Backrooms: Escape Together - Level FUN

Gameplay and Level Designer

May 2024 - August 2024

Backrooms: Escape Together is a 6 player survival co-op game where players must escape the depths of the community driven concept of the “Backrooms”.

One of the most anticipated levels, FUN, was a difficult task to approach. It involved careful planning, testing, and iteration.

First, we started with a cutscene level made to end the previous version of the game.

This was used to help me expand the next blockout and give vision to how the final pass could look.

What’s unique about Backrooms: Escape Together is that every level is procedurally generated at runtime.

This means that every level uses a unique style of procedural generation that’s tailored to what designers envision will be needed for gameplay.

To help navigate this unique pipeline, we first start with a blockout meant to mimic the style of procedural generation that we would want.

We were fascinated by the look from the concept photo above. Since the backrooms is community driven, there is no definitive “cannon”, so taking a wide variety of inspiration helps expand ideas and not feel trapped on guard rails.

Using the blockout and this as inspiration, our Programmers started with proc gen that had mazes inside a large warehouse.

Around the maze, rooms would be added to act as the safe zones from the entities that would be added. 

After the proc gen is tweaked to a scale that’s desirable, we play tested with multiple players to make sure it felt good with a group of people.

Using the PCG framework, we take the information from the runtime generated level in order to place various POIs and clutter for each area of the level.

This is an inflatable area meant as a variation of the party rooms.

They focus on scale in order to give the player a sense of feeling small in such a large environment.

A small detail I enjoyed adding was the displaced foam floor. The foam is spawned by PCG on a grid and each foam piece is slightly offset.

This attention to detail is important to sell the realism and enhance the idea that these places could have been inhabited.

A lot of testing and adjustments went into preparing this level. My skills have improved drastically in Unreal Engine with programming and PCG framework.

I’ve improved my skills working with others on a short production timeline.

Overall, I’m very happy with how it turned out and I’m hoping you’d be interested in playing it!