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STELLAR JOCKEYS AUGUST NEWSLETTER
Welcome to the Stellar Jockeys newsletter for August. Read on for a
discount for the store, another brief dive into company history as well as
your regular round up of community contributions.
Benjamin, Stellar Jockeys

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Back in May's newsletter we announced that we had changed shipping
rates to overseas territories, which we only recently realized turned out tobe completely inappropriate. On the upside we did discover we werevastly overcharging to some territories (apologies to anyone in Norway &Switzerland put o by our shipping rates; we have since xed this). With
that in mind, please enjoy a 10% discount on your next order from ourstore - simply enter promocode JOCKEYS (all caps) at checkout, or click
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Understanding The Brigador Journey: "Ziggy"?
One of the things that sticks out about our archival project into Brigador's
history is just how little we've talked about the elephant in the room: theengine. At one point the Brigador engine was brie y codenamed "Ziggy",
though the name never took o with other team members - possibly
because game engines are tremendously complicated.
If you aren't familiar with what a game engine is, it's typically de ned as asoftware framework that's used to make and run games, and comes witha suite of development tools. A good example is Unreal Engine, whichcomes with its own physics engine, renderers, animation and scripting
among other things. For anything a game engine can't do, there are also
propietary 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 two
programmers: Dale & Harry, who we've already mentioned in previous
newsletters. We should also note that at the time of the Brigador engine's
creation circa 2011, the game engine landscape was not how it currently
is. Using engines like Unity (Escape From Tarkov) or Unreal (Fortnite) camewith steep license fees that would typically either require a lot of money
up front or signi cant publisher support. That has changed drastically inthe 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 o the-shelf engine is you e ectively get to control your own destiny. Most of
the above mentioned engines are created with a speci c genre of game inmind. If you decided to make a game in an engine that doesn't support afeature you want to have in your game, you are e ectively at the whims of
the engine's creators as to whether such a feature is important enough toever 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 damn 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 subsequent months we will explain a few things going on under
the hood that you are unlikely to be aware of, starting with how the gamecreates the illusion of 3D models using sprite textures... with a twist.

Community SpotlightNot everyone has been consumed with making freelance maps for theGrave to the Rave competition. GetKraken has instead been consumed
with making Precursor James a reality.

...Flyingdebris returns with an homage to Strong Bad's Teen Girl Squad...

...and Juntti has graced us with Man From Volta striking the Jack-O Posefrom Guilty Gear.

This is only a smattering of what's available in the #becks_best channel on
our Discord server.
Join Our Discord Server

Next Month
In September we'll attempt to explain the Brigador engine's lighting
system and show o some aspects of the art pipeline.

Stellar Jockeys
112 N Neil St Apt D, Champaign, IL
United States
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