Tales of Brevis: A Beast Called God
Available on the Microsoft Store and on Xbox
amadeus, the bunny killer
Spite Studios, our game dev group of friends, got together to make our next title. In the summer of 2019, my dog went on… a bit of a rampage as he had discovered a rabbit nest under our shed. We found him digging under it and he had pulled two baby bunnies out and promptly killed them. Over the course of the next week, as the remaining three bunnies left the nest, they unfortunately found their way into our backyard where they met the same fate.
Guilty that we got mad, not guilty at the lives lost.
For my game pitch, I told the story of a chase between Amadeus and a rabbit, originally imagining something a bit like an isometric PVP puzzler. My concept had the most votes and our group began to work out the details and mechanics of the game, which eventually evolved into a Rock Paper Scissors couch co-op 1v1 game.
LOTS OF HATS
Aside from myself, there was one more artist and an animator on the team. I was responsible for the art direction on this project, creating all of the UI assets, character textures, and object textures. Aside from the art, I also worked on UX, UI strings, and narrative for the game. We all knew we wanted our game to be fun and playable for everyone—especially for families who may have kids that want to play with a parent. This is why I chose to go in a direction that felt like a children’s storybook—a little dreamy with our main hero, Brevis being anthropomorphic and Deus staying beastly.
The UI that displays the number of burrows left for Brevis to deposit carrots.
The X to display a lost RPS match.
We mapped the RPS colors to match an Xbox controller.
One of the tutorial screens prior to the characters being added to the frame and the Continue button.
The art process
Once our core gameplay prototype was in place and we knew this was the game we wanted to make, we started making the assets. Our animator created the 3D objects with the UV map in place before handing it off to me. From there I imported the object into Photoshop and used the 3D tools to paint the textures. I went with a blue tint for Brevis and a red tint for Deus and a few iterations until we got the kind of texture contrast we needed for the game.
The texture map for Deus, cute butthole and all.
The final look of Deus’ character model.
PROUD DOG MOM
As with most games, we were constantly adjusting for scope, but I’m extremely proud of what we had created in the six months of what spare time we had. Our game was created with the arcade spirit in mind, a game loop that would be repeatable and fun over and over again. We were able to get the game published via the Creators Collection and the game was one of the first new available on Xbox Series X and S.
