"If you're not careful and accidentally glitch out of reality in the wrong area, you'll end up in the backrooms. Here, it is nothing but the stink of old, moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and about 800 million square miles of randomly connected empty rooms where you are trapped. God save you if you hear something wandering around, because by that point, it already knows you are there."

- and therefore allow us to welcome you to the first blogpost of the game: 

The Backrooms!

But first of all: Who are we?

We are 5 students, studying at Howest Digital Arts and Entertainment in Belgium:
Carolin Aust (Game Graphics Production)
Eloise De Backer (Game Graphics Production)
Yannick Godeau (Game Development)
Bjarne Huijs (Game Development)
Salomé Vandereyt (Game Graphics Production)

Two weeks ago, we started brainstorming and came up with the idea of an arcade game, set in the backrooms:

You have been stuck in the backrooms for so long, that loneliness and insanity have driven you mad and the only way you can survive is by devouring the people wandering the backrooms. If you don't keep killing, the violence-meter will go down and once it reaches zero, you die.  Survive as long as you can and set a new highscore!

This week, we mainly focused on developing an art-style and started prototyping the 
map generation and player movement.

Art Style:

By creating the art bible (a document about the different design choices regarding art style etc.), we were able to decide on an art style, we want to go for.
We chose to create a 3D game with a top-down view and an ink-like look to it.  The general atmosphere of the game is really moody and colors are very important: While the main character is completely black and dark-gray (apart from its glowing eyes) the enemies wear slightly colored clothes to highlight the contrast between them. The dark matter dropping from the protagonist, as well as the yellow-ish wallpaper found everywhere in the backrooms, are the consistent theme, which can be found all throughout the game, whether it is the start menu, interface or characters themselves. 

Movement prototype: 

The main mechanic regarding the player movement is the sprint, which can be used to catch up to the humans to be able to devour them. The sprint has to work properly and be fun. If that isn't the case, the whole mechanic of chasing the humans wouldn't be fun for the player, so this is one very important aspect we focused on during prototyping this week.   

Map generation:

Our game concept requires to change the layout of the rooms at runtime, thus we asked ourselves which method we could use to generate the map and change the layout. In addition to that, the rooms need to be connected (with hallways), so we prototyped the map generation process to achieve this goal. 

Engine Choice:

During this week's prototyping phase, we worked in Unity and Unreal Engine, to learn each engine's advantages and disadvantages regarding developing our game. Since Unreal Engine provides us with several advantages, which make it a lot more time efficient to implement not only game mechanics, but also art assets (e.g. creation of RFX and attaching those to the player character), we decided to go with Unreal Engine.

Where do we go from here?

In the next week, we will work on our Game Design document, which will  help us significantly to organise and plan our work for the upcoming weeks.
The same goes for the art bible - as mentioned above, we already worked on it, but it still needs wrapping up.
Apart from that, we will also start working on the Art Assets and try out different workflows, which will help us to achieve our chosen art style.

See you next week!