A game about following your brother's footsteps.
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.
Which is to say, this game (mockup) is an alternate universe of my webcomic characters. I originally conceptualized this idea for my final project in 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 (shout out to EML Manager Eugene Kuznetsov for his help!). I was going to just scuplt Beck at first, but then Prof. Belkina suggested I sculpt both, and I'm always down for a challenge when it comes to my characters.
The game concept is my approach to a combination-metroidvania-roguelike where each run focuses on furthering your exploration and building up your map of the world. Gameplay would be mainly stealth-focused until you increase your abilities, and I imagine there would be a cosmic-horror narrative arc as you become more powerful, more monstrous, and more akin to the abandoned city you're diving deeper into. While I'm not currently developing this project into a full game, I may carry this world and narrative concept into other future projects.
Sculpting the characters in clay took about two weeks. The rest of the project took about six months. That was mainly because I took a lot of breaks during this time.
Take a look at my process below.
