As part of the last installment of the video.
We haven’t heard much about Ninja Theory’s “metal terror” experience, Project: Mara since its opening at the beginning of last year, but now Hellblade and Enslaved has offered a new glimpse, focusing on Mara’s meticulously rendered environments, as part of from its latest video developer.
Previously, Ninja Theory described Project: Mara as an “experimental title that explores new ways of storytelling” built around a “real and grounded representation of mental terror”. Using “accounts of real life experiences and in-depth research”, your goal is to recreate “horrors of the mind in the most accurate and realistic way possible”.
Now, in his new developer video, Ninja Theory’s creative director, Tameem Antoniades, has detailed some of the processes the studio is taking to capture that sense of realism for Project: Mara, and to deliver an experience that “doesn’t feel like a game. and it doesn’t look like a movie [but is] something totally different “.
The Dreadnought Diaries Episode 3 – Capturing reality.
Antoniades says the studio is “trying to do a lot of things that [it’s] never tried before, “especially in their efforts to” capture reality obsessively. “More specifically, the art team is focused on recreating the Project’s environments: Mara – based on a real, real-world apartment – in the most perfect way possible, capturing its materials, scanning its geometry and creating procedural tools to build the “most ambitious and realistic game scenario ever” of Ninja Theory.
This work, according to Antoniades, marks a change for the developer in the way he creates art. “Artists don’t just exist to create an object,” he says, “they are there to create systems that can create that object and infinite variations on that object.” It is an approach that is “laying the foundation for all of our projects in the studio and all of our future projects”.
There is a lot of footage comparing Project: Mara’s digital apartment to its real-world counterpart, in case you’re interested in seeing the final results, in the studio’s latest video.
Project: Mara, which still remains an enigma beyond its initial teaser trailer and update today, is just one of several projects known to be under development on Microsoft-owned Ninja Theory. Others include The Insight Project (described as an “ambitious combination of technology, game design and clinical neuroscience brought together to generate strategies to alleviate mental suffering”) and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2.