Nobody Wants to Die: Creating the Trailer for a Noir Retrofuturistic Detective Game
Andrzej Marszalek talked about his role as Art Director on Nobody Wants to Die, explaining how the cinematic trailer was created, from initial references to the visual effects.
Introduction
Hello! My name is Andrzej Marszałek. I'm a 35-year-old CG artist based in Poland. I've worked as a character artist for over 10 years and have contributed to projects such as Baldur's Gate 3, Dying Light, LawBreakers, and Rage 2 as a freelancer.
Currently, I'm focusing more on a holistic approach to game art. I'm also a co-founder of Critical Hit Games, and for the past few years, I've been responsible for the art direction of Nobody Wants to Die.
Nobody Wants to Die
Nobody Wants to Die blends the aesthetics of 1930s New York Art Deco with a futuristic dystopian setting. It's a noir retrofuturistic world where the city grows kilometers high, is constantly rainy, dark, and wrapped in thick fog. With the invention of Ichoryt, a god-like material capable of storing human consciousness, death has effectively been defeated, at least for those who can afford to pay for a body subscription.
Players explore this world through the eyes of a hard-boiled detective, James Karra, who is haunted by his past and his addictions. The game is a narrative-driven experience with elements of detective work. The core mechanic revolves around a reconstructor device that can recreate crime scenes as they originally happened.
By rewinding time, players uncover the sequence of events that lead to the truth. If you enjoy slow-paced gameplay, deep immersion, and a strong atmosphere, this roughly six-hour experience is definitely for you. Because we wanted to create the reveal trailer entirely in-house, we first had to convince our publisher, Plaion, that a small development team of around 25 people could deliver cinematic-quality material without compromising game production.
To prove this, we prepared a one-shot sequence at near-final quality, which was enough to secure approval. Around three people worked full-time on the trailer for approximately three months. We also pulled in additional artists from the game team when needed, for modeling, animation, sound, and writing. At the time, the game was approaching beta, so we tried not to disrupt the core development team unless necessary. We also collaborated with Radikal Studio to create the end slate.
Working with References
We established our references and visual rules during pre-production and followed them very strictly, even for the cinematic. We clearly defined what "noir" meant for Nobody Wants to Die. In terms of lighting and color grading, the Blade Runner films were our main reference. We focused on monochromatic lighting with one dominant color per scene:
Sometimes, simple "do's and don'ts" are enough to define an entire visual style:
Of course, as NWTD is based on 1930, we chose Art Deco as the main architecture style:
Rendering
We used Unreal Engine 5.3 with Lumen ray tracing as our rendering method. Since ray tracing was already used in the game, all assets and shaders worked out of the box. We considered path tracing, but converting the scenes would have required too much work for our timeline.
Normally, cinematics are rendered in multiple passes and composited in post-production. However, since we didn't have a dedicated VFX editor and the team was more accustomed to a game development workflow, we decided to render everything in a single beauty pass.
This approach was challenging, especially for VFX, but it allowed for extremely fast iteration. What you see in the real-time viewport is almost exactly what you get in the final render. We started with a very rough storyboard and quickly moved into layout animatics inside the engine.
This helped a lot early on, but as development progressed, we allowed ourselves to deviate from the storyboard when better ideas emerged. This was very different from a traditional cinematic studio pipeline, but fast iteration was the key to success. That agility was only possible thanks to a small team and the absence of an external client.
Visual Effects
Most of the assets used in the cinematic were in-game assets. The main exception was explosions. We used Unreal Engine 5.3 experimental features for fire rendering, SVT, and VDB effects, which were lifesavers. We used EmberGen to create slow-motion fire simulations. Just three versions with around 300 frames each (later interpolated to about 1,400 frames) were enough to cover all the fire effects in the trailer.
Since VDBs in Unreal can't blend together yet, we had to carefully place them to avoid flickering and to create the illusion of larger, more complex explosions. Because Unreal is fundamentally a real-time engine, certain requirements must be met to use it as an offline renderer. We made a conscious effort to ensure that all shaders and particle effects were deterministic, removing any time-based or random nodes.
Unreal also uses deferred rendering, which makes high-quality translucency challenging. For this cinematic, the most important translucent elements were replaced with opaque materials using render targets to fake translucency. This gave us higher-quality reflections and better control over refraction. That said, translucency is under active development, and achieving good results is much easier now, especially with the new Substrate material workflow.
Conclusion
One of the biggest advantages of creating trailers in-house is that you know your game better than anyone else. A deep understanding of your assets and materials dramatically speeds up production. It also works both ways. Many things developed for the cinematic can be reused in the game.
For example, we created a much more detailed version of the reconstructor glove for close-up shots in the trailer. There was no reason not to transfer that asset back into the game. Another example is the main protagonist, James. Since the game is first-person, we didn't initially need a finalized character model.
Creating him for the cinematic meant we could also use him in other contexts later on. Producing trailers in-house benefits both marketing and development, and I highly recommend it. For anyone interested in cinematic work in Unreal Engine, I strongly recommend William Faucher's YouTube channel.
It's an excellent resource with very detailed explanations of lighting and rendering. My sincere thanks to the 80 Level team for the opportunity to share this behind-the-scenes look. For any additional questions, the easiest way to reach me is through my ArtStation.
