That Which Gazes Back was a level I built as part of a short design challenge that I did to try and experiment with changing player context. For this, I decided to code a custom portal system in Unity and use ProBuild to save myself time during level construction.

I started with a rough level sketch based on several ideas pulled from House of Leaves, Library of Ruina, and Book of Hours.

The narrative throughline of the level starts with the player entering on a hemmed-in mountain top with a singular path up to an observator with a slightly ajar door. By the angle of the door to the player, they are unable to see inside, which is crucial in hiding the portal to the oversized interior.

The main motif was the larger than life building with countless rows of books and artifacts. I was playing with older architectural styles as well, relying on art nouveau and néoclassique mainly, with baroque and constructivist elements thrown in to break up the space and make it feel otherworldly. However, of course, there’s only so much I can get across with standard whiteboxing.

After entering, the player is greeted by several avenues through the space that serve to expand on the player’s knowledge of the space before ascending the central staircase. For highly-direct players, the central pathway leads directly to the staircase, but for others, their attention can wander to either the lecture hall or the sparring area. All of which expands knowledge of the space by expanding the context & scope.

The Stairs

The stairs and the rooms on it were by far the hardest part of this level. I decided on a slanted spiral staircase to allow players to more naturally look up along its length without needing to look straight up(something players generally dislike doing). Each level section of the stairs opens to a portal of a room in a different architecture style, further implying a grander scope of the occupants of the building while also informing more on the goings on of the day-to-day activities.

The rooms in order are a library and reading room, a laboratory, a blocked off room, and the grand observatory.

The Laboratory

This was probably the trickiest space to think through for a few reasons:

-I wanted to give players clarity about the space itself

-I needed to still expand on the narrative.

-I wanted to play more with the portals I made

-I want players to still feel confused through the space

By adding several supporting props, and implying the portals were part of the experiments, I was able to solve the first 3, but the last one still eluded me. To achieve it, I had to do a lot of experimenting myself, and built a supporting room within the laboratory that would use portals both to mess with player’s movement, but also their perception of the space.

It did alter the pacing of the labs a bit, but due to how I constructed the space, it didn’t end up affecting the players all that much. In the future I plan to experiment more with how players view spaces compared to how I do to prevent myself from losing track of my audience’s views.

As the player ascends up the staircase, the player is slowly given insight into an insidious force that is corrupting the observatory. This climaxes in the final observatory, where the entire area is filled corruption, with all of the dead occupants corpses littering the room.

Unfortunately I didn’t get the time to finish the resolution in a satisfactory way, but I was overall pleased with the result, and my playtesters said likewise. I look forward to doing more experiments into spatial structures in the future.