A new Mara development diary details the way developer Ninja Theory is creating a photorealistic experience for his experimental Xbox Series X horror game.
In the video, entitled Capturing Reality, creative ninja boss Tameem Antoniades goes into detail about how the studio is recreating a real-life apartment as the setting for the Mara Project. He says: “We are trying to do many things that we have never tried to do before and one of those things is to capture reality obsessively.”
To achieve these goals, the art team is looking to recreate a real-world apartment perfectly, in which they seem to be doing a good job based on the images of the engine revealed in the development diary.
Part of that process includes taking material samples from the apartment, photographing and scanning them and using them to create “procedural shaders and detail maps” to recreate these items in the game.
Antoniades also discussed how the team recreated the entire apartment in the game, using a company called Clear Angle Studios, which helped create a “point cloud” of the apartment using LiDAR scanners. Antoniades describes it as “some of the best references we’ve seen”.
The result, in addition to the impressive engine images mentioned earlier, is that Ninja Theory is in the process of changing the way it creates art in its games. As Antoniades explains: “Artists are not just there to create an object, they are there to create systems that can create an object and infinite variations on that object.”
The Mara Project was originally announced last January, with commercial director Dom Matthews describing the experience as: “Based on reports of real experiences and in-depth research, our goal is to recreate the horrors of the mind in the most accurate and realistic way possible. Project : Mara will be an experimental title and a showcase of what can become a new way of telling stories. “
It looks like Project Mara’s photorealism will come to a seriously frightening end. We hope to find out more about a possible release date in the coming months.
To learn more about what to expect from Xbox this year, check out our guide to next Xbox Series X games.