First off, thank you all for your reception to the recent demo. There has been a lot of feedback and even though we can't watch every single stream or respond to every single message, we do look through a lot of it. This month's dev post is to address some of the most common feedback to the Brigador Killers demo as well as explain what we are up to.
Speaking of the demo, the trailer for it uses an edited version of the song "Burned" by Makeup and Vanity Set, which is now up on our YouTube channel.
More songs from the game can be heard in this playlist. The full OST for Brigador Killers contains 40+ tracks and will become available in the next couple of months. For those who have already bought the audiobook through Itch and are expecting the OST, we will be loud about when it will become available (details on that can be read in this post from last year) and you should receive an email notification from Itch when it is updated.
Please note we won't be covering everything in this post – do be sure to check the FAQ that gets updated over time as your questions may already be answered there. Now let's get into it.
By far the most common source of frustration for players in the demo has been the UI/UX. More specifically:
Directly accessing backpacks or containers the player is carrying as well as items on the ground.
Confusion over what goes where (weapons, items, ammo, mounts, etc.).
Legibility on ammo and what weapons even do.
Too much downtime spent in menus.
We've already made a few changes internally that we think will go a long way to addressing some of these points. For instance, the inventory UI will look something like the following:
In general the same rules still apply as before – the player's inventory is always on the left, and whatever is on the right is what is being interacted with (the ground around the player, a vehicle inventory, a container, etc.), but a few things have been changed and not just visual elements like replacing placeholder art:
Inventory tabs have been moved to the top and the player has the ability to drag and drop items into those individual tabs. For example, the player can move grenades into their backpack by dragging and dropping the grenades from a weapon slot straight into the backpack tab at the top, or mousing them over the backpack icon in the MNT column.
Containers currently mounted on the player (in this case the backpack) can be accessed by either clicking the backpack tab at the top or pressing Alt + click on the backpack icon – previously the player had to drop the backpack on the ground to access the contents, but this ended up being too many steps of friction.
Insta-equip weapons by quickly dragging and dropping into inventory – new behavior now exists where if the player is trying to frantically grab a weapon off the ground in order to equip and fire it, what happens now is that weapon instantly goes into any available weapon slot on the player even if the player happens to mouse over any other element on the UI in a particular time period. Before this change the weapon had to go in a gun slot to be equipped, or placed in the correct row in the inventory column to be picked up. In other words, the inventory screen is more "generous" in how the player interacts with it. This is a result of something called exponential smoothing.
This is not the only change coming to the UI. There are two things to pay attention to in this next screenshot.
An edge highlight is applied to everything that is being interacted with like vehicles, bodies on the ground, interactive elements in the garage – anything the player is mousing over when walking about (or while in the inventory) will light up with an edge highlight to indicate where that item is. This edge highlight appears when the player is sufficiently close to something and they are mousing over the interactable element.
Interact popups appear directly over the player's location, instead of what is being moused over. This will be the intended default since it became noticeable to us that players were missing interact prompts that were likely as a result of the prompt overlapping with other elements within the game. The old interact prompt behavior will still be found by toggling the STATIC INTERACT POPUP menu toggle that is being added to SETTINGS > DISPLAY.
As of the time of this post we do not have any changes behind the scenes to show off regarding the point of legibility. These are things like more easily identifying ammo types for different weapons, what a weapon even does, or clearly indicating what size a mount is on a vehicle, but we have some ideas on how to address all of those, such as:
iconography to signpost the sizes/types of weapons, gun slots and mounts.
an additional short description for weapons that briefly outlines their utility which is separate to the lore description e.g. the Libertador pistol will have something like "Single shot, .45 caliber pistol. Poor accuracy with low damage and long reloads."
The last significant change – for the moment – is all vehicles will be given "hands" (these hands are invisible). Prior to this, only some vehicles such as the loader Tuk Tuk could interact with nearby items or containers and pick them up directly off the ground, but most vehicles could not. Our original intent was to deliberately have some amount of friction for the player so that their inventory and vehicle choices have meaning, but that has changed especially in light of how many players we have seen fuss over what to carry and what to leave behind.
We think these changes will help streamline inventory flow for the player and reduce the amount of time spent in those screens.
Enemy vehicles have difficulty pathing around building props, while infantry units have a habit of instantly running away, ganging up on the player, knocking each other over, or blowing themselves up because they don't know to not hipfire rocket launchers in close quarters among other things.
None of this is a surprise to us, because the current enemy AI has long been what we might call "functional" while other things have taken priority during development. We're finally at the point where the AI is getting the attention it needs, but it is going to take a while.
So please continue to enjoy sniping the cop APCs that Austin Powers back and forth between buildings with the Voltan Bog Rifle from afar while it lasts – you may miss those times when they're gone.
The Garage currently contains five gantry pads to park your favorite vehicles, and a separate pad for scrapping vehicles into parts, a pad for building or upgunning vehicles with those parts, and another pad to mount weapons on those vehicles. We are mostly ditching this setup and replacing the non-gantry pads with a superpad that will do all four things (park, scrap, build, mount weapons). It may look something like this.
We haven't yet settled on how the consoles will look or be arranged around the new superpad, but the hope is this revision will further reduce downtime in the garage as well as stop players from losing vehicles they left parked on pads that weren't gantries.
Those of you who have watched Fallout creator Tim Cain's YouTube channel may be familiar with this term. If you are not, please give the linked video a watch as it gives an overview about how game economies work, and what sort of issues developers encounter when they add an economy to their game. The short version is Brigador Killers will have other merchants that will buy and sell lower-tier items, but whether they will make it into the demo is not known.
The current demo still has an unpleasant crash on the Lovell Archer mission that for some users is remarkably consistent. We have since fixed this crash on the Itch build, but it will still be present on the demo for some people. Until the demo is updated and gets rid of this bug you can skip this mission entirely by doing the following:
Start the Lovell Archer mission and finish the brief dialog at the start
Press F1 to open the debug panel.
Click and drag the lower right corner of the window that appears to expand the window.
Check the first box in the top left of this window marked "devmode".
Press F1 again to close the debug panel.
Press the "Home" key on your keyboard - this will immediately "win" the level and take you back to the trailer lot.
After winning the level, press F1 to open up the debug panel again and disable devmode so that you can continue playing normally and proceed to the finale of the OBSTACLE 1 campaign.
Completing the OBSTACLE 1 campaign is not required to access THE GARAGE in the demo right now, but you will miss out on some important tutorial messages (and a fun finale) if you skip it.
As mentioned earlier, those of you who already own the game through Itch will know that it is currently slightly ahead of the demo as it has already received some hotfixes. We expect to update the demo version before Steam Next Fest starts in June that will bring the same fixes and quality of life changes. When this happens all versions of the game will be the same again. More importantly, there will not be a separation of the narrative and the garage - it will just be the one campaign.
After Steam Next Fest we do not expect to update the demo again other than if we need to address potential crashes or severe bugs, because we will be moving towards Early Access. More details on when Early Access is happening will become known when Steam Next Fest ends.
Although some of you have put a lot of time into playing this demo, when the game eventually rolls into early access you are going to have to start the game over fresh. In other words: progress made in the demo will not carry over into the full game. We do not want players to miss important narrative beats, and in terms of how progression works all sorts of weird problems will absolutely occur if importing save data becomes a thing.
We expect to update the Itch build of the game before this week is out to include some of the things mentioned in this post. Meanwhile the demo version is not expected to be updated until June 10th, the week before Steam Next Fest starts. We will have more information about Early Access after Next Fest.
Again, please check this thread for other frequently-asked questions that might already be answered.