Ninja Theory’s upcoming psychological horror game called “Project Mara” will take place entirely in a luxurious apartment, with serious technology used to create incredibly realistic textures, lighting and more.
In a four-minute video, the creative director and co-founder of Ninja Theory, Tameem Antoniades, explained how the studio tries to ‘obsessively capture reality’.
Ninja Theory’s art team used an actual apartment (seen in the video), took several samples of walls, floors and other objects and photographed and scanned everything. With the reference, Ninja Theory then recreated the materials (like a bit of leather) and generated procedure shadows and detail maps to make the materials as lifelike as possible.
“A funny thing happens when you get as close to a material, when you get as close as a human eye can see,” Antoniades said. ‘Things that look flat from a distance become 3D. You start to see details, you start to see edges, edge, you see fluff, you see dirt. You see all sorts of things that are 3D geometry. ”
To give you an idea of what Antoniades means, Ninja Theory shows a rug in play with numerous individual bumps and curls in the wire, and hair and fabric spread along a wall. Together, the versions in the game definitely give the real world a chance.
Check out Ninja Theory’s previous trailer, which contains some small details.
Ninja Theory also used the skills of Clear Angle, a 3D scanning specialist company, to scan the entire apartment. This enabled Ninja Theory to have a working “point cloud” of the apartment, allowing the team to ensure that everything has a proper sense of scale and shape.
The most impressive artists of Ninja Theory, who are perhaps the most impressive, used procedure generation to create this level of detail in the apartment, a task that, according to Antoniades, would be impossible by hand. You can see their work in the images below.
Project Mara was announced in early 2020 with Ninja Theory’s Hellblade: Senua’s Saga. Ninja Theory is now part of Xbox Game Studios, so expect the titles to be released as Xbox-exclusive first parties on consoles and computers. From what we’ve seen so far, Project Mara seems to be following a young woman plagued by ‘spiritual terror’ based on actual reports and research.
Joseph Knoop is a writer / producer / texture monster for IGN.