Two Brothers is an Action/Adventure/Role playing/Nostalgia game that I have been working on for the past few years. Development began just before I started my college thesis. I used programming and sprite creation as a way to calm down from animating and modeling my thesis. Before long I had a full running game with a story on my hands. Now that I am out of college I put together a team of a few people, one other programmer, another artist, and a composer, to finish the game for release.
Now on Steam Greenlight!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=143503892Latest Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8egDoNHtmhE*UPDATE* http://youtu.be/Uz_mcZ64lmg *UPDATE <-- This is the first proper trailer of the game.
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The idea for Two Brothers came from seeing all of those fantastic demake mockups around the internet. I started mocking up my own screen shots in the style of Gameboy games and soon realized I actually really wanted to make this game.
The general story of Two Brothers goes something like this: You take on the role of Roy Guarder, a young inventor who is begin to obsess with the idea of finding a new color on earth after a near death experience shows him an after life filled with color. Your brother, Bivare, is also an inventor and explorer, he soon takes on your obsession and you begin a quest.
Of course, making a new color is completely out of my abilities so I am using the green on green aesthetic to show the player how out of place the colored objects of Roy's desire are. Also, many of my memories are of Gameboy color games as a child, so I had a hard time deciding if I wanted to go closer to games I remember playing clearer, or go with the more common demake look. I guess in a way, the the change from green on green to spurts of color is a chronicling of the shift from Gameboy to Gameboy Color. Only in my head, it doesn't sound as pretentious.
As for the Gameplay, I wanted to stay true to a game that felt as if it could have existed on the system, although I wasn't meticulous about what could actually be done by the hardware as this is a PC game... Lufia 2 was a big inspiration for me, although it wasn't on the Gameboy. I loved how the game felt like Zelda outside of combat, but had a great leveling system, and lots of story driven content. The combat is real time, with a system that allows for various weapons. It is very much the bastard child of Lufia 2/Wild arms/and Links awakening. Although the game contains no leveling up system, it still very much feels like an action RPG, as everything else fits in the the category.
As for the demake aspects , there were a few modern games I kept picturing on the Gameboy. I imagined what Mass Effect would have been like on the Gameboy. Not so much the shooter aspects, but the character interaction and choices you could make. Now, as we didn't have the man power that Bioware had, we have created a simplified conversation system using three basic emoticon reactions to any question. This isn't a triumph in game design, but it adds some realism and believability to the game as characters react differently to each choice.
Really, what we're trying to create is a game that we would have LOVED to have played as a kid. Something that is intelligent, but not over the head of kids, but still had enough violence and questionable content (like drinking in bars, and getting towns people dates) that only in the future you'd appreciate what was going on. I should note that I don't plan on marketing this at kids, or anyone in particular... I just hope people enjoy playing a game I wish someone else had made.
As for what's left in terms of development... we've already created a large portion of the games towns and such, so now we really just need to buckle down and smooth out some of the game and add a few more places to explore that aren't part of the main quest!
I look forward to your comments!
Here are a few shots unrelated to the content of the description...
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