Unity Midterm Documentation

The idea for my project was inspired by the concept of Liminal Spaces. A friend had mentioned a couple months ago about discovering a Creepypasta called ‘The Backrooms’ and I felt like that’d be a cool concept to build upon for the project.

The Backrooms is a concept about finding yourself in a pocket reality where you’re stuck in an endless set of rooms. In this video, the person is in a maze of yellow office rooms and dimly lit spaces with an evil entity lurking about. Everything looks the same. Another idea that builds upon this concept is being trapped and running through endless doorways stretching out forever.

I used The Backrooms as inspiration for my second scene where I was going for an empty office building with cubicles stretching out in every direction. I played around with the directional light and managed to get this glitchy shadow and light look that makes the overall mood creepier.

My first scene looks like this:

I was trying to build a single room with a table in the middle, but then I didn’t realize the scale of things were too big. Instead, I took the table asset and replicated it a bunch of times across the room with varying heights and widths. From the low perspective, it seems like foreboding monoliths on some other planet. I was thinking of the black tables being like some sort of disease that turns the other colored tables black.

The first scene doesn’t quite fit the definition of Liminal Space, but I used the concept as inspiration in both scenes to create a sense of emptiness and low level panic/uncanniness.

The project was intended for VR, but I couldn’t get the scene scripts done in time so I was trying for just a player game instead. Both audioListeners work in the scenes to play the audio, and I had a white rectangle in the first scene that would switch to the second scene if the player ran into it. I couldn’t test if it worked though, since I had trouble getting a first person controller functioning.

In the end, I recorded the full screen view while in the scene editor and use the keyboard keys to move around to simulate what playing the game would’ve been like. The corresponding audio clips were added in post.