Backrooms: Fractured Dimensions

About the project

The Backrooms: Fractured Dimensions is our attempt at creating a compelling horror game for the platform. We feel like the horror genre is massively slept on in general on Horizon Worlds, which is a shame because we’ve found that horror games activate extremely well with other Metaverse adjacent playerbases, including mobile gamers. Some of the top breakout hits from this year, like REPO and Lethal Company, prove that players enjoy getting scared, but more importantly like watching their friends get scared (which also explains why the horror genre has been so popular on platforms like Tiktok, Youtube etc - shareable moments!) We think our game can help Horizon Worlds also get its own little “shareable moments” which have proven to be popular with mobile gamers on other platforms we have developed on, like Rec Room!

Inspiration

Our submission was primarily inspired by “The Backrooms” mythos which has taken the internet by storm ever since 2020. The concept of “liminal spaces” has always interested our team - we love hand crafting these eerie, familiar environments of subway stations, department warehouses, and hospital hallways that seem to stretch on forever. The environment almost entirely takes place in “transitionary spaces,” the places in life you do not pay much attention to as you journey from point A to point B.

For game inspiration, we have adapted this gameplay loop from a lot of the horror games we make on Rec Room - mechanically simple “chaser” games where you are placed in an environment and must complete simple objectives while outrunning a scary monster. These games can be immersive but simple, allowing for mobile gamers to easily enjoy the experience.

What it does

Fractured Dimensions is an immersive horror game where players must explore our take on “The Backrooms” while avoiding a monstrous entity.

Tech breakthrough - fully expressive Blender-crafted animations! We actually created a pipeline script that can port anything we animate in Blender, like our monster entity, directly into Horizon Worlds. This means that this game has the most expressive and fluid 3D animations on the platform (unless someone else figured this out this contest cycle!)
Our monster AI will attempt to find players at all times - it does not wander aimlessly. It leverages HZW pathfinding, so players are never fully “safe,” even in cases of multiple floors, stairs, etc.
Players must find tickets around the map. After they have collected enough tickets of their “quota,” they must find an exit door to escape and win. If you are caught by The Entity, you lose your tickets, but can re-obtain them if you make your way back to the spot you were caught at without being caught again. Players can venture back into The Backrooms to continue grinding for top leaderboard spots, including “most amount of tickets.” This also puts players into a “winstreak mode,” where we are tracking how many times you are able to escape in a row without being caught.
Useful powerups and items - throughout the game a player may find Jack-in-the-box styled surprise boxes. These boxes can be cranked (by hand interaction, if on mobile) in order to open to obtain special single-use powerups to aid the player against the entity.
1. Bear Trap - players can place down a trap that will capture and stun the entity for a short period of time, halting its movement.
2. Entity Radar - temporarily displays a HUD that visually shows how far away The Entity is from your position.
3. Super Speed - temporarily speeds the player up.
4. Invincibility - temporarily makes the player immune to being attacked.

All of these items can additionally be purchased from the lobby store as a way for us to drive in-world purchases, with the addition of a “Rage Mode” item, which dramatically increases the speed and aggression of The Entity for a short period of time.

We designed the items to be simple to use, so no fumbling through complicated inventory UIs. Just tap and the effect happens automatically!

How we built it

We used lots and lots of Typescript + MHCP tools like the Desktop Editor. Our thumbnail was hand-painted by our amazing 2D artist in Photoshop. Our 3D environments were hand crafted using Blender and Maya without using any external asset packs. We used Substance Painter and Designer for textures and materials. Our monster animations were created in Blender and imported using Typescript. Our monster is an original design and was sketched in photoshop and modeled + rigged in Blender. Our music was composed in Ableton Live 11. Our sound effects were engineered using Audacity and Ableton Live 11.

Challenges

We ran into a couple different challenges when building the game.

Activation with the community - for this contest, we did not want to fall into a trap of making a “contest only” type world, i.e. a world that is very technically/artistically impressive, but does not attract players. We looked to find a way to blend these 3 core principles: have an artistically interesting game, have a game that does something technically that no other game has done yet, and have a game that we think will be popular instead of just a portfolio piece.
Expressive animations - during our last contest submission “Black Friday,” we wanted to create a game where a large amount of expressive enemies attacked the player. We did not want to have non-animated, static meshes bumping into the player. For that game, we opted to create a sprite animation system which allowed us to display hundreds of expressive, reactive enemies at once. For this game, we had the issue again of creating an expressive enemy. We knew we probably couldn’t use 2D sprites in a way that accomplished what we wanted, so we had to figure out how to get the 3D mesh to move in a way that was scary.
Mobile-focused interactions. What can we add to take advantage of HZW mobile tools, like the reactive touchscreen?

Accomplishments

Blender-crafted expressive animations! Using typescript, it is now possible for us to animate a model in Blender, then have that animation be played directly in Horizon Worlds. This was our biggest technical challenge. We utilized Meta’s language model AI’s to help us “vibe code” portions of this script and help us navigate the unfamiliar Blender APIs, which saved us a lot of time!

We hope to release this script very soon to the public so that all creators can have this as a temporary solution to “the animation problem,” at least until more official tools are released. We are also looking at releasing our scalable spritesheet animator from our previous contest submission as well.

HZW Typescript Compiler - we created our own intermediate typescript compiler that enabled us to do more distributed iteration on the codebase without accidentally stomping on each other’s work. We designed it to leverage HZW’s existing script syncing design so that we could have the best of both worlds. It provides compatibility with git workflows and integrates with our existing pipelines we use in our game development.
Created an artistically impressive map - we have a bunch of environments baked into a really large, explorable environment that players can easily get lost in. There’s a lot of stuff to look at, and we made everything in the game ourselves!
Compelling mobile interactions - The game plays great on mobile, and we managed to even pack in cool mobile exclusive interactions, like using your finger to crank a surprise box.
Custom OST and sound effects we created ourselves!

What we learned

We learned a ton from this project!

Working within shader constraints to make really good looking materials. It’s often said that constraints breed creativity, and that couldn’t be more true for the materials we hand crafted for this submission. Our artists learned to work with horizon’s visual style and fully take advantage of every shader feature to deliver the environment of Fractured Dimensions.
Horror games thrive on moody environments, and the most significant contributor to that mood is the lighting. We learned how HZW’s lighting tools could be used to make performant but deeply intricate environmental lighting. The lighting primitives were incredibly flexible and easy to work with to achieve our vision once we adjusted our workflows to take full advantage of vertex lighting.
We learned to leverage the horizon asset system for faster iteration on our project. Assets make it easy to take a single instance of an entity (such as the ticket pickups) and make changes to all of them with minimal effort. On this project, we learned to extended our use of the asset system to improve iteration times on all aspects of the game!

Overall, this contest has given us a lot more comfort working with the HZW engine and editor, and we’re excited to apply what we’ve learned to build even more extensive games on the platform.

What's next

We have a lot more in store for the The Backrooms: Fractured Dimensions

More powerups - we want to add more ways for players to interact with the monster, like a “stun gun” or a disco ball that causes The Entity to start breakdancing instead of chasing down players. We’d also like to touch up our shop to offer more permanent upgrades, i.e. permanently giving your character a speed boost.
Unlockable costumes - We’d love to add the ability for players to wear more “Backrooms” styled outfits, like hazmat suits, or The Entity’s mask.
We’d love to make a sequel to the game if it becomes popular enough!
Releasing tools from our development of the game, like our Blender animation importer, to the public.