Overview / Usage

The Camera That Bleeds is a first-person horror game with a striking graphic novel noir visual style. Playing as Detective Grey, use your supernatural camera to solve a series of cold cases and get to the bottom of the conspiracy in the city you call home.

Each mission sees you using your detective skills, along with your enchanted camera, to figure out what happened at each of a series of haunted locales. Photograph ghosts as they reenact events from their lives, follow footprints invisible to the naked eye, read memos and letters long since lost to history, and draw important objects out of the supernatural world and into reality as you work to figure out what really happened.

Methodology / Approach

Development of The Camera that Bleeds is centered on a core experience - “You are a supernatural detective” - that all decisions must be graded against. If a new feature doesn’t add to that core, it doesn’t get implemented. Conversely, if we ever feel as though that experience isn’t fully realized, then we must implement new features to give players that core experience.

The best example of this methodology is our mystery web UI. Playtests indicated that players had a hard time keeping track of all the information they needed to solve the mysteries we presented them in our tutorial, and we had ambitions of telling more complex and interesting missions in later levels. The mystery web was the perfect solution to this problem: it helps players keep track of their information, and allows us to present our stories and mysteries in an easy to digest format. And of course, the web makes players feel like real detectives due to similar visuals in popular media.

Early in the project we knew we wanted our aesthetic and narrative to go in a noir direction, with a visual style inspired by noir graphic novels. We felt this would also reinforce our core experience, playing into the mystery elements of our game with the noir aesthetic, as well as the horror with its high contrast and prevalent use of light and shadow. To create our end result, we needed to use a combination of a stylized texturing approach and postprocess FX, which includes a unique cel shader and an edge tracing shader.

The Camera that Bleeds began as a fun weekend game jam between friends as a break from school and work, but even after just that one weekend we could tell we had something special on our hands. We continued working and before too long we started expanding our team. What started as a team of two designer/programmers expanded to a 10 person multi-disciplinary team of designers, programmers, 3D artists, animators, and an sfx artist.

We brought the project to school and developed the game further in three production studio courses offered by the School of Interactive Games and Media for which we earned course credit. We then applied for and were accepted into the MAGIC Maker program at MAGIC Spell Studios who awarded us a research grant to work on the game full time this past spring semester. Our next, and biggest step, will be bringing our game to publishers to secure a funding deal to finish the game and bring it to market. We will begin our pitches to publishers late in August this year.

Our Team:

Mark Lipina - Co-creator, project management, design, programming, art direction
Davis Snider - Co-creator, design, programming, narrative
Michal Zadok - Player animation, music composition
Arthur Tisseront - Foley, audio engineering, voice acting
Jesenia Roberts - Social media management, writing
Victoria Lofaro - 3D modeling
Leah Tyler - 3D modeling, texturing, concept art
Jacob Irizarry - environment art, 3D modeling, texturing
Tae Won Chung - 3D modeling, texturing
Eric Burby - environment art, 3D modeling, texturing
Ryan Welsh - monster character art, 3D modeling and texturing

Technologies Used

• Unreal Engine 4.25
• Wwise 2019.2.5.7349
• Visual Studio 2019
• Visual Assist
• Git VCS
• Github
• Trello
• Google Drive Suite
• Autodesk Maya
• Substance Painter
• Photoshop
• Logic Pro
• Studio One 5

Other links

• Official Website - The Camera that Bleeds
• Follow us on Twitter!