A 90s High School Murder Mystery

Welcome to Tellerman High School, est. 1921

A cinematic story driven video game experience by a Senior Unreal Engine Artist behind hundreds of TV shows, films, AAA Virtual Productions and live XR events.

Powered by Unreal Engine 5

TELL gameplay
Hallway crowd
Interrogation close-up

01 — The Game

Reading people is the mechanic

Not a dialogue tree. A conversation you have to pay attention to.

When you think someone is lying to you, you question them — and the game gives you nothing but their face and their answers. No meter. No highlighted clue. No confirmation that you were right.

  1. 01

    Find the anchor

    Ask something you already know the answer to. Now you know what this person looks like telling the truth — their pace, their pauses, their real smile.

  2. 02

    Find the tell

    Ask about something small they would rather not discuss. Everyone conceals differently. One goes still. One talks faster. One holds eye contact a little too well.

  3. 03

    Call it

    Close their exit, ask what you came for, and compare. Accept the answer or accuse them — and live with it either way.

02 — The Story

Tellerman High, summer 1996

[ PLACEHOLDER — jacket copy, in your words. ]

Clay Mason is eighteen, remembers everything he has ever seen, and is not really a student. He is here because three people connected to this school are dead, because the detective who should be investigating has been taken off the case, and because a boy with a perfect memory can walk a hallway and come back with more than a warrant ever would.

What nobody told him is how much everyone else is hiding. The girl at the lockers is protecting a friend. The janitor is protecting himself. The teacher everyone trusts is the reason a family fell apart. Most of it has nothing to do with the murders — and that is exactly the problem.

Placeholder images — click to enlarge.

FacialRAS driving a MetaHuman performance LIVE CAPTURE — NO MOCAP
Placeholder — swap for the looping NPC reaction reel.

03 — The Tech

Built on FacialRAS

A performance engine for MetaHumans, written for this game — and usable in yours.

A game about reading faces needs faces worth reading. 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.

20+
NPCs live at once
0
mocap sessions
18
months, solo
5.8
Unreal Engine

  • 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, driving face, posture and breath rather than canned expressions.

  • Concealment

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

  • Conversation

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

Matt Baamonde

04 — The Creator

One person, eighteen months

TELL is made by Matt Baamonde at Baazar Studios.

A Senior Unreal Engine Artist whose work spans hundreds of TV shows, films, AAA virtual productions and live XR events — now pointing that toolset at a game of his own.

[ PLACEHOLDER — two or three sentences in your voice: background, what you did before this, why this game. ]

Everything running in TELL — the attention system, the emotion and personality model, the conversation director, the procedural face and body performance — is original work built from scratch, then used to make a game with it.

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

05 — 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.