Ninja Theory’s next psychological horror game, dubbed “Project Mara”, will take place entirely in a single luxury apartment, with some serious technology being used to create incredibly realistic textures, lighting and more.
In a four-minute video, Ninja Theory’s creative director and co-founder, Tameem Antoniades, explained how the studio tried to “obsessively capture reality”.
The Ninja Theory art team used a real-world apartment (seen in the video), took several samples of walls, floors and other objects and photographed and digitized everything. With this reference, the Ninja Theory recreated the materials (like a piece of leather) and generated procedural shaders and detail maps to make the materials as realistic as possible.
“A funny thing happens when you get so close to a material, when you get as close as a human eye can see,” said Antoniades. “Things that look flat from a distance become 3D. You start to see details, you start to see edges, edgeware, you see lint, you see dirt. You see all kinds of things that are 3D geometry. “
To get an idea of what Antoniades means, Ninja Theory shows in-game renderings of a rug with countless bumps and individual curls in its line, and hair and dust strewn along a wall. Side by side, the game’s renderers certainly give the real world a run for their money.
Watch the previous teaser trailer for Ninja Theory, which shows some small details of the story.
Ninja Theory also used the skills of Clear Angle, a company specializing in 3D scanning, to scan the entire apartment. This allowed the Ninja Theory to have a functional “point cloud” of the apartment, allowing the team to ensure that everything had an adequate sense of scale and shape.
Perhaps most impressive is that Ninja Theory artists used the procedural generation to create this level of detail throughout the apartment, a task that Antoniades says would be impossible by hand. You can see their work in the images below.
The Mara Project was announced in early 2020 along with the Ninja Theory Hellblade: the Senua Saga. Ninja Theory is now part of Xbox Game Studios, so expect to see your titles released as exclusive to the original Xbox for consoles and PC. From what we’ve seen so far, Project Mara seems to follow a young woman plagued by “mental terror” based on real reports and research.
Joseph Knoop is a writer / producer / texture sample for IGN.