Hello PlayStation fans! My name is Serge and I am the Head of Production at Frogwares, a video games studio most known for its Sherlock Holmes series and The Sinking City. Today, we want to show you something that we’ve been working on in our studio for months – a new trailer and a new gameplay video from our upcoming open-world mystery adventure Sherlock Holmes Chapter One. So pop on the kettle, brew some hot tea or coffee and grab that magnifying glass – we have a case to solve detectives. 

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In Sherlock Holmes Chapter One we tell the story of a young Sherlock Holmes before he becomes the world-famous detective. On the outside, he’s a young, confident, maybe even borderline cocky man who is still trying to figure out who he really is. His life purpose is still not known. Now, what happened in his life that turned him into this antisocial genius? What events shaped him into the character that we now know and love. These are the kind of questions that we asked ourselves in the studio, and are somewhat answered in our game. 

Our game starts when you, the young Holmes, arrive on the island, Cordona together with your good friend Jon. The reason for your trip is to dig up and heal old emotional wounds. You are here to uncover the mystery of your mother’s death. You’ve always felt that something didn’t add up, and now you have received even more reasons to discover the truth as to what happened to her on that island.

Speaking of the island, Sherlock Holmes Chapter One takes place on the Mediterranean island of Cordona, in the late 1880’s. This beautiful, almost paradise-like place is a melting pot of different cultures. But as it normally pans out in life, under all of this beauty there is a layer of flaws. As you venture out into this open world, you will see that apart from the different regions of Cordona, the island has its own social class hierarchy too. And those at the bottom don’t always get to live the paradise life that you see in front of you. 

As you experience the island, you will come across cases and mysteries that only a future detective can solve. Murders, missing jewels, even a runaway elephant are all there waiting to be solved. What tools are in your detective arsenal you ask? Well, take a look at our latest gameplay video to get a better idea on how you will be able to use that intuition of yours!

Besides captivating gameplay, Housemarque is known for over the top particle effects. Titles such as Resogun, Alienation, Matterfall and Nex Machina all used proprietary VFX technology to bring colorful explosions to the screen in order to reward players for destroying enemies or completing levels. In Returnal, Housemarque switched from top down to a third person camera, but also to a more grounded and darker art style than before. In this article, Risto Jankkila, Lead VFX Artist, and Sharman Jagadeesan, Senior Graphics Programmer, give us a closer look at how they utilized their VFX tech to make the alien planet of Atropos and its inhabitants come to life.

Below you can find the full breakdown video covering some of the showcase VFX features of Returnal. In addition to that, we’ll go a bit more into detail with some of those features in this article.

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The history of our VFX tech 

We have been working on our proprietary VFX tech since Resogun (2013 PS4 launch title), where the first prototype of our current particle system was used on some of the showcase effects. After Resogun, the particle system got a graphical user interface and we started referring to it as Next Gen Particle System (NGP). In 2014 we made the decision to produce all of the particle effects for Alienation with NGP. After shipping Alienation, the system was used for Nex Machina and ported to Unreal Engine for Matterfall.

NGP is designed to be a GPU-only VFX authoring system with minimal CPU overhead. Focus is on good performance and flexibility. Particle authoring is done by VFX artists who write compute shader snippets that define particle behaviour and data. NGP takes care of memory allocation and most of the boilerplate code, while artists can focus on behaviour and visuals.

Currently NGP is not intended to handle only particle effects. It can also be used for controlling voxel behaviour in volumes or for generating dynamic procedural geometry. We also have several modules that generate data to be used as an input for effects. 

For example, we have our own fluid simulation module that can feed its simulation data to NGP. Another example is a module called voxeliser which can convert an animated mesh to voxels. That data can be then used for volumetric character effects. Other resources like textures, bone matrices and vertex buffers can also be used as inputs for particle effects.

The VFX magic behind enemy tentacles and bullet trails: node particles 

From early on in Returnal’s development, it was clear that we wanted to do something special with enemy creatures on Atropos. Game director Harry Krueger wanted them to res