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Finally after 10 years of weekend work - NoseBound is out on Steam!

DiegoBAQ
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DiegoBAQ polycounter lvl 11

Hey Polycount!
I’d like to share with you some of the work we've been doing on NoseBound, a stylized noir adventure game developed under my indie label Quarantine Interactive.

NoseBound is a serialized, point-and-click detective game set in a surreal, dark, and gritty city inspired by 1940s noir cinema, with elements of psychological horror and the paranormal. You play as Ray Hammond, a cynical private eye drawn into a twisted case that spirals into cults, conspiracies, and eldritch horror.

🎨 Art Direction & Pipeline

Visually, NoseBound leans heavily on the noir aesthetic: harsh lighting, strong contrast, hand-painted textures, and stylized proportions. Our goal was to evoke the mood and atmosphere of classic noir films, while still allowing for expressive animation and interactive storytelling.

I’ve handled all character designs, modeling, rigging, texturing and key environment work, shaders, and integration into Unity. The entire project is built using Unity’s HDRP pipeline, optimized for performance while still allowing cinematic presentation.

🧩 Tools & Techniques

  • Modeling & Sculpting: 3ds Max, ZBrush

  • Texturing: Substance Painter, Photoshop

  • Rendering & Lighting: Unity HDRP with custom shaders

  • Cutscenes & Animation: Adgenture Creator + Unity Timeline

  • FX & Shaders: Unity Shader Graph + particle systems

  • Workflow: Fully indie — small team, big hats!

🎮 A Personal Project

This game has been in development on and off for more than ten years — between freelance gigs and studio contracts. It’s deeply personal and a true labor of love. We were lucky enough to receive an official grant (FONSOFT) to support development, and the game is currently available on Steam & Play Demo here → Steam Page

Here are some shots of the characters, environments, and animation tests from the game. Feedback is more than welcome (not that we can change anything now, but if we can raise enough interest to make a sequel, we'll definitely appreciate any feedback given on this forum) As a 3D artist this place has been always a playground and kind of a school for so many years. 

 I’d be happy to answer questions about the production, pipeline, or anything technical you’re curious about!

Thanks for reading,
—Diego M. Martinez
ArtStation Portfolio

RAY HAMMOND - PRIVATE DETECTIVE - Game character rendered in Marmoset

RAY HAMMOND - PRIVATE DETECTIVE - Zbrush Highpoly

CULT MEMBER -  Zbrush Highpoly

CULT MEMBER -  Game Character


ROVASIO - One of the Cult Leaders 




SMITY - One of the missing persons 


LIZ KOVACS - The case



THE GAME - STORE PAGE AND SCREENSHOTS 



I hope you like this post and the story around this game. I know it's not perfect but I did my best and put a lot of work into this. Comments and questions are always welcome! 

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  • Noren
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    Noren greentooth
    Congratulations for finishing your game, that's an awesome achievement!
    I like point-and-click and detective games, so I might give the demo a spin when I find the time.

    One feedback I'd have is that while I think the art direction is a fitting choice, replacing the blob shadows with actual ones (e.g. via depth maps in case of 2.5 D) would add a lot to the atmosphere. For the best result, you'd have to do several background textures for several lights, but it might be worth it.
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  • Eric Chadwick
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    Eric Chadwick admin
    http://nosebound.com/ seems to be broken, I just get a default file list type of page, but with no files?

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  • DiegoBAQ
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    DiegoBAQ polycounter lvl 11
    Eric Chadwick said:
    http://nosebound.com/ seems to be broken, I just get a default file list type of page, but with no files?

    Thanks for this , we don't have an actual site, we just run a re-direct to the steam store but something must have broken. Here's the site you should have been re-directed to.  appologies. 

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/340020/NoseBound/
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  • DiegoBAQ
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    DiegoBAQ polycounter lvl 11
    Noren said:
    Congratulations for finishing your game, that's an awesome achievement!
    I like point-and-click and detective games, so I might give the demo a spin when I find the time.

    One feedback I'd have is that while I think the art direction is a fitting choice, replacing the blob shadows with actual ones (e.g. via depth maps in case of 2.5 D) would add a lot to the atmosphere. For the best result, you'd have to do several background textures for several lights, but it might be worth it.
    Great eye there! thanks . Yes this was a major pain working with Unity. For some obscure reason that we couldn't find, raytraced shadows only worked with the transparent material (the capture shadow shader) when you used perspective cameras. When switching to ortographic cameras, the ones that were needed for all the scenes that use paralax scrolling, the raytraced shadows don't work. So we ended up making a patch fix and added a blob on those scenes so the character had something, but we couldn't figure that one out. 
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  • Noren
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    Noren greentooth
    Bummer. But I guess you already have enough ideas how to tackle this for a successor with a bit more time on your hands, so throwing random ideas out there probably won't help.
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  • Lamont
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    Lamont polycounter lvl 16
    Very nice, I'll wishlist it now!!
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  • DiegoBAQ
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    DiegoBAQ polycounter lvl 11
    Noren said:
    Bummer. But I guess you already have enough ideas how to tackle this for a successor with a bit more time on your hands, so throwing random ideas out there probably won't help.
    Yes, the main learning experience would be not to fall under the idea that third party plug-ins can solve a big portion of the code and you can rely half of your game on that.  It usually ends in a time sink of patch fixes, updates, and dependencies hell.  I think is better to try to code everything yourself and the only tool to use would be the Engine as it is, wheter this is Unity or Unreal or whatever you want. We were lucky to be able to finish and publish, but it took way more than it should, and that impacted negatively on our sales momentum. 
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  • iam717
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    iam717 polycounter
    The nose, nose know bounds!

    Why is it called Nose bound?

    The shnoze is strong with this one,

    i
    am
    sorry

    Congrats on this achievement, you are better than i in what we do as i have yet do release anything so you are ahead of the game here.

    Edit mods:
    Spolier code doesn't work at all for me.
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