8101cdb472
3 Commits
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| a806272a7f |
LANE7: there are two of them, and the room changes one thing every loop
THE OTHER ONE (Entity.Kind.MIRROR)
After three loops a second one turns up, and it shares the first one's silhouette on
purpose — same height, same suit, same dark — so at range you cannot tell which you are
looking at. Its rules are the hunter's rules INVERTED:
hunter the other one
while watched frozen IT COMES
while unwatched it closes inert
noise hunts it deaf
correct play keep it in view LOOK AWAY
Every instinct the first one trains into you is the way the second one kills you, and
that is the entire design. The tells are close-range only and all wrong in the same
direction: head thrown back so it stares at the ceiling instead of you, arms raised, and
feet that never reach the carpet (Backrooms floats it 14 cm).
It also makes no static and doesn't breathe, so the only warning the tape gives for it
is the edge closing in — even while you are looking straight at it.
ONE THING PER LOOP (Backrooms._disturb)
Exactly one change per wrap. Never two. That constraint IS the effect: change nothing
and a loop is just a teleport, change several and it reads as a new room, which is the
opposite of what this place is for. One change means you are never sure whether you
noticed something or imagined it — and since the room is otherwise identical, when you
ARE sure it is worse.
Escalating: early loops shift a prop half a metre, turn one, or kill a bank of lights.
Later ones hang a totem that wasn't there, permanently reveal an object nobody dusted,
or put the hunter exactly where you were standing a moment ago.
The shift is half a metre, not one — a metre is enough to shove a neighbouring prop and
read as TWO changes, and it's too obvious anyway. Half is "…was that there?"
dev/probe_two.gd verifies the inversion with numbers (unwatched 0.00 m, watched 4.39 m,
noise heat 0.00) and that the disturbance fires per loop. Note the probe has to wait out
WRAP_COOLDOWN between laps or only the first wrap ever fires.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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| bcd67906a4 |
LANE7: you can die in LEVEL 0, and how you died decides which death you get
NO HEALTH BAR. Nothing else in this game does damage, so hit points would be a
survival-horror UI bolted onto a demolition game. Instead: one meter, DREAD, fed by
every way this place gets at you — being stared at, something close behind you, each
loop, and your own coughing. It decays when nothing is happening to you, and every loop
makes it grip harder (DREAD_LOOP_GRIP), so the place gets better at this the longer you
stay.
At 100% you die, and WHICH source pushed it over decides the death, which is what keeps
the three memes legible at the one moment it matters:
STARE "YOU LOOKED TOO LONG / it was still. it was always still. that was never the
safe part." (Slenderman)
REACH "IT WAS ALREADY IN THE ROOM / you were making so much noise."
Sprays. This is the gory one. (the xenomorph)
LOOP "YOU ARE STILL IN THE ROOM / you walked it eleven times. you will walk it
again." Eleven loops and the room simply keeps you. (Blair Witch)
Gore.gd is procedural — seeded blobs that swell on the lens and then bleed downward in
streaks, a wet burst at the camera (physical deaths only; being taken by the static
shouldn't spray), the camera going down to land on its side on the carpet, then the
card. The sequence is deliberately SLOW: a jumpscare is a spike, but a death should take
its time, because the seconds spent watching the lens settle are where it lands. R wakes
you up.
Player.set_frozen() so you can't stroll around during your own death.
Renamed Backrooms' VHS layer to `tape` — `dread` is the meter now, and it was clearer
anyway.
dev/probe_death.gd drives all three deaths and the revive.
Note: the "Parameter material is null" warning only appears under the headless dummy
renderer; windowed runs are clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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| 006c324f1f |
LANE7: LEVEL 0 gets an entity, a tape, and a loop
THE ENTITY (Entity.gd) borrows from three places and each borrowing does a job:
SLENDERMAN it does not move while you look at it, and has closed the distance every
time you look back. Looking is ALSO what builds the static — so the safe
option (keep it in view) kills you slowly and the fast option (run) lets
it catch up. That's the trap, and it's why Slender worked.
XENOMORPH it hunts SOUND, and the thing you came here to do is smash furniture.
Every break and every puff of powder drops a marker it walks toward.
Playing well is what feeds it. A loud enough noise overrides the freeze,
because staring is a valid answer to a stalker and not a valid answer to
something that just heard a sledgehammer hit a filing cabinet.
BLAIR WITCH the level wraps: walk far enough and you come out of the opposite wall
into the same room, because every room here IS the same room. A wrap is
also when it repositions, so "I've been here before" and "it's already
here" land in the same second.
It can't be fought. Getting caught doesn't kill you — it costs a lungful, a spike of
rage, and the knowledge that it can do that whenever it likes.
Deliberately unresolved design: 2.5 m, faceless, arms past the knees, cranium swept
backwards. Slenderman from the front, something else in profile. A silhouette your brain
finishes beats a monster it recognises. Blair Witch stick totems hang in the maze.
THE TAPE (Dread.gd) — one shader: grain, scanlines, chroma split, a wandering tracking
tear, an edge that breathes when it's near but unseen, and Slender interference driven
straight off the stare. The static IS the read-out; there's no meter for it.
TWO BUGS WORTH THE COMMIT MESSAGE
1. `seen_now` was a pure view-cone test with NO line of sight, so it built static
through walls — and in a maze that's most of the time.
2. Fixing that exposed the real one: the generated maze was so dense there was no
sightline longer than a few metres ANYWHERE, which kills the entity outright, since
a stalker you can never see can never be stared at. Thinned the generator — skip a
third of the lattice lines, much bigger gaps — which also matches the reference
photographs far better. They're mostly open floor with occasional slabs, not
corridors.
dev/probe_horror.gd verifies all of it headlessly, including hunting for a clear
sightline first (otherwise the Slender test silently tests nothing).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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