Part of our upcoming SCP game takes place...in a containment and research facility. As the developer of the original level editor used in Containment Breach, I felt a strong desire to push the boundaries of what the environment in a new SCP game could look like.

Establishing the right look and feel to the game is very important. There’s a fairly well-defined style games like Containment Breach,** Secret Laboratory**, and SCP:5K have already laid out for us to build on. We wanted our game to be instantly recognizable as an SCP game, but at the same time, we wanted to use our unique capabilities to do something completely new that players haven’t seen before. Most of all, we wanted to try to take advantage of the unique features in Leadwerks 5, since this should give us the ability to push boundaries and break new ground, in both gameplay and visuals.

Looking for Inspiration

Initially, we were looking at Black Mesa’s environments a lot, which I still maintain has some of the best level design in any game, ever. This is one of my favorite areas.

However, translating Black Mesa into an SCP game proved difficult. Black Mesa, though amazingly well done, has a very stylized environment, while SCP Games tend to use very utilitarian, almost mundane, office and industrial settings, with hints of brutalist design.

F.E.A.R. is probably the closest thing I could find to what we wanted, and it also happens to be a great horror game. Unfortunately, the game is honestly just too old for us to learn much from it, stylistically at least.

One game that leans hard in the brutalism direction is Control, and it sometimes comes up in discussions of games that have a sort-of SCPish theme. Although I am a fan of this architectural style, we didn’t think pure brutalism was the right choice for this game.

After several not-quite satisfying attempts, we started shifting our focus away from level geometry and more towards materials. Some of the abstract Backrooms-style games caught my eye. Although this is way too abstract for our purposes, I did think it was interesting how simple shapes and minimal design could be made to look both beautiful and somehow more realistic than some more complex scenes. This idea was intriguing to me.

POOLS shows that level design can be both beautiful and simple.

We started looking at a lot of photos of real buildings, and analyzing what made them look real. We traveled to office buildings, universities, hospitals, as well as several undisclosed locations to study small architectural details, as well as patterns of wear and tear that occur with time. We took hundreds of photographs and studied them closely to answer one simple question: What makes reality look...real?

A New Direction

We decided to try fairly simple, almost mundane, realistic office architecture. Since this is an environment everyone has been in, we felt it would provide a more immersive, relatable experience, and thus provide more opportunity to crank the fear factor up. The color theme is a mix of bright, almost cheerful colors, along with a “government green” tone designed to make the viewer feel uneasy. Here are the results:

Familiar, yet alien. Mundane, yet vaguely terrifying. The perfect setting to toy with the player’s deepest fears.

For your enjoyment, we are providing the image in beautiful 4K resolution here.

To me this image instantly communicates several things:

• This is a huge organization with a large beauracracy, and you personally are probably not very important in that scope.
• The facility is designed to be cost-efficient, implying that it is huge.
• The foundation is aware of and concerned about employee morale, on some level. This splash of orange was undoubtedly decided as a result of a lengthy cost-benefit analysis.
• There are materials or...things...onsite that are probably very dangerous to you.

Now that I think about it, this actually reminds me of some of the NASA facilities I have worked at...but that’s a story for another time...👽🛸

The Beauty of Blank Surfaces

Blank white walls are a feature virtually no game uses, and offered both challenges and opportunities. At first we thought it would be difficult to communicate any detail with white walls, but the opposite is actually true. With white walls, you can see literally everything. Any little imperfections in our design have nowhere to hide. On the other hand, this also allows us to communicate a lot of small details that would otherwise get swallowed up and lost on any darker background.

The walls in our facility are made of painted cast concrete. One thing that jumped out at us immediately when comparing our initial renders to our photographic sources was that our normal maps were way too strong. I think designers had a strong urge to make sure normal maps were highly visible when the technique first arose, but these deeply pitted surfaces can detract from the realism. We also found that too much noise in the surface would decrease the visibility of deep cuts that actually should have strong normals, so we adjusted the balance of these two layers, as well as the overall normal strength of the material.

The material on the left certainly looks dramatic, but does it fit the setting? If we made all materials look like this, what would the effect be on the overall image?

We started making our textures in Substance Designer, but in many cases switched to Photoshop after a while. @Rich Dlikes to have fine control over every pixel, and a layered Photoshop file made it easier for him to paint exactly the look he wanted. Many of the walls are modeled in 3ds Max, and then baked into a normal map, just to get the exact look in the normals that he wanted.

The baseboard is baked into the wall normal map. It’s just one flat piece with no geometry for the base.

Bright white surfaces provided a dramatic and completely different look that we want to take advantage of, but when lighting was applied, the resulting color would turn out gray due to the light falloff. Although this was technically correct, it didn’t provide the result we wanted, so we increased the brightness of these materials up to 125%. Since our brightness levels are balancing on a knife’s edge, we want to avoid or make careful use of effects that alter brightness, like iris adjustment and bloom.

The material with 100% brightness (left) looks gray and dull. Increasing brightness to 125% (right) gave us the look we wanted.

Finally, we gave the white walls a very slight warm tint, with the idea that we wanted to just place white lights everywhere without using a prefab or worrying about careful adjustment of light colors. This might not be the most scientifically accurate solution, but it’s the one that allows us and the game’s modders to produce levels quickly, with a consistent look. The orange trim actually has a visible effect on the overall diffuse reflection that fills the room, so areas without that will have a slightly cooler look.

Getting Edgy

We paid a lot of attention to edges, and made heavy use of the edge-turn bevel features in the Leadwerks 5 level design tools. We found that beveled brush edges, combined with some edge details baked into the texture, gave us a little extra definition that better communicated the geometry of the room. The effect is subtle enough to avoid being cartoonish, but strong enough to give the scene a much better appearance.

Edge bevels set to 3 cm, combined with some texture detail aligned precisely to the geometry corners, turns a plain sharp corner into so much more.

Edge-turn bevels act as a subtle visual cue that helps trick your eyes into believing the image is real. In some ways, this can surpass photorealism, because a photo has a very limited resolution compared to your retina. In real life, you can see lots of fine edges that a photo won’t pick up, so highlighting these gives the render something extra that I find very appealing. It almost looks like a technical engineering drawing, but remains subtle enough the viewer doesn’t necessarily notice why it looks good.

Painting Tools

We used the vertex material painting feature to add a light layer of dirt all around the permeter of the floor, and around the grates embedded in the floor. Rather than subdivide the entire floor into small pieces, @reepblue modeled a “skirt” of brushes all around the perimeter, and added a 4x4 subdivided block under each vent. This gave us enough geometry to add detail in the right places.

The floor perimeter didn’t need a lot of subdivision to look good.

Getting the exact right look with the edge dirt tool several tries. Of course we got the best blending by adding a displacement map to the dirt texture. Using a grass diffuse texture actually provided good results due to the fine detail in the texture. I added some low-frequency noise by making a copy of the texture, applying a Guassian blur, then adding the blurred image as a layer in Paint Shop Pro, using “hard light” (mod2x) blending. We may revisit this later, but for now it’s producing the effect we want.

The key is the combination of low and high-frequency noise. This added some large blobby variation, while retaining the sharp high-frequency detail. This gives an appearance that is somewhat “speckled” but also has a rough uneven edge, even if our painting isn’t done with a lot of detail. We also found the “Blend smoothing” setting in the material editor to be very useful in controlling the exact sharpness of the displacement map blending.

Dirt tends to collect over time in areas that don’t see a lot of foot traffic.

Virtual Geometry with Decals

Initially we started making our vents and grates as geometric meshes, but realized after a while that decals actually gave a better appearance for these highly detailed objects. We believe the reason for this is that mipmaps effectively act like pre-cached super sampling. The fourth mip level in any texture is a combination of 64 samples averaged together, and provides far better display of fine detail than even 8x MSAA ever could. This may be something we revisit if we make a VR version of the game, but for now we are happy to use decals for these details. As a bonus, it’s really easy to slap these items wherever we want, without altering the scene geometry!

Decals look great and save lots of time!

One of these is the original polygon mesh, and one is the mesh baked into a PBR decal. Comment below which you think is the “real” mesh, left or right.

Detail Meshes

Our approach to level design uses constructive solid geometry (brushes) for the walls, floors, and ceilings. We then add instanced polygonal meshes throughout the scene for increased geometric detail. This method allows us to effortlessly create new unique areas in the game, and is easy enough for modders to pick up and use without a steep learning curve.

Although we feel the windows are the star of the show in this screenshot, there’s nothing particularly special about them. The improved lighting and reflections for transparency and refraction in the Leadwerks 5 renderer undoubtedly played a big part in this, and the rest is just good artistry. @Rich D modeled these in a modular fashion so we can easily snap pieces into place to make windows of various sizes.

The pipes are actually a modular set modeled by me. I think I’m a better programmer than artist, but it’s fun when I get a chance to do something different. @Rich D added the fancy valve wheel and chain mechanism.

Post-processing Effects

Although the situation today is not as extreme as the early 2000’s butter-on-the-lens bloom filters, I have noticed a lot of games still seem like they are trying to hide the scene behind a layer of lens filters, particles, and fog. We wanted to make the shot as clear as possible, so you can actually see the beautiful world we are creating for you. For post-processing we only used a slighly modified version of the standard SSAO shader with a little extra denoising. The reflections are just the standard Leadwerks screen-space reflections combined with a single environment probe. I think this minimal use of effects gives a feeling like all the goo has been scraped off of the lens, and you are just looking through a clear sheet of glass into another world.

Continuing Refinement

Since the stark environment of this scene leaves nothing to the imagination, and we are using a fairly high base texture resolution (2048x2048, 8 pixels per centimeter) we noticed some of our mipmaps make textures look a bit blurry at some distances. We think adding an adjustable autosharp filter to the mipmap generation routine will improve the appearance of these surfaces.

Conclusion

I’m very pleased with the result, and feel this helps us establish a unique style we can easily reproduce on a large scale. It looks both modern, but is instantly recognizable as an SCP game. And it takes advantage of key features I have programmed into the editor for level design, like vertex material painting and edge-turn bevels.

We are excited about this milestone in the game’s development, We hope to move the SCP franchise forward with this game, and push the boundaries of what an indie horror game can be, If you’d like to participate more closely with us as the game develops, you can join our Discord server and sign up for the mailing list to be notified about important updates.

And remember...the O5 council is always watching!