Backrooms in Snapchat

Hey all! New project this week, and it's the most fun I've had speccing something in a while.

It's a Snapchat lens set in the Backrooms. Doom style, first person, procedural levels that are too big and too wrong, with a VHS look over the whole thing. It was originally called Exploration_MOV_4299, like you're watching somebody's recovered footage rather than playing a game. The title is doing a lot of work there. But I ultimately decided on something simpler that still evokes the spirit but is more friendly for the SEO results.

YELLOW ROOM MOV

Try it here:

https://www.snapchat.com/unlock/?type=SNAPCODE&uuid=7f6f48fa43964bbe9d3e1fceed7f6dff&metadata=01

So here’s how it goes. You go into the maze and you collect Anchor Objects, and you bring them back for study. That's the job. Mostly you're exploring, and every so often there's an entity, which is the part that makes exploring feel like something.

You can't fight it. There are no weapons in this at all. What you find instead are objects that buy you distance, one kind that stuns it with light and another that distracts it with noise. The reason I like that is you're always spending something to get away, so a close call costs you a resource you wanted for later.

Controls are dual joystick, not the gyroscope.

Gyro is the obvious call on a phone. You hold it up, you turn your body, the world turns. It demos beautifully! But this is a game about getting lost somewhere large on purpose, and I want people to play it on a couch for more than ninety seconds. So, two sticks on glass, like the thing it's pretending to be.

The part I cut

I wanted this multiplayer. Anybody who's read these knows I've been deep in the Connected Framework on the story one-shot, and a couple of weeks ago I was writing here about how the opening minute of a group experience is where you lose people.
So v1 of this is single player with a leaderboard. That's it. Multiplayer is deferred, not cancelled, and I'd rather get the thing on its feet and running than spend a month on matchmaking for a game nobody has played yet.

The daily map is what makes that trade work. Everybody gets the same new map every day, Wordle style, and you can run it as many times as you want. Same maze for everyone means the leaderboard actually means something, and a new one tomorrow means there's a reason to come back. You're playing against other people without any of us having to be in the same session, which is most of what I wanted from multiplayer in the first place.

I wrote the whole spec up as a doc before building any of it. That's the same habit from the Lens+ experiment a couple weeks back, write down what you think you're making before you're emotionally invested in what you've already made

Be good little potatoes out there (or be bad ones, either way!) I'll talk to you again soon!