Your Brother's Maps

A game about following your sibling's footsteps

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Your Brother's Maps is a post-apocalyptic, open-world RPG where you play as a young, timid teen searching for their older brother after he disappears into the webs of an ancient, labyrinthine city.

In a world where humanity has largely died out, two siblings – the fearful yet loyal Beck and the adventurous yet idealistic Sammy -- live alone in a cottage on the fringes of civilization. While mostly content with their lives, in the distant horizon sits an expansive city filled with alluring secrets and dangerous mechanical creatures. Beck's life changes drastically when Sammy leaves for the city and fails to return home.

Development Notes

Narrative Development

YBM began as part of my final project for Professor Anya Belkina’s Drawing for Character Design class at Emerson College. The project was to design a character who I will sculpt in clay and then 3D scan into Autodesk Maya. The goal of this project was to gain a deeper understanding of the musculature of the human body.

These characters are originally from my webcomic, >My Lonely Soldier, but the concept behind this world and setting developed as I considered how I might create a game that was simultaneously a Metroidvania and a Roguelike – two of my favorite game genres. Inspired by games like Hollow Knight and Fear and Hunger, I was interested in creating a game where the primary goal of each run was to further your exploration, building your mental map of the world.

During that semester, I created a Twine game to explore the narrative style of YBM, eventually developing a sort of surreal, lonely atmosphere. The central mechanics in this narrative mockup were the several branching exploration paths the player could take and the return home upon death. Notably, areas of the map were not connected in a particularly linear fashion; taking a left turn instead of right, or walking into the ocean instead of taking the trolley could bring the player into an entirely new environment. I enjoyed building out this multi-layered, deeply complex map, but since each area warranted its own branching narrative, the narrative scope of the game as a whole got pretty big.

Still, this Twine game was an important aspect of designing this game’s narrative. Feel free to play it down below. It’s definitely unfinished and has a lot of bugs, but I still enjoy the writing of it. If I was to remake this Twine game, I’d definitely develop a more robust approach to tracking the player’s movements and leading them towards particularly pathways.

After settling on the idea of a third-person 3D game, I started rethinking the flow and narrative. In this new format, nonlinear exploration could be told visually rather than through text, which I suppose makes things easier. This time, I actually needed to think about the visual placement of landmarks, so I began sketching out a possible map. As I was sketching, I realized the shape I made looked kind of like a human head.

Seeing this, I had the idea that the city was alive itself (which contrasts nicely with the fact that it's abandoned). Following this line of thinking, I started considering the idea that Sammy gives himself up for the city -- or even becomes the city, in some way. Building from this, the foundation I thought of for the city's lore is that prior to abandoment, the city had a central policy of isolationism and had built the automatons to find and capture all outsiders. Even after the city was abandoned, these automatons continued to carry out their duties.

There are definitely a lot of questions this raises. Why was the city so isolationist? Why is the city now abandoned? Do the automatons kill outsiders, or just capture them for imprisonment? etc. Still, this premise compels me, and I'll continue to stir it in my brain as I solidify the timeline of events.

Technological Development

As it might be obvious from the visuals, the video mockup above was created in Autodesk Maya with some added effects from Adobe After Effects and UI elements created in Adobe Illustrator and Clip Studio Paint. I decided to go with this route rather than attempt to create the game in Unity because I primarily wanted to explore what the in-game visual style might be.

Development began with creating the clay sculptures for Beck and Sammy. I initially was planning to create only Beck, but during my pitch, I mentioned that Beck had a brother named Sammy, and my professor invited me to create two characters instead of one. I knew it would be challenging to create both since it would essentially double my workload, but the thought of having clay sculptures for the duo really appealed to me.

For my sketches and turnaround, I questioned what kinds of accessories each character would have given their lifestyle and personality. Beck, being the timid one who primarily stays at home, was designed around the idea of safety – the big coat and hat to protect them from the cold, the large backpack that holds resources but weighs them down. Their weapon was the flare gun – something to redirect the attention of enemies and give them time to hide. Sammy, on the other hand, was designed more around the idea of adventure – protective yet lightweight clothing that allowed for increased mobility and agility, a cross-body bag that removed physical restrictions on his dominant arm. He was given a grappling hook – something that aided in exploration and speedy escapes when faced with danger. For the sake of lightening my clay sculptures scope, I saved most of these accessories for modeling in Maya.

In total, sculpting the characters in clay took about two weeks, with many late-night and weekend hours at Emerson’s Emerging Media Lab (EML) where all the supplies were kept. The most fun aspect of this process was studying human anatomy and using a sculpting knife to help mark out the different muscle groups. The least fun aspect was sculpting the clothing – it was so hard to get the creases just right!

When the sculptures were finished, EML Manager Eugene Kuznetsov and I scanned them into Autodesk Maya via LiDAR 3D scanning using the Artec Eva. The topology was pretty bad, so I needed to retopologize the models.

At this point, I took a bit of a break from the project since, at the time, I wasn’t sure what exactly I wanted to use these models for. It was only during the following summer that I had the idea of using these models to create a game mockup – it would be a good way to practice my Autodesk Maya skills, and it would help revitalize this game concept that I had put on the back burner.

The plan was to retopologize, texture, and rig Beck’s model only, and to use that model to fake a bit of gameplay and UI.

Of all aspects of 3D art, my favorite is probably modeling because I enjoy puzzling out how to best flow the quads while building out the model. Retopologizing this model was a different process than what I’m used to, which is usually to build the mesh from scratch. There are definitely modeling choices I wouldn’t have made if I was taking the latter process; the clothing, hair, and body are all combined into one mesh rather than separated from each other. However, I decided to go with this method in order to maintain the clay-like quality of the original sculpture. Like clay, elements of Beck’s model blend in with each other.

For materials and texturing, I decided to try out Adobe Substance 3D for this project. Materials and texturing is far from my strong suit, and I definitely didn’t fully explore the program, but it was fun to get a bit of a feel for its capabilities. In the future, I’d love to pull out my drawing tablet to really dive into the painting aspect. I’d also like to pay a bit more attention to the UV unwrapping of the model beforehand, since that was where I ran into the most issues while painting.

Rigging was also a difficult step in the process. I don’t know how to make complex rigs, so my goals was to make a rig that was functional enough for my needs in this project. Essentially, I needed the limbs to move relatively well in order for me to animate a run cycle and to pose Beck for the Stats UI section. I think I succeeded in this goal, but I’d love to have more formal training on rigging in the future. I had a lot of fun with the animations, and I bet it would only be more fun if I had a really robust rig to animate with.

Ultimately, I really enjoyed making the 3D art for this piece. It felt really great when, after adding in all the lights and textures, I rendered a frame and saw the piece really come to life.

The final step of the piece was creating UI elements and bringing them into After Effects with the rendered animation. For the UI elements, I began by initially sketching them in Clip Studio Paint before translating them into Adobe Illustrator. I based the style on the idea of map fragments, utilizing the jagged shapes of torn-up paper and old ink.

I definitely feel that UI is an area I have less experience with. UI is really about putting yourself into the player's head because you have to consider how the player will navigate each game screen. The UI elements inherently serve a functional purpose -- to bring the player to different game screens or to give essential informaiton to the player -- but they also need to have visual style. Furthermore, the visual style of UI elements must fit in with the game's style as a whole, contrast with the background in order to be visually distinguishable, and be simple enough to read easily at first glance without being too distracting. Since I have a stronger background in illustration than design, this was a difficult final step and I definitely feel there are areas of the UI I could improve in, but I learned a lot through the entire process.

I had a lot of fun with this project and seeing this game concept come to life. I would love to see this concept created into a game one day -- the idea as it stands now is way to large a scope for me to develop on my own, but I'm curious how it could translate into other game formats like a 2D rpg or a non-linear narrative game!