Cardiac Messenger

Cardiac Messenger is an advert about the life of an illegal courier in a fantastic post-cyberpank town where you’re going to have to explore the most dangerous corners of the complicated streets that hang over the ocean, deliver life-saving drugs to people, extract materials, and resist hostiles.

Cardiac is a city built on the remains of giant androids drowned in an infinite ocean. Android hearts, connected to each other with wires, have become the centres of the districts and are still pumping android blood. Blood is both a curse and salvation. It exposes residents to radiation, but it supplies the whole city with energy.

Couriers, one of whom is the main hero, are the saviors of ordinary people who cannot afford expensive radiation vaccines. Couriers have to get through the storms, hide from the police and the neighborhood gangs, find parts to fix their tools and their air bikes, all to get blood and deliver the medicine made out of this blood to people.

This medicine is dangerous. At the moment of rebooting, all hearts are shutting down, all people who have recently used something based on blood are dying. No one knows when Reboot will happen again.

Why would you do that? To avoid dying of Rebooting and Radiation on your own, earning yourself a quality vaccine.

When selecting the visual style, I wanted to combine roughness and harshness with painting. It was decided to use the Low Pole model, and to do the architecture in such a way that it was more like a built designer. Painting, on the other hand, is done with hand-paint textures that highlight the climate of rain-prone and oceanic humidity in the city.

The architecture varies from area to area. In industrial, wired, there are more long houses, without a clear foundation that can be hung like wires like grapes. In the commercial, we have more land-based buildings, as they are located on antigravity platforms suspended in the air.

Special attention was needed to light up and adjust the weather. In order to transmit the oceanic atmosphere of eternal storms, the use of special systems for setting up light and weather in Unreal Engineering 5 was required.

Cardiac Team Ekaterina Monfald — Game Designer, Art Director, 2D artist Ulyana Mokrov — T-lyd, 3D and 2D artist Cyril Nikolaev — Special Effect and Lighting artist Pauline Ivaszewski — 3D artist by character and environment Special thanks Valentina Balitskaya — 3D artist by Sophia Scvortsov — 2D artist by character Alsa Shakirov — Left-artist Javohir Gayratullaev — Hard-surface 3D artist