Brigador Killers 如何将炸毁建筑变为策略的一部分

Interviewed by

15 October 2026

Stellar Jockeys explains how Brigador Killers combines bullet penetration, systemic building collapse, reactive physics, readable VFX, and a Blender-based sprite pipeline.

Brigador Killers substantially expands the destructive tactical sandbox of its cult-classic predecessor, allowing players to fight on foot, commandeer vehicles, assemble a private arsenal, and tear through its dense urban environments. Moving the action closer to the ground also required Stellar Jockeys and Gausswerks to rethink the scale and detail of nearly everything around the player, from handheld weapons and vehicle physics to collapsing buildings, debris, fire, smoke, and environmental damage.

The sequel’s destruction is more than visual spectacle. Railgun rounds can penetrate an entire city block, damaged structures can cause neighboring sections to collapse, and vehicles can careen into surrounding props using physically simulated collision volumes. 

In this interview, Stellar Jockeys explains how it evolved Brigador’s relatively universal destruction states into hundreds of bespoke “pyro” setups, how its expanded art team uses Plasticity, Blender, Substance Painter, and EmberGen, and why sprite-based rendering remains central to the project’s visual identity and performance.

You can play the game for yourself now in Early Access on Steam.

Brigador has always been strongly associated with overwhelming firepower and destructible environments. For Brigador Killers, how did the team approach evolving the destruction tech from the original game?

Stellar Jockeys: First, the best tech is finding talent and hiring them. A Brigador modder did amazing things with the first game's effects, and for his crimes, Josh is working his magic for the sequel as a full team member.

Destruction assets were mostly universal in Brigador: destroy a pipeline or a building, and they all get switched into generic rubble states. Huge swathes of props and vehicles have now been painstakingly given unique effect stacks we call "pyros", as a way to organize particles, sprites, and lighting/sound effects triggered all together. Whereas the vast majority of Brigador pointed at the same handful of pyro files, Josh has authored a staggering number of unique pyro set-ups for even the smallest props. We knew with a much higher resolution game, and closer in camera, we'd have to step up our game.

When players see a building collapse, vehicles explode, debris scatter, or a street get torn apart, what systems are working together under the hood to make that destruction feel reactive and satisfying?

Stellar Jockeys: We've got physically simulated collision volumes for cars for careening and bouncing off of props now, both hilarious and adding some amazing unpredictability. We've got a refined bullet penetration system from the first game, which really helps sell it when a railgun slug passes through an entire city block. There's a more sophisticated damage fall-off model for explosions, and a systemic collapse system so that if nearby building pieces have been damaged or collapsed, adjacent tiles can begin to collapse as well. All of these working together mean a lot more chaos, but in ways that make intuitive sense to the player.

How do you balance destruction as spectacle with destruction as gameplay? In other words, when is blowing something apart just cool visual feedback, and when does it meaningfully change tactics, navigation, cover, or mission flow?

Stellar Jockeys: Feedback, in a word. Since Brigador, we play different effects based on how much damage you're doing. When the entire level is destructible, and the guns range from handgun to tank gun, it's also really important to make sure that the carnage the player is dishing out is properly reflected in the effects. A ton more specific gibs, blood effects, smoke plumes, and muzzle flashes are in this game.

Also, committing to fully destructible levels means that many of the classic gating mechanisms from other games simply won't work for us, so it changes everything about how weapons, levels, and enemies are conceived of and executed. Mouseholing, a real-world tactic of tunneling hidden inside of urban buildings to get at enemies from unexpected angles, is something we have to teach and reinforce in the player. Most games don't have our level of destruction, so you're not used to thinking about how to put holes through city blocks and make your own way around.

Brigador Killers shifts more attention toward boots-on-the-ground action while still preserving vehicles, heavy weapons, and the series’ tactical sandbox identity. How did that change the way you think about scale, impact, and environmental damage?

Stellar Jockeys: Everything has gotten much more detailed as a result. The game's sprite resolution has doubled. There are already about as many hand-held firearms, only for the infantry-level combat, as were in the entirety of Brigador.

A huge inspiration people might think is unlikely was Katamari Damacy, because it's one of the few games that has expertly sold the player on zooming in and zooming out on your effect on the world. Infantry gets squished without a second thought in Brigador; in Brigador Killers, you're having satisfying, intense firefights with pistols and shotguns. We just keep pulling the camera back, increasing your power, increasing the toolkit you and your enemies have, and before you know it, you're slugging it out in giant battle tanks.

The best Brigador moments are often extremely GIF-able: a chain reaction, a collapsing structure, a vehicle being obliterated, or a tiny decision creating a huge mess. How intentionally do you design for those readable, shareable destruction moments?

Stellar Jockeys: We had a target interaction we wanted to replicate from the novel for Brigador Killers: a soldier in a strength-amplifying power suit kicks a car, which pins a cop against a wall, killing him. We built systems until you could do that in the game.

Spelunky is a really influential game there, too. A simple set of ingredients (arrow, rock, fall damage, explosion) interacts in such a way that while the mechanics are very simple, the results can be surprising. We have several very sophisticated systems in play, like modeling morale/suppression for enemy AI, combined with very simple ideas, like bailing out of a car with a brick on the gas pedal. So a simple combination of shotgun, grenade, knock-down, gas station, and out-of-control EV that's on fire means you know where the chaos is coming from, but it can still end up surprising you quite a lot.

Can you walk us through the art and technical pipeline for destructible assets? How are buildings, props, vehicles, terrain elements, damage states, debris, explosions, fire, smoke, and VFX authored and implemented?

Stellar Jockeys: I'm afraid to survey exactly how many art assets we've made, but even ahead of just Early Access we've surpassed the amount of art produced for the entire first game.

Brigador's vehicle and environment assets were built almost entirely in 3D Studio Max, with procedural texturing for speed.

Now that the art team has gone from one to six people, we've modernized and expanded our pipeline. Assets are designed in Plasticity or in Blender. Plasticity alone has made huge gains in visual fidelity for this game, the new standard. Texturing in Substance Painter (with some procedural texturing for environment work in Blender), then rendered in Blender in two different pipelines. The first pipeline is high-resolution, full PBR versions of guns that get an HDR-based high-resolution render for inventory beauty renders and promotional use. The second pipeline, also in Blender, is a simple rendering script that, when a sprite is needed, will take a textured 3d model and do 4 90-degree turns for environment props, or 128-angle rotations (often mirrored) for vehicles. The render script exports a diffuse term, as well as a Z-depth term, which is used to interpenetrate sprites in the engine in a 3d way, as well as derive a normal map for lighting.

For effects like explosions, muzzle flares, and smoke, we use Embergen and also render out of Blender.

Blender is an essential tool not only because we don't have to buy license seats for the team, but because we can ensure that our workflow is something we can also hand over to the community. The majority of our current team on BK were a part of our community first, so giving back to the community and continuing to support mods as best we can is really important to us.

How do you keep destruction readable in an isometric game where the screen can quickly fill with gunfire, vehicles, civilians, enemies, explosions, particles, and collapsing geometry?

Stellar Jockeys: Scene legibility is key. In Brigador, when a building or vehicle is partially destroyed, it gets darker to recede back in the visual plane. For BK, we've taken a more detailed but also more realistic approach. Buildings throw a lot of dust when destroyed. So rather than getting darker as in the first game, the general principle is to reduce contrast as a prop takes damage. So if not darker, then less contrast and color. Explosive props are, as players expect, bright red. But we still want to maintain basic good rules of composition and player attention: your eyes should still be drawn to the most important parts of the scene. So while explosions and debris and flying clods of dirt and spinning shrapnel are all in the game, they are carefully weighted visually so as to not draw more attention than they should. Your character, whoever is currently shooting you, or the out-of-control EV that's on fire should demand your attention.

What were some of the hardest performance problems to solve when building dense urban environments that can also be shot, burned, smashed, or otherwise reduced to rubble?

Stellar Jockeys: Performance is not nearly so rough to handle since this game is sprite-based, rather than full 3d. We still have to keep an eye on our draw calls, which means managing texture resolution, as well as how large we're letting our fully dynamic lights get. Very big explosions can be very bright but the light is only allowable for a short period. Recoloring existing shrapnel effects, using per-sprite Color Look-Up Tables, is another big win for us for saving texture resolution.

Brigador Killers seems to preserve the series’ intentionally abrasive, complex, cult-game identity rather than smoothing everything out for the broadest possible audience. How does that philosophy affect the design of destructive systems and player agency?

Stellar Jockeys: I'm reminded of the parable about the dog with the piece of meat in its mouth that sees its reflection in a lake. When the dog opens its mouth to get the meat from its reflection, it drops the meat into the water, leaving it hungry.

We think that story applies well to not watering down what made you excited to make a game in the first place; don't lose what's important to you because you think you can make more money. You might end up pleasing nobody at all.

And in a funny way, in a game with a lot of loot but also a lot of explosions and some very tough enemy encounters, the parable extends to the player themselves: know when not to be greedy. Brigador, in its best moments was like that: dancing on a knife's edge, but knowing when it's time to run is as important.

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