Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2

The client required experienced talent who could contribute immediately, with strong portfolios and proven skillsets integrating into existing teams and workflows. Flexibility and innovation are at the heart of everything Atomhawk does. Our clients’ needs are king. Thus, we onboarded rapidly and seamlessly, participating in daily stand-ups, retrospectives, and operating as an extension of the Bloodlines 2 team.

Atomhawk’s UI/UX team helped to define and refine features through a structured UX process. Each feature began with discussions to identify requirements from both a gameplay and user experience perspective, working closely with Game Design from the very beginning.

User flows were created, then evolved into wireframes and interactive prototypes in Figma, which were continuously tested and iterated in close collaboration with the client’s game design team. Once approved, the work was fully documented in Confluence. The UI Artists then created the UI assets and integrated them, following the UX wireframes.

We provided Technical Art support to the Bloodlines team in various areas, notably around optimisation. Our favourite challenge was a nightclub scene: this was to be a high impact scene where a fight took place in the middle of a crowded club. It needed to look busy from all angles with a minimum hit on the framerate.

Bloodlines 2 leveraged the latest Unreal Engine rendering technology, like Nanite and Lumen, but we ultimately had to take an old school, then slightly left-field approach, to the hi-res characters. First, we optimised the characters down from over a hundred thousand tri’s to 1200. Then, we baked down all textures into atlases for use in a single material to be shared between all characters, which reduced overall drawcalls.

But the big trick was the idea of treating characters as grass. We stripped out the rigs and added them through Unreal’s mesh instanced foliage system. The animation was simply stored as vertex positions and applied through the shader. This tech would normally enable thousands of blades of grass swaying in the wind, just here it rendered the crowd of clubgoers grooving to the beat. This allowed us to take a low FPS scene with sixty characters and turn it into a heaving dance club running at a high framerate with no drop in quality.

We delivered over nine minutes of cinematics for the game. Working closely with the creative team at The Chinese Room, we compiled a digital library of smoke, ink motion and fluid reference to help us create the look and feel of the cinematics for Bloodlines 2. A lot of the early work was experimenting with stylised motion, making sure we captured the required sense of depth and fluidity.