My Bootcamp Project

Welcome to the suburbs! For my ten week Immersive Arts Bootcamp at BOM (Birmingham Open Media), I decided to set my project in a neighbourhood that seems normal on the surface. There were two things that pushed me in this direction. Firstly, the incredible power of Unreal Engine 5 to create highly realistic and lifelike environments, and secondly, my personal belief that suburbs are creepy and soulless. Would I be able to capture that vibe? I’ve posted a video walk-through on Youtube, read on to see what I built and my thinking behind it.

You spawn into the suburbs that look like they go on forever. You cannot explore the whole neighbourhood though because I have used invisible collision boxes to pen in the area around my house. I built the houses from basic shapes in Unreal Engine 5 and applied brick and tile textures to them. Most of the landscaping is made of assets from Quixel Bridge and other free download sites.

Here’s a view of my explorable house from the street. It’s the only house without a picket fence and has a wild, overgrown garden. This shows that the owner doesn’t fit the culture of the suburbs, she’s more chaotic but also potentially more open. I built the doorframe with windows in Unreal, and built the door model in Blender — I used Blueprint to make the door interactive so the player can press E to make it open or close. The plants come from Quixel Bridge.

It is possible to walk around the house to get to the back garden, but you can also access it through French doors at the back of the house. Here you’ll find more wild overgrowth (the homeowner may be a botanist) and this shed I made as part of a bootcamp skills test. I built it entirely in Unreal with textures from ambientcg.com, and added the door model I’d made previously in Blender in a new colour. To develop this project further into a game, I’d put important information, clues, or items in the shed to reward exploration and advance the story.

Inside the house, a lot of the lighting is quite low which is part realism and part attempt to control the vibe and push it in certain directions. The bathroom is dingy, I applied this mould material to the walls and bathmat (slightly off-camera here) and kept things simple — there are no items to be found here but houses need bathrooms and a gross bathroom implies that the occupant of the house wasn’t doing great. She was behind on cleaning and garden maintenance (relatable tbh). The bathroom suite is made up of downloaded assets but I did build the heated towel rack from basic shapes in Unreal and apply a steel material to it.

Now we’re in the pink zone, starting with the cosy living room. I didn’t want to make the whole house gross because I want the player to feel sympathy for the person who lives here, she’s not supposed to be the enemy. In this area I modelled the coffee table in Blender and created the butterfly decals using royalty-free images from Wikipedia. I left some of the picture frames empty to imply that something shady had gone on. Were they stolen? The realistic butterflies also reinforce the homeowner’s connection to the natural world.

On the other side of the living room is a home office area. I downloaded many of the assets to create this, choosing furniture with mid-century style elements and an old-fashioned laptop to make the time period a little vague. I added emissive material properties to the lamps to make them glow. I built the pink shelving unit in Blender and added books and ornaments from Quixel Bridge, including items like an animal skull to tie in to the nature theme and also the vibe of things be a little off. The baskets are just cubes with a wicker material applied. The scattered papers on the desk and floor imply someone has been searching for something in a hurry.

I pushed the environmental storytelling a little further in the dining area, setting a scene of half eaten food (with the sound of a fly hovering around it) and a toppled over chair to suggest that the person who was living here either left in a hurry or was taken against her will. I made this area relatively early in the project as the idea was quite strong in my mind, so the only things I built from scratch in this area are the basic walls and skirting boards, plus the little blue mug I made in Blender.

The kitchen was one of the last places I accessorised, so by the time I got round to this room I was getting more confident in Blender. I made the breadbin and cutting board meshes then imported them into the project in Unreal to apply a wood texture — the half loaf of bread is from Quixel Bridge. There is no knife, and there are no knives in the knife block either, all the knives are missing. I also built the cooker, extractor hood and Moka pot in Blender and coloured them and applied some material properties (like shininess). I am especially pleased with details like the grill on the underside of the extractor hood, and the dials on the cooker.

On the other side of the kitchen, with the harsh but not too bright spotlights showing off the wall texture, is another collection of things I made in Blender. The mugs and mug tree were among the first things I made, the kettle I made at the same time as the Moka pot above (clearly craving a coffee that day), and the sink with draining board and tap is the final thing I sculpted for the project.

Here’s the bedroom, softly lit and mostly populated with downloaded assets apart from the pink bedside tables. I also painted the floral wallpaper by hand and uploaded it into the project, and although the colour is outrageously saturated it is super fun to see something I painted with gouache appear in a digital environment.

At the back of the bedroom is another door with a keypad beside it. If I was developing this project further I’d put the keycode in the shed with a little puzzle to figure it out. At present the door is unlocked. I made the keypad in Blender and added an extra little plane behind the keys so I could make it an emissive material and create a backlight.

Behind the door is the creepy room. This has gone through many versions over the last couple of months and currently looks like this: stark brick walls with bars on the windows (made in Unreal) and a bright glow from the hole in the floor. Previous versions included a dark space with horrible noises and a version with a trapdoor in the floor that opened when the player walked over it.

Below the creepy room is an area I’ve nicknamed the disco room for its bright flashing light. This marks a big tonal shift away from the suburban house into something very sci-fi, although really it exists as a place to practice making things flash and as a transition zone to the next stage of the level. There is also an alarm, prompting the player to move faster.

There is one doorway off the disco room leading to a dimly-lit corridor.

Everything in the corridor is bland and institutional, but turning it upside down, adding a dull colour palette and dimming the lights transforms ordinary things into a deeply unsettling environment. This is one of my favourite elements of horror: taking ordinary things and twisting them into something uncanny.

Finally, to turn this corridor into a horridor, there is something awful at the end. When the player approaches, I’ve set collision boxes to trigger noises and to wake up the creature and make it crawl towards you. Is this the missing resident of the house you’ve been exploring?