How to Make a Video Game While Rationing Water and Amidst Rolling Blackouts

Much of Beautiful Desolation was made amidst catastrophe. South Africa was in the grip of a water crisis, the result of multiple years without meaningful rainfall. People lined up with containers, hoping to walk away with anything. There was talk of “Day Zero,” a date when places like Cape Town would, in essence, run out of water. The Brotherhood, a two-person studio responsible for several moody adventure games, happens to be based in Cape Town.

“There were days where [we] had no electricity and had to severely ration water supplies,” said The Brotherhood co-founder Chris Bischoff in an interview with Waypoint. “I sometimes think we should have actually thanked our water tank and petrol generator in the credits.”

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(And yes, the studio is called The Brotherhood because the two co-founders are brothers.)

Beautiful Desolation is the third release from The Brotherhood, an ambitious slice of sci-fi post-apocalypse. The Brotherhood’s previous games are dark horror stories in space, and while Beautiful Desolation is also set in the future, it’s a future much more close to home; Beautiful Desolation is The Brotherhood imagining a future for its own home of South Africa.

“Our goal with Beautiful Desolation was always to make something unique,” said Bischoff, “something that players had never seen before in the sci-fi setting and our home was perfect for this.”

Bischoff’s family arrived in South Africa in the 1840s, after emigrating from Germany.

It’s a place of beauty, but, at times, a pain in the ass for making games. The Brotherhood isn’t the only place to call South Africa (and frequently Cape Town itself) home. The popular action game BroForce, made by Free Lives, is from the area. Same with puzzle platformer Semblance by Nyamakop, and the satirical violent cleanup sim, Viscera Cleanup Detail.

Bishoff called development in South Africa “uniquely challenging.” Only recently, for example, did the studio get broadband internet, which made uploading and downloading gigabytes of data, required in making even the most modest modern game, a total pain.

“On paper, we’re considered a developed country on various fronts, yet even some of our most basic infrastructure is seriously unreliable,” he said. “The country suffers from regular, planned power outages that last for hours on end, so we need to work around those. We have often joked that Statis [another game from The Brotherhood] is one of the few games out there built on a petrol generator.”

Rolling power outages are normal for The Brotherhood. One minute, the lights are on. The next, they’re not. It’s a big reason why their games are made using laptops; it allows them to jump from one power source to another, depending on the circumstances. Bischoff actually has an uninterruptible power supply device snuggled under his desk in case of a blackout.

In the event even this fails them, their files are being continually backed up.

“100 meters of extension cables became the norm for us!” said Bischoff. “Power off, grab the extension cables, and run them around the house before the UPS turns off!”

But the influence of where Beautiful Desolation was made goes beyond power hiccups and slow Internet. Bischoff and his brother wanted to make a game that reflected the world and history around them, what they grew up with, in a variety of ways. The visuals, for example, use a form of photogrammetry to convert photos into 3D images, allowing them to put pieces of Cape Town into the game itself. This video walks through the tech process behind this:

The game opens with players on a beach built from scans of an actual beach close to their home. A dog-like carcass you find later is, in fact, a mummified wild dog from hundreds of years ago in a local museum. And a giraffe skull featured in the opening menu is actually a skull on display at the same museum as the dog. Some touches were even closer to home, with texture for some of the characters generated by a 3D scan of Bischoff’s own face.

“When you use a country like South Africa as a backdrop for your story,” said Bischoff, “it’s tempting to try and grow a direct narrative from the negative perspective of its legacy. Our concern with this approach is that you end up creating a parody of events, instead of being sensitive to the nuance of its history.”

South Africa was under apartheid until the early 1990s—it’s recent history. For decades, white supremacy was ingrained in South Africa, with informal segregationist policy later becoming formal laws that would, for example, prohibit large swathes of land from being held by Black South Africans and prohibiting sex and marriage between whites and other races.

Bischoff heard about this period from his family, and stories of police brutality especially stuck out.

“When you hear [those stories] you can’t help but feel the helplessness that the general population had,” he said. “The racial bias of the government was horrific towards Black people but the control over the entire population, no matter their race, was absolute.”

This history informs the backdrop of Beautiful Desolation. South Africa has 11 languages, and so, as does Beautiful Desolation. One group, called the Agnate Robots, are remnants of the world’s fascistic past, living history of Beautiful Desolation’s own apartheid government.

“Given that the majority of our sales will come from the English-speaking market, will players be able to even connect with a protagonist who speaks with such a heavy accent, or uses slang that they may not even know?”

“Using these tales as a basis, we instilled the fascistic robots of the game with these traits,” said Bischoff. “A premise of Beautiful Desolation being, would a tyrannical government produce a tyrannical AI if given the chance?”

One of the most conflicted intersections, however, came when The Brotherhood was trying to decide the cast of voices that would try to bring this place to life. The studio knew Beautiful Desolation would have a lot of dialogue, and the right voices were key to selling it.

But who are the “right” voices? Early on, The Brotherhood was encouraged, despite the game’s unique setting, to make its voice acting sound, as they put it, more “international.”

“I believe the advice to keep the VO ‘international’ was to stay away from the heavier local accents that we initially wanted,” said Bischoff, “or even limiting things like the slang words (including local cuss words!) and vernacular references we used.”

The pressure to conform to a perceived mainstream and the resulting flattening of non-Western culture isn’t new, but it’s less common for developers to speak about it.