Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Procedural Buildings: Interrogation Rooms

The interrogation room can be found deep inside the extended basement, after a long walk down dark and narrow passageways. A single empty chair sits in the center of the room under the light, facing the door.  Buckets of unknown colored liquids are placed around the chair. Bottles and bits of trash are strewn across the dirty floor. The walls, ceiling, and floor are wet, stained, and cracked. A ladder with an unclear purpose leans against a wall.

An interrogation room with cracked walls. It's not very bright in here, so I lit it up with my flashlight.

Interrogation rooms are relatively rare and are only placed in extended basements of buildings with water damage. They can appear in both houses and office buildings. Sometimes the chair has fallen over backwards, and sometimes the light doesn't work. Broken lights shower sparks over the chair. The ladder is optional. This is the only room that currently contains the new bucket-with-liquid object.

These rooms don't serve a purpose yet. They're mostly just there to be creepy, though I didn't go so far as to add blood, tools of torture, or anything like that. I might not add this at all, since it's not supposed to be that type of game.

Also, take a look at my new basement cracked surfaces effect in the screenshot above. I replaced the old shader code with new code that uses a Voronoi grid and an intensity mask to apply cracks to selected areas. It's based off of this Shadertoy shader. Cracks are added as a layer that modifies the material properties of the surface it's applied to.


3 comments:

  1. I feel like procgen could push this room right into the uncanny valley of horror approaching comedy. A few random objects. A random number of chairs. Objects that change into other objects depending on how far away you are. Sitting in the chair makes you slowly fade-teleport to a random position on the surface. Endless possibilities!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh! And don't forget the procgen torture instruments! The more inscrutable the better!

      Delete
    2. Yes, horror comedy is what I'm going for. I already have some of the buckets show as "bucket of unknown liquid" in the inventory. I might turn the liquid into something funny so that I can have buckets with strange and unlikely things in them.

      It's easy to add multiple chairs. I had to special case these rooms to have "only one chair". I'm not sure how to do changing objects, teleporting, or even player sitting. Maybe I can have some event happen if the player pushes the chair over?

      Procgen torture instruments? You mean like some randomly shaped objects with random spikes, blades, chains, etc. on them? That could work.

      Delete