By Dom Peppiatt, Monday 18 January 2021 18:12 GMT
A new trailer has been released that gives us more insight into the groundbreaking footage from Ninja Theory’s Project: Mara.
Last year we heard about Ninja Theory’s experimental title called Project: Mara – the developer unveils the game as a quirky game that will explore ‘new ways of telling stories’ and be based on a’ real world ‘and’ grounded representation ‘of spiritual terror.
Now, in a new trailer, we heard a little more about the game and saw some of the staggering photorealistic footage that Tameem Antoniades and his team are creating for the mysterious title.
Perhaps the biggest revelation of this new trailer is that the entire contest takes place in just one apartment – an apartment that really does exist! – and the team devoted a lot of development time to recreating the apartment in a photorealistic way.
The dimensions of the apartment, the textures displayed on the site, the lighting … everything was repeated by the development team using the latest technology. And you can see the results for yourself.
In collaboration with Clear Angle Studios, Ninja Theory succeeds in using a ‘point cloud of the entire apartment’ to ‘every little detail’ to create the digital representation of the real space that shows off in the trailer above.
From there, the team began using procedural tools to add ‘signs of life’ to the apartment – dust, wear and tear and other more organic elements were layered on this lifelike replication to add the elusive ‘sense of place’. ‘too disinfected play environments can sometimes be lacking.
We still do not know much about the mysterious game beyond the ‘goal of recreating the horrors of the mind as accurately and realistically as possible’, but at least we know that it will look damn good because it scares the life out of us.
Ninja Theory is also currently working on Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, and will be part of the Xbox Game Studios collective in 2018.