The Backrooms
The Backrooms is a short gameplay demo inspired by the backrooms urban legend. It showcases procedurally generated rooms with placeholder obstacles that can be replaced with enemies or items. The goal is to collect keys to find a way out.
Responsibilities and Experience
For this project, my main focus was to attempt procedural generation for the first time. I was inspired by The Binding of Isaac because its random dungeon generation seemed to mix well with the idea of the backrooms legend. I also focused on creating a spider model that used procedural animation to walk, as well as first-person player movement.
The Process
I began with making different room models. Each room has a different amount and directions of doorways. The rooms were put in an array to be randomly picked from.
Each doorway had a potential spawn location where a room could spawn. Each point would randomly select from the pool and each subsequent room would continue until rooms with no available doorways would spawn. The middle point prevents the new room from spawning another in the same location as the previous.
Each room also has the chance to spawn a random number of obstacles. The obstacles here are just basic pillars and blocks, but can easily be replaced with anything, such as enemies. In the most recent build, baby spiders can spawn.
To make the spider model I used Blender for the first time and imported it into Unity.
To create its walking animation, I used a rig builder with inverse kinematics for each leg. The position each leg depends on the movement of the body and the elevation of the floor beneath it.