Preparing for Public Release #2 part 1 (Patreon)

Now that the trail is out, I have been working on more features and increasing the difficulty of the entities in the maze. I am planning to release the next public release sometime this June. There will be 1 online tool that you will be able to use to help others. More details on that later this month.

I am also adding another entity. It will be mostly kept a surprise but I will talk about the technical details that had to be done to implement it.

Mirrors!

Mirrors have been very difficult to implement in video games because it typically means rendering the entire map (or a subsection) AGAIN. That can be very detrimental for framerate. So in a lot of games you just see a blurry glass pane with no reflection. It's a bummer but it is a technical limitation.

I found a way to render perfect mirrors, with some caveats, with as many surfaces as I want and in any shape.

First what are the limitations? I can:

• Render the lighting in the map
• Render the walls of the map
• Use as many mirrors as I want with no framerate lag

But I cannot:

• Render anything else including the player model

It's still all I need for the upcoming entity. How it work is basically just writing a regular shader for the material that first figures out where the floor would be if it were to reflect from its surface:

Then when I know the world position of where the surface is, I apply the world's lighting:

Then to add the walls of the map, I feed the shader a little array that describes the boxes of the map in the reflection:

Then I also apply the lighting to that and voila

I've also been asked a lot how multiplayer will tie in to the game. But basically the world of the backrooms is randomly generated but it is persistent. So you could spawn in a place where someone else spawned previously. You can see where they walked if they left blood trails, and you will face the same enemies in the same locations as others. Cooperation will be important.

In the art and sound department, we are doing some concept art for some later monsters. Also, we have the game's official soundtrack ready and made by the same guy that made the music for Viva.

Stay tuned!