When I recently spoke to Stellar Jockeys lead artist Jack Monahan and lead designer Hugh Monahan about Brigador Killers, a big focus for me was approachability versus depth. Most of my favorite games are super-crusty and complex RPGs or immersive sims, and the studios that made them—Troika, Looking Glass, Obsidian, to name a few—often found sustained financial success difficult or impossible.
You need some level of mainstream buy-in to keep the lights on, but something that’s too focus-tested or homogenized won’t please anyone. Stellar Jockeys’ first game, Brigador, is a hardcore mech sim that initially bombed sales-wise, but is now a cult classic, so the Monahans are well-positioned to comment on the subject.
I appreciated the philosophical stance they had toward people who bounce off Brigador and Killers. “We love our games, we’re very in this world,” said Jack, “But you only need to have an encounter with your mom or someone else’s mom to realize none of this makes sense, and we’re all speaking Greek all the time.”
They see getting people to buy into it all as a design challenge, but don’t begrudge the ones for whom it doesn’t click. “We had a vtuber recently, she streamed Brigador Killers,” Jack recalled. “It wasn’t quite her [thing]. She’s very polite. She said, ‘This is not really for me.’
“People kept asking her in the chat … And she just goes, ‘I don’t care about mechs! I care about the engineers! I care about the people who pilot them! Give me that stuff. All this mech stuff, it’s all boy slop!’
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“I think we make boy slop, but that’s okay. First of all, somebody’s got to do it, but I think for us, it’s the willingness to get that crunchy with stuff.”
Hardcore
Even if a lot of players may not pick up what they’re putting down, Jack argued that there’s just not enough room in the current market for games that aren’t born of real passion, and that creative compromises can also have unintended side effects.
“I think the great irony is that, when you’re trying to deliver what you think people want, you’re actually holding a weird mirror not to them, but to yourself,” he said. “It creates this weird inversion of saying, ‘Actually, I think you’re idiots, and I think you’re idiots in this way, and so here’s what I think idiots want.'”
And no matter what, Jack argued, creators can’t help but leave a thumbprint on their work, whether they intend to or not. As an example, he pointed to the 50+ ’90s-style, pre-rendered portraits in Brigador. Jack recalled a fan telling him “Oh, they’ve got your cheekbones”—without intending to, the artist had inadvertently given a similar profile of cheekbones to his own to every character in the game.
“You don’t really have a choice,” Jack concluded. “Be honest, be true, because it’s all going to come leaking out one way or another, either in a good way—which is to say, the stuff you’re really into. Don’t pretend like you’re not into stuff, it comes out anyway.”
Min spec player
Hugh Monahan told me he thinks of approachability and difficulty in a similar way to reading comprehension. He cited the influential sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin as someone who produced works of great depth that were approachable for a wide audience of readers, while the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, by contrast, was a genius who wrote extremely challenging literature.
If we take The Left Hand of Darkness as Baldur’s Gate 3, I guess the Brothers Karamazov can be, I dunno, Daggerfall? CyberMage: Darklight Awakening? Fallout developer Tim Cain expressed a similar idea as the “minimum player spec:” What’s the minimum amount of prior videogame knowledge someone needs to complete—let alone enjoy—a given game?
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Much as his brother feels you shouldn’t dilute a creative vision to meet market demands, Hugh argued that challenge and complexity are key not only to making games more memorable, but also getting communities to form around them.
“If Dark Souls were an easier game, you would not have nearly as vociferous of a community around it,” he said. “It’s tough, because if there’s a barrier to entry, that means people aren’t going to make it through the barrier … But by making it something that is difficult to earn, if someone is willing to overcome that hump, then that’s an implicit in-community.
“You actually need some of that friction in order to help build more of an identity amongst the players, and that’s something I feel like I’m starting to really come to understand now after working as a designer for 15 years. But I’m sure I can look back on this in 10 years and go, ‘What an idiot.’ But you know, taking steps.”
Stellar Jockeys’ first game, Brigador, is currently $6.50 in the Steam Summer sale. Brigador Killers does not yet have a release window, but you can wishlist it and try the demo on Steam. I loved that demo, and Killers also boasts one of my favorite game mechanics: It’s a mech game where you can get out of the mech.
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