Motion Capture in focus.
In CONTAMINANT, motion capture is important to creating immersive horror, using authentic character movement as a key storytelling tool.
This devlog offers a deeper dive into how mocap shapes the game’s eerie atmosphere and emotional, physical storytelling.
The Value - Motion Capture in CONTAMINANT
The player's emotion relies on the characters' movements and reactions, and how convincing they're for them. Translating real human performances into the game makes it more possible to do this.
The infected's unsettling movements convey the game's themes of contamination and human frailty, letting players feel the story through animation itself.
Motion capture lets us surpass standard game animations by capturing subtle physical details that are difficult to replicate by hand. The expressiveness of the human body comes through clearly with mocap, even when used for eerie or distorted enemy characters.
In the end, motion capture is what makes CONTAMINANT blur the lines between animation and storytelling. By capturing every moment of a real person's performance, we develop enemies and characters that feel alive, vulnerable, and haunting - letting the players experience the horror unfold not just on surface level - but on an emotional level as well.
The Realism - Tension through Atmosphere and Authenticity
Animation goes beyond characters and creatures - every crawl, limp, or collapse adds to the game's atmosphere and environmental storytelling.
While actors have their own sense of perception when it comes to the story of the game, it is essential to understand what needs to be experienced by the player. And so, when it comes to making certain actions, movements, or emotions, they need to know what it might look like in-game. Such is the clip below showing how actors determine how actions are reflected in the game.
While realism is important, CONTAMINANT isn’t striving for photorealistic perfection. Horror thrives in exaggeration and distortion - slightly unnatural movements that unsettle the player. This is why we often take mocap data and creatively edit it.
The clip shown above captures the actor practicing exaggerated "flailing" motions, portraying a character overwhelmed by an unnatural force. It starts off naturally but is intentionally amplified in-engine to create an unsettling effect that feels disturbingly inhuman.
With combat animations, the demand for a distinct approach from idle or environmental movements is different. They must be sharp and responsive enough while still conveying narrative significance.
Capturing attack animations, including heavy melee swings and defensive reactions that prioritize clarity and impact, ensures that combat feels visceral within CONTAMINANT's already oppressive atmosphere.
The Collaboration - Director, Performer, and Animators
Motion capture is a collaborative process where directors, performers, and animators work closely to ensure performances look and feel right, with constant feedback between the set and the game engine.
This teamwork is explored for various takes on a character's death animation. The director provides real-time feedback while the animator reviews references to fine-tune the performer's movements between takes, making sure that the end-result balances both gameplay clarity and narrative impact.
While CONTAMINANT emphasizes atmosphere in its visual style, facial expressions remain vital for emotional storytelling. Subtle facial cues, combined with full-body mocap, help breathe life into each character.
This teamwork guarantees that each movement and expression captured and translated into the game feels genuine and purposeful. Through combined efforts of directors, performers and animators, we develop characters whose actions draw players deeper into the game - enhancing immersion and leaving a lasting impact.
The Near Future - What’s Next for CONTAMINANT?
Motion capture is at the heart of what makes CONTAMINANT terrifying. It allows us to root our animations in human physicality while giving us the flexibility to distort and exaggerate those movements in ways that evoke unease. It also enables us to use "movement as storytelling", where animation isn’t just about how characters move, but "why".
What’s next for CONTAMINANT, you ask? We’re looking at the possibility of having a community playtest by August 2025. This will be essential to building CONTAMINANT the way everyone - including us - are expecting it to be. Your feedback will matter most - and will help us shape the game into the horror experience you’re about to dive into when it eventually releases later this year.
Tune in to announcements in our Discord server for more information about the upcoming playtests next month. We can’t wait to share the game’s first look and feel with you.
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