Building Up the Scene

Okay, it’s time to set up the scene! Enough shaders for now, let’s think spatially. My main concern was how to let user move inside of my corridor kid of freely, without coding camera path? Back then I imagined it as BackRooms where you experience everything from first person POV, so I was in terms of camera movement only:

Backrooms_model

Then I saw this tutorial of Bruno Simon where he had physics and an actual player: Bruno Simon's game

Not only it makes much more sense to put physics colliders onto walls and floor but also having an actual player helps to kind of “see yourself” in the environment. I think I was a little bit too fixated on that reference, anyway it is an inspiration and I am not building exact same copy, so why not have some fun?

I have changed the “player” to the capsule so fun and it’s kind of entertaining how it’s being pushed and thrown into sides, I was thiking maybe later I will add a model of some can instead of it.

Also I want to create a feeling of impossible geometry, so I’m going to move my player to another spot unnoticeably (hopefully) so that they just continue navigating thinking that they are in an infinite loop. At first I drew a simple loop on paper:

corridor-sketch

So after following Three.js Journey tutorial I was excited to start: I’ve put my own, longer corridor with the ceiling and basic colors for now and this is how it looks: First iteration

I switch between normal OrbitControls to get the whole overview while building the “architecture” of the scene, and player POV to see how it feels. Of course, there are a lot of things that would be tweaked in future like textures and light, but I already see one big difference…

For some reason I always refered to this part of scene as “corridor” and imagined a corridor in my mind, but what does actually create this uncanny atmosphere in Backrooms? Let’s see the reference again: Backrooms_model Severance

It’s not just a hallway, it’s a structure that is off to a human proportion, big, empty and repetitive. If you see the corridor that just goes straight and then maybe turns, how scary it can be? On the other hand, the more empty space you don’t see, the more possibility there’s something evil there.

So let’s add more space and re-think the architecture: architecture-iteration-2l Debug version with no ceiling and no player

Noow we’re getting there!

Player POV

From here I also might try to make the geometry more complicated. Next step will be to think of 360 camera rotation, adding lights and textures!