more Brigador - maybe check out the modding documentation...
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2464626495
...and the list of community-made and community-approved mods.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2963636132
If they inspire you - go ahead and start making your own levels in Tiled! The modding documentation should be enough to get you started but if you’re stuck figuring out how to place props, there’s even a #maps-and-modding channel on our Discord server. Remember: crashing into gas stations is simple; crashing the game is much harder.

If you are wondering what inspired the game, we wrote a post on that here.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/274500/view/3279206839055741611
If you wanted to know how the game was localized into several different languages, you can read about that.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/274500/view/3452600498056903563
If you are curious as to how a game that is not 3D looks 3D, that was also covered.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/274500/view/3662024223190614902
We also dug back further into the archives to reveal the initial beginnings of both Stellar Jockeys and concepts for the game itself:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/274500/view/3691305861982422369
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/274500/view/4181099593203652156


...Then congratulations! If you want us to keep doing such things, tell a friend we’re on sale!

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

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[/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.


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! 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/

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

• 2x Buckmaster
  
• 2x Fork
  
• A powersuit selection of 4x Mongoose, 2x Dorothy & 2x Pellinore
  
• 24x Loyalist Infantry 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. Otherwise, please enjoy the rest of the article.


Buckmaster on the right, Fork on the left

The 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 left

Fork on the left, Buckmaster on the right

The 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 right

Front: Mongooses, Middle: Pellinores, Back: Dorothys

The 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 behind


The 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 and we look forward to seeing what people do with the new store additions.

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.

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

The latest addition to our merchandise store is three pewter minis of vehicles from Brigador: the Canmore, the Broadsword and the signature Touro 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. 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

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 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 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) 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. 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 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.