TELL | A 90s High School Murder Mystery Investigation Game

TELL. Welcome to Tellerman High School, est. 1921

Play as Clay Mason, a brilliant but broken 19 year old racing to stop a serial killer with a rogue off-books cop in Ashland, North Carolina. Explore the town, including the century old high school, question suspects, read their tells, and build your investigation.

TELL is a cinematic story driven video game experience running on FacialRAS, a procedural performance system built exclusively for this game. Attention, emotion, personality, psychology and lying tells are generated live for every character on screen in real-time.

Created by Matt Baamonde, a Senior Unreal Engine Artist behind hundreds of TV shows, films, AAA Virtual Productions and live XR events.

Powered by Unreal Engine 5.8

TELL gameplay
Hallway crowd
Interrogation close-up

01 / The Game

A Game Built on Immersive Social Dynamics, Personalities, Psychology & Relationships

TELL reinvents the concept of NPCs into living, breathing socially aware characters.

Using real human Big Five ‘O.C.E.A.N.’ psychology, interpersonal relationships and real-time procedural behavior, TELL’s characters are aware of their world and the people in it, and respond to what happens around them.

  1. 01

    NPC Awareness

    Non-player characters are aware of the people, objects and environment around them, and react according to their psychology, relationships and personality. Everything you do is scored behind the scenes and changes how characters respond to you.

  2. 02

    Make Choices

    Conversations branch on what you say, and nothing is forgotten. Every lie you tell is remembered by the person you told it to, and it comes back at the moment it costs you most.

  3. 03

    Question Liars

    Every character in town has a motivation and a life. Learn what makes them tick, find their ‘tell’, and call them on it before the killer gets ahead of you. But accuse a truth-teller or tip off a liar and you’ll damage the relationship and lose ground in your investigation.

  4. 04

    Explore the Town

    Investigate a small town in the North Carolina hills, in whatever order you like: the protagonist’s former high school, eerie backwoods cabins, secret rendezvous at motels, and the covered-up history of its landmarks.

  5. 05

    Build Relationships

    Everyone in town has an opinion of you that changes with every interaction. Trust, attraction, romance, contempt and collaboration are all weighted, and they shift with what you say and what people see you do. Forge friendships or lie your way to your goals?

  6. 06

    A Rich Story Built on Depth

    Written as a screenplay long before it was a game, TELL is a rich single-player story featuring a cast of characters with histories you may never uncover. Intended to speak to the human condition, it captures everything from adventure to romance, danger to introspection. See the world through Clay’s eyes, or bend him to your own.

02 / The Story

Tellerman High, Summer 1996

Investigative Brief

Case No.
96–0431
Written by
Matt Baamonde
Subject
Mason, Clay
Status
Active

Clay Mason was a brilliant high school student at the top of his class, aiming for a future at MIT, when his parents suffered a horrifying event in the backwoods of the North Carolina mountains. With his father missing and his mother traumatized and disturbed, Clay was forced to drop out of high school to provide income for the family.

Years later at 19, Clay has resorted to illegal means in order to make a living, until he is busted by a rogue police officer with an ulterior motive. Detective Bullock wants to recruit Clay to help him investigate a series of unspeakable murders by a smart, adapting serial killer with no known motive, before the killer murders his captive partner. Bullock needs someone who can sit across from a stranger and know they are lying, and Clay has been able to do that since he was a boy. For his partnership, Clay is given the chance at a GED and a real future, as well as to find out what really happened to his dad.

All leads currently point back to Clay’s former high school. Tellerman High is an old medical school, renovated into a modern lab for a post-high-school summer med program, with guest experts brought in from around the country. Hoping to find the next suspected victim, Tara Ashcroft, before the killer does, Clay must go in undercover as a pre-med student to learn what is really going on before the killer’s tracks are covered.

Placeholder images. Click to enlarge.

03 / The Tech

Powered by Unreal Engine 5.8

Featuring the brand new proprietary FacialRAS Plugin created by Matt Baamonde.

TELL is a game about looking at a face and deciding whether to believe it, which makes light the whole job. A lie shows up as tension around one eye, and it only shows up if the light falling on that eye behaves the way light behaves. Lumen does that in real time with nothing baked, so a classroom can be relit at four in the afternoon and played at four fifteen. Real-world intensity units and a locked exposure mean the school is lit the way a film set is lit.

MetaHuman gave me a cast. One person cannot model, groom and rig thirty teenagers to that standard, and thirty teenagers is what a high school needs. Nanite, Chaos Cloth and strand hair carry the rest of the fidelity, so the frame budget goes where the game actually is, which is faces.

Everything Unreal had already solved was everything that is not the game. What was left over was the problem nobody had solved yet: making those faces behave like people. That became FacialRAS. And Tellerman High is a place. Unreal is building toward one connected world where a place one person built can be walked into by everybody else, and TELL is being built to stand up in that world when the time comes.

Rendering

Lumen
Real-time global illumination and reflections, no baked lighting.
Nanite
Virtualised geometry across the school and the town.
Ray-traced shadows
Contact shadows on hair and skin, where raster falls apart.
Physical lighting
Real-world intensity units and locked exposure, lit like a set.

Characters

MetaHuman
The whole cast, assembled and dressed in-engine.
MetaHuman Animator
Performance capture solved onto the face rig for hero lines.
RigLogic
The MetaHuman facial solver, driven live by the plugin’s curves.
Grooms
Strand-based hair, rebound per character after retargeting.
Chaos Cloth
Simulated garments on every student.

Animation

Motion Matching
Epic’s Game Animation Sample driving player locomotion.
IK Retargeter
Live retarget from the sample mannequin onto MetaHuman skeletons.
Control Rig
Runtime IK for foot planting and hand contact.
Animation Blueprints
Post-process graphs, where FacialRAS composes over everything.
Sequencer
With a custom track family for emotion, gaze, dialogue and blinks.

Systems

C++ and Blueprint
The plugin is C++; the game logic on top of it is Blueprint.
Data Assets
Characters, relationships, conversations and reactions are all data.
Enhanced Input
Contextual mapping contexts for movement, interaction and close-ups.
PCG
Procedural scatter for the environment.
Scene Capture
Render targets behind the journal and the examine views.
UMG
The journal, the choices, the inventory and the HUD.
Attention arbitration running across a hallway crowd Emotion and personality driving a single performance The conversation director staging a scene Concealment: a masked expression leaking

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Placeholder captures. Swap for plugin screenshots.

Built on FacialRAS

A proprietary performance engine for MetaHumans, developed exclusively for this game.

FacialRAS is an Unreal Engine 5 plugin that drives MetaHuman performance procedurally: where a character is looking and why, what they feel, how their personality shapes what they show, and what leaks out when they try to hide it.

No motion capture. No per-character animation. It runs on a crowd.

Every tick in TELL, every NPC takes stock of their environment, consciously or unconsciously, and reacts accordingly, based on a hierarchy of interest points, characters, objectives or events. Their emotional reactions are genuine to who they are and their psychology.

  • Attention

    Eight-tier social arbitration. Characters notice what a person would notice, and look away when a person would.

  • Emotion

    A continuous emotional state shaped by personality, which drives the face, the posture and the breath. Nothing canned.

  • Concealment

    Characters mask what they feel, and leak it anyway. Masked smiles, suppressed tension, micro-leakage.

  • Conversation

    A director that stages scenes, handles interruptions, and resumes them the way real conversations recover.

The vocabulary

Real Human Psychology and Social Dynamics

TELL reflects real human psychology and behavioralism. Every face in the game runs on these logic trees.

The attention loop: characters noticing, and looking away.

Reticular Activating System

In people, the reticular activating system is the filter that decides which of the thousand things in a room are worth noticing, and lets the rest fall away. It is why you hear your own name across a loud party.

In TELLEvery character runs an eight-tier arbitration over everything they can perceive. Targets are scored by category, salience, distance and what the character thinks of them, then gated by how far that character can see and how far they care. A voice raises the priority of whoever is speaking, but only after a personal reaction time, so a group turns toward a new speaker in a ragged stagger rather than a synchronised swivel. Dwell, habituation and return-stickiness keep the eyes from flicking between equally interesting things.

The same line, performed by two different people.

The Big Five

Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. The most empirically supported description of personality that psychology has produced.

In TELLEach character carries a value on every axis, compiled at load into runtime dials rather than checked at branch points. Neuroticism raises blink rate, saccade jitter and how easily fear takes hold. Extraversion scales how large expressions run and how much feeling bleeds into speech. Low conscientiousness widens gesture. Agreeableness slows how fast trust decays. Two characters given the same line and the same emotional state will not perform it the same way.

A composed face, and what escapes it.

Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy

Three traits that describe how a person manipulates, and how well they conceal that they are doing it.

In TELLIn TELL they mostly govern masking. A character high in Machiavellianism suppresses negative expression while positive emotion is on show, so what you see is warmth and what they feel is contempt. The felt state is never overwritten, only the shown one, and that gap is what makes leakage possible: suppressed emotion escapes as micro-flashes, a lip press, tension on one side of the brow. High psychopathy also kills the Duchenne markers, the eye crinkle that separates a real smile from a worn one.

Establishing a baseline before the pressure starts.

Reading someone in seconds

People form accurate judgements of each other from very short observations, seconds rather than minutes. What thin slicing does not do is catch lies: deception accuracy across the literature sits barely above chance.

In TELLThat distinction is the whole game. The first read establishes a baseline, who this person is and how they behave when nothing is at stake. A tell is then a deviation from that baseline, not an entry in a dictionary of guilty behaviours. QUESTION is built on it: find the anchor, find the tell, bait the question, then decide whether you believe them. Because every baseline is generated from that character’s own personality, the noise is fair.

Trust and attraction shifting across a conversation.

Relationships that move

Attraction, trust and resentment are not a meter that fills. They are a running account of how someone has been treated, and they colour everything that person subsequently notices, feels and says.

In TELLEvery character holds a profile toward every other, yourself included: trust, attraction, contempt, collaboration. Those values change how strongly you register in their attention, what emotion the sight of you injects, and how they behave once a conversation starts. The game also keeps an append-only record of every lie you tell, per person. When their own story comes out, that record converts to trust damage, so a romance built on charm and lies collapses at precisely the moment it is revealed.

04 / The Roadmap

Where it stands

TELL is past the idea stage. Everything marked shipped is built and running in engine today. The rest is content, polish, and the work of finishing.

  1. Shipped

    The performance engine

    Attention and gaze, emotion and personality, full-face dialogue, the conversation director, procedural body and idle library.

  2. Shipped

    A world to put it in

    The vertical-slice demo level, 20+ concurrent NPCs, story beats, save, journal and inventory.

  3. In build

    QUESTION

    The interrogation mode. Find the anchor, find the tell, bait the question, then decide whether you believe them.

Scroll to advance

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05 / Funding

What the funding is for

One capture session, for the cinematics only.

The gameplay performances in TELL need no motion capture. That is the whole point of FacialRAS: a full cast runs live, generated per character, with nothing animated by hand. It is also why the cinematics are the one place where a live performance is still the right tool, and the one place the project needs money.

I am seeking funding for a cinematics-only motion capture session at AAA standard. Live actors, stunt work, and full screenplay production covering every non-player event in the game.

Branching is what makes that a real number. A film shoots a scene once. TELL has to shoot the version where she trusts you and the version where she does not, with the same actors, in the same room, on the same day. Split them across two shoots and the performances stop matching, which a player will read immediately, because reading performance is the entire game.

Everything else is built or building. The engine work is done, the world is standing, the demo is playable. This is the one piece a single person cannot make alone.

Talk about funding

Matt Baamonde

06 / The Creator

One person, a story decades
in the making

TELL is made by Matt Baamonde at Baazar Studios.

Everything running in TELL is original work created by Matt: the attention system, the emotion and personality model, the conversation director, the procedural face and body performance. All of it built from scratch, then used to make a game from an idea he wrote down decades ago.

Matt Baamonde started in music. He studied composition at Berklee, played guitar seriously enough to be good at it, and spent his first working years in music production and film scoring. A decade in Hollywood followed, across hundreds of TV shows and films in a range of creative roles, before he moved into visual work as an Unreal Engine VFX artist and character animator.

He now works in real-time virtual production, where rendering, animation and story get made in the same room at the same time. It is the part of the industry that changes fastest, which is why he is in it.

The skill set is deliberately wide: visual effects, graphic design, 3D animation, photography, video editing, music production. The music is the part that shapes how he works. Rhythm and timing are what make an animated performance read as alive, and he tends to hear them before he sees them.

TELL is the first project where all of it points in one direction.

mattbaamonde.com mattb.ai hello@tell-game.com
Solo developer 18 months C++ / Blueprint / Unreal 5.8 Atlanta, GA

Contact

Say something

Press, publishing, funding, or a question about how any of it works.

TELL is a one-person studio, so this reaches me directly. Press and content creators: say what you need and I will send builds, stills and capture footage.

hello@tell-game.com mattbaamonde.com