Big news, with more coming soon! First, for anyone who's attending PAX East this year, we're showing Brigador once again as part of the Indie Megabooth. We're tucked into a minibooth, so just look around for these two idiots in military jacksuits:



As well as PAX East in Boston I'll be flying to San Francisco next week as part of a little press tour for showing Brigador. The build we lock in for that will also go live for you guys as well, so finally a proper update. The biggest change is that weapons visuals have gotten a complete overhaul, and I've locked in the full roster of 40 playable weapons. I anticipate launching the new build this coming Sunday or Monday, which will add all 40 weapons as playable and some new vehicles that utilize both heavy and small mounts.



The other big thing is that the unlock system is finally going in place. I don't think I'll have time to get in a rudimentary balance pass on money so all the unlockables will just cost $0 for now, and will only include pilots and vehicles. Oh yeah, and pilots are going in too. From a gameplay standpoint the pilots function as mutators for the game; for now pilots determine the starting strength level of enemy units as well as the speed with which enemy strength escalates on subsequent levels. That's currently in the game, and we're hoping to add some other cheeky options there as well.



As a final note, the Brigador soundtrack is nearly complete, and we're really excited to announce that a 2-disc vinyl edition is in the works, the 1st of which will be going up for preorder in the near future. Soon as it's up we'll post an announcement here. In the mean time, get hyped, and thanks for sticking with us-- we're in the home stretch now!



---------

One more thing-- MAVS just popped a new single that you should all listen to, catch it here.

Big news, with more coming soon! First, for anyone who's attending PAX East this year, we're showing Brigador once again as part of the Indie Megabooth. We're tucked into a minibooth, so just look around for these two idiots in military jacksuits:



As well as PAX East in Boston I'll be flying to San Francisco next week as part of a little press tour for showing Brigador. The build we lock in for that will also go live for you guys as well, so finally a proper update. The biggest change is that weapons visuals have gotten a complete overhaul, and I've locked in the full roster of 40 playable weapons. I anticipate launching the new build this coming Sunday or Monday, which will add all 40 weapons as playable and some new vehicles that utilize both heavy and small mounts.



The other big thing is that the unlock system is finally going in place. I don't think I'll have time to get in a rudimentary balance pass on money so all the unlockables will just cost $0 for now, and will only include pilots and vehicles. Oh yeah, and pilots are going in too. From a gameplay standpoint the pilots function as mutators for the game; for now pilots determine the starting strength level of enemy units as well as the speed with which enemy strength escalates on subsequent levels. That's currently in the game, and we're hoping to add some other cheeky options there as well.



As a final note, the Brigador soundtrack is nearly complete, and we're really excited to announce that a 2-disc vinyl edition is in the works, the 1st of which will be going up for preorder in the near future. Soon as it's up we'll post an announcement here. In the mean time, get hyped, and thanks for sticking with us-- we're in the home stretch now!



---------

One more thing-- MAVS just popped a new single that you should all listen to, catch it here.

Want to ask the team questions about the development of Brigador live? Come check out their stream with Volition:

https://www.twitch.tv/dsvolition

Want to ask the team questions about the development of Brigador live? Come check out their stream with Volition:

https://www.twitch.tv/dsvolition

Want to ask the team questions about the development of Brigador live? Come check out their stream with Volition:

https://www.twitch.tv/dsvolition

Want to ask the team questions about the development of Brigador live? Come check out their stream with Volition:

https://www.twitch.tv/dsvolition

We're all looking forward to spring and being able to open up the windows-- the number of computers we have in one room has hit the double digits, so a little ventilation goes a long way.

Anyway, to business! Something we've been working on over the last few weeks is a way to better visualize pathable area. Given the fully destructible nature of the game, it's possible for the player to create corridors through the environment. Up to now however, it hasn't always been clear what areas are walkable or not, or in the case of anti-gravs what areas can be flown over. The varying heights of rubble exacerbates this problem.

Our solution to this problem will look something like this:


Like the directional indicator and most other visualizers will be toggle-able of course. It's not a perfect solution but I'm not sure there is one for this kind of problem which is inherent to isometric games. As we get closer to the end of development there's a lot of these little quality of life things that we're working to address in order to make gameplay as smooth as possible.

Another small but significant change in the pipe is a revision to how smoke and EMP work against enemy units. Currently there's a known tactic (*cough* you know who you are -___-) to deploy smoke and simply stand within it while engaging enemy targets. Since the original implementation of smoke blocks line of site entirely this functionally made the player invisible. Our solution to this problem boils down to allowing the AI to approximate the player's location when they are receiving fire from or can hear the player. So far this seems to work well enough, though we'll continue to tweak it once we start getting player feedback.

On the EMP side it's a small but simple change: boss/captain units will be affected for a shorter duration than other units, possibly as low as 1/2 the duration. Those numbers will be tuned over time.

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Probably the most important part of this post is that we're putting updates on hold until the end of March. The main reason being there's a lot of different logs in the fire right now, and it's much easier for us to temporarily halt the update rotation in order to focus solely on finishing new features. If all goes well, by the time the end of March update rolls around we'll have all 3 factions available to fight, several more playable vehicles and weapons, a first draft on the new soundscape, some new missions, and possibly even a first pass on the unlocks system if we're lucky. In the mean time we'll of course still be active on the threads if you have any questions. Thanks for bearing with us, and we hope you're as excited for what's ahead as we are.

Cheers!

We're all looking forward to spring and being able to open up the windows-- the number of computers we have in one room has hit the double digits, so a little ventilation goes a long way.

Anyway, to business! Something we've been working on over the last few weeks is a way to better visualize pathable area. Given the fully destructible nature of the game, it's possible for the player to create corridors through the environment. Up to now however, it hasn't always been clear what areas are walkable or not, or in the case of anti-gravs what areas can be flown over. The varying heights of rubble exacerbates this problem.

Our solution to this problem will look something like this:


Like the directional indicator and most other visualizers will be toggle-able of course. It's not a perfect solution but I'm not sure there is one for this kind of problem which is inherent to isometric games. As we get closer to the end of development there's a lot of these little quality of life things that we're working to address in order to make gameplay as smooth as possible.

Another small but significant change in the pipe is a revision to how smoke and EMP work against enemy units. Currently there's a known tactic (*cough* you know who you are -___-) to deploy smoke and simply stand within it while engaging enemy targets. Since the original implementation of smoke blocks line of site entirely this functionally made the player invisible. Our solution to this problem boils down to allowing the AI to approximate the player's location when they are receiving fire from or can hear the player. So far this seems to work well enough, though we'll continue to tweak it once we start getting player feedback.

On the EMP side it's a small but simple change: boss/captain units will be affected for a shorter duration than other units, possibly as low as 1/2 the duration. Those numbers will be tuned over time.

-----

Probably the most important part of this post is that we're putting updates on hold until the end of March. The main reason being there's a lot of different logs in the fire right now, and it's much easier for us to temporarily halt the update rotation in order to focus solely on finishing new features. If all goes well, by the time the end of March update rolls around we'll have all 3 factions available to fight, several more playable vehicles and weapons, a first draft on the new soundscape, some new missions, and possibly even a first pass on the unlocks system if we're lucky. In the mean time we'll of course still be active on the threads if you have any questions. Thanks for bearing with us, and we hope you're as excited for what's ahead as we are.

Cheers!

New build is up. Free Mode now has you facing the Corvid Uprising, all 40 different units. Because I didn't have time to do a full 20 strength spawnlist, and because it's expedient to condense that for testing, there's now only 4 strength levels. First map should be around a 2nd map in strength, followed by ~str 6, str 11, str 18. If you can beat the 4th map and beyond, especially with any kind of regularity, I want to know about it in the discussion threads. How often, how many times you did it, and what equipment you were using. Also the smoke grenade nerf is coming next week so if you know what's good for you don't do the 'huff your own fumes and stomp everyone who comes in' trick because it's going to get you killed once the next week's build goes up.

In the future, the plan is to have either dedicated runs with this speed of difficulty escalation or use the pilots as mutators for things like run difficulty. The latter is the ideal scenario though it's also the one that takes more work, we'll see. Either way though we definitely want to make it so that if you just want to jump in at really high difficulty, even for the beginning of a full Solo Nobre run, you'll be able to.

I'm going to power through revising the Loyalists and getting the Spacers in as well, at which point you guys will finally have all 3 factions to play with. Once those are all in, I'll go back through the player weapons and recalibrate them based on the variance between factions. My hope is to have all 3 factions in by the beginning of March, and by the beginning of April to have all playable vehicles, weapons, and abilities in. Buckle your pants, because new content is going to come streaming in from now on, and I'm going to need all the feedback I can get.

Cheers.


- DEVELOPMENT LOG - (check steam page for full log)
*Please bear in mind Brigador is a work in progress.*

2 / 18 / 2016 - Current Update:
- Added Corvid enemy faction to Free Mode, removed Loyalist enemy faction.
*note* for testing purposes this is a heavily compressed spawn progression, increasing up to max difficulty at 4th stage. Any levels beyond that will repeat that difficulty.

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2 / 4 / 2016 - Previous Update:
- Added substations and panic walls
- Added 4 new maps & run