The world I’m building

Ancient Bros

A fighting game grown from a fascination with ancient history. Researched places, carved stone, and champions with their own ways to fight.

Play Ancient Bros

Ancient Bros: Arena

Why I built it.

Ancient Bros started as a game, and became a much deeper exploration of history and craft. It’s the project I’m most excited to share, and a place to express a fascination that’s harder to show in a conventional engineering project.

The history and the artwork have become as interesting to me as the engineering. Stone, bronze, natural pigments, and carved planes give the world its character, and the art is still moving toward the rugged, grounded feel I want.

Inside the project.

Two fighters on a stone platform, and the only way to win is to launch the other one off it. Every hit raises the damage on the one it lands on, and the higher it climbs the further the next hit sends them, so a fight turns on who gets careless near the edge first. A match runs a minute and a quarter; a tie goes to fifteen seconds of sudden death, so no match runs past ninety seconds.

Each champion comes from a real ancient people and is named for what they called themselves or the place they built. Göbekli for the megaliths raised around 9500 BC by people who left no name, the oldest ever found. Giza for the last of the Seven Wonders still standing. Inca for walls fitted without mortar that outlast earthquakes. Izumo for sword steel from furnaces that burn three days and nights. Every champion carries a legend, told as legend, with the history underneath it kept apart and checkable.

The look is stone and bronze. The icon is a basalt wheel pressed with wedge marks and broken at one edge, which is the ring-out, and each champion's sigil is cut from only the marks a scribe's stylus could leave. The wordmark is carved limestone beside cast bronze, rendered in Blender rather than set in a font.

It runs in the browser with no install, against bots at three difficulties or another person through a quick match or a friend's room code. Guests play from the first tap and an account is optional. An iPhone app built from the same game is in testing through TestFlight and is not on the App Store yet.

The roster storyboard is the public record of the art: all six champions as they stand in the game beside their approved concepts, a timeline that puts them to scale across twelve thousand years, and a dossier for each.

The arena every match is fought in, ringed by the crowd, with the carved wordmark over it.

A duel in progress: Maya and Inca on a cracked stone platform beside a wall of raised stone pillars, the clock at 1:07, each fighter's damage percentage in the corners and touch controls along the bottom — Inca has raised a wall of fitted stone; the damage in each corner is how far the next hit will send them.

Champion select: six cards — Maya, Giza, Göbekli, Inca, Olympus and Izumo — each with a carved sigil, an element and a title, beside a line of history about the selected champion — Picking a champion tells you who their people were, in one line under the cards.

The roster storyboard: all six champions rendered in the game's own engine, each standing on a stone floor above their name and title — The storyboard draws every champion with the game's own renderer, so it can never show a look the game no longer has.

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