The Brothers Project was a game prototype/art test that three Art Institute of Phoenix undergraduates took upon themselves to build from the ground up. Specifically, Rob Tomson, Julio Sanchez, and myself. I'm not going to lie to you...our primary motivation was to create something in lieu of the main graduation project in which students were required to create an Unreal level. Epic's Unreal Engine® technology had already been crammed down our throats for two years, so the idea of doing our own thing was that much more exciting.

December 2004
Since Rob was a programming student, coding this project would address his graduation requirements. However, as members of the Game Art & Design program, Julio and I were also required to create a finished character in order to graduate. So we knew that whatever we came up with would have two main characters. With only a year left until graduation, planning began very quickly over Monster® and alcohol. Since all three of us were passionate about 2d games, we decided up front that this project would be a side scroller. Within the space of a few jam sessions we conceptualized a Metal Slug® inspired shooter. Bless the 'Slug, it was the quickest agreement the group ever shared.

The basic concept involved two brutal anti-heroes traveling from planet to planet, wiping out humanity for trashing their proud and exotic civilizations.

We wanted to emulate the animation quality and humor of Metal Slug®, which made the character creation process more technically challenging. So we would end up using a 3d rig made of 2d parts to achieve the distinct look we had envisioned.

January 2005
We ended up with playable demo after a brief period of hard work, but it came clustered with a whole slew of technical and artistic problems; our animation rigs were sloppy and limited, we couldn’t figure out how to make the characters shoot without breaking their run cycles, and my character (Keyk) was unsuccessful as an in-game sprite. His unusual form did not translate well to the screen. At the end of the day, our animation pipeline just produced gross results.

February 2005
We went tabula rasa and decided to create our own design instead of borrowing one, and with it would come a fresh aesthetic. The new concept involved two characters who were caught up in a war between their respective tribes.

Our assets would be created in 3d (with complete meshes instead of planes) and then rendered to 2d. Since the characters would have a lot of motion, we felt the process of constructing the models legitimately would be more effective. At the time, we were becoming very familiar with the rigging and animation tools in Max, so all seemed well.

Unfortunately, we didn’t end up getting a demo out of this one. In an attempt to create a system of mechanics that would accommodate the single player AND multiplayer experience, we went in over our heads. Rob told us that what we had designed would not be feasible in the time we had. Furthermore, we could not decide on a proper environmental concept that Julio and I both liked. Because of this, almost no assets were created in this time and we wasted a month arguing. So we laughed and then jumped into the creation of the next idea.

March 2005
This concept was a slight evolution of our previous concept. It also involved two tribal characters, except now they were brothers who relied on each other. This would be reflected in both the story and the gameplay.

Again, we would be creating our own design, only we made a point to be less ambitious. We stuck with the method of creating our assets in 3d and rendering them to 2d. We knew we wanted an environment that would be very vivid and colorful, so we buckled down and created some concept art. We began modeling after the few key pieces that got us particularly excited.

After a couple weeks of experimentation, we ended up developing a way to create very sharp and colorful assets:

After modeling a basic object in max, we would render it out at an angle we felt would translate well to the playing field. Our main goal was to include a little bit of perspective, but not too much (a la Metal Slug®). After rendering in conventionally lit grayscale, we would use Photoshop trickery to color it and then apply a black outline. I created a handful of purely 2d mini-assets and decorated the larger pieces with them to give everything more life. This pipeline birthed us a solid library of vivid and stylized objects. A few more choice examples:

May 2005
We leapt head-first into the creation of the character assets, starting with Little Brother. We knew he had to be small in stature, but intimidating in his own little way. Julio completely came through and ended up modeling him out in a very funny, successful way. We felt the finished product communicated a character that bled Napoleon Complex.

While he was doing that, I began work on Big Brother. He is much bigger and more intimidating than Little Brother, and we felt the contrast would be humorous to the player. After some discussion, we determined that Little Brother (standing straight as he always does) should be just shorter than the hunched over Big Brother. This would create a healthy proportion with the in game sprites, while still letting the player know how large Big Brother is. As his protector, we wanted the player to genuinely care for him, so we attempted to create him as lovable as possible. The core of this challenge was in the eyes;

We felt the empty pupils and childish grin would be very endearing. Here is the end result of both characters:

As far as the design went, we made a point to maintain the scope of our mechanics, but problems arose anyway. A big part of the problem was the fact that it was being programmed in C#, an unpopular language for games. Being the only programmer on the project, Rob was effectively alone with little to no outside support.

Then Rob landed a job at a local game development studio, where he was no longer capable of contributing to the game. We were programmerless, but we were almost 6 months into the project and we weren't about to give up. So we hacked together a website explaining our situation. It contained some art and some design details, and we felt it would prove our commitment, energy, and skill. Then we whored it out to every location on the internet we could think of where talented programmers congregated.

And it worked. A Swiss programmer by the name of Tomas Pettersson was developing a 2d engine framework when he saw our SOS. The next 6 months were dramatic and wonderful as Julio, Tomas, and I cobbled together a designless (but interactive nontheless) art demo that ended up graduating us about as hard as you can be graduated.

Here is footage of our baby taking it's first steps.

So that's the Brothers Project and the gameplay you see in that footage is a precise snapshot of where we left off. I ended up getting a job at Crunchtime shortly before I graduated, and Julio moved back home to Texas after graduation, leaving the project in limbo. But before we parted ways, we managed to get together some mock screens of what we imagined the game looking like in a final build:

Thanks for reading.