I started working independently in 2023 primarily focused on contract work. In between contracts I developed a prototype for a Murder Mystery Sim:
PROOF is set in Washington DC – the shape of the shattered glass in the logo.
It utilizes a unique action-dialogue system and is driven by a deterministic conversational AI Director. You can say what you want, when you want, and the characters you’re talking to will understand you and respond believably. Built in Unreal Engine 5, it utilizes performance captured custom Metahumans.
The character setup involved deconstructing everything that makes a Metahuman and rebuilding it around an optimized, indie-scale pipeline. The test character shown is a quick, custom-sculpted head that has its own bakes, but works with the parameterized wrinkle maps and full face rig employed by the Metahuman system.
Out-of-the box Metahumans are built for cinematics or filmmaking, not live gameplay. I built a custom Animation Blueprint that takes raw head and face animations from Metahuman Animator and blends them with body animation. It also features automatic eye tracking based on distance and a visibility cone, automatic blinks that don’t interfere with the base animation’s blinks, and automatic eye saccades. This helps the character feel alive in normal gameplay and it means dialogue face animation can be the same as gameplay face animation. The plan is to keep developing this pipeline until adding performance captured face animation to the game is no more difficult than recording the dialogue.
This only the prototype – primarily intended to develop the gameplay – visual quality is not representative of what the final product would be.
I love the way this game is turning out, but it’s going to need a year of dedicated production, maybe more. Proof is on pause until such a long-term effort makes sense for me personally.
