Where did the idea for ROOM-9 come from?
The concept was first conceived by me in Phase 3. It’s not a complicated starting point, but it’s very well understood, and I’ve always been interested in how people intuitively understand space in stressful situations. Especially if you are new to a space, you tend not to analyse the rules first, but to observe and use your own experience and feelings to determine where to go next.
In the previous stages, I repeatedly used the keywords ‘exit’, ‘closed space’ and ‘sense of direction’. When I put them together, I realised that they all pointed to the same direction – what kind of behaviour one would do in a space within a limited time. Instead of staying at the conceptual level, we could just put the player in a situation where they have to make choices, and let intuition be the main way to move the game forward.
Rooms play a key role here. Each room is a brief node of judgement that can be either an opportunity to move forward or a mistake. By continually entering and leaving rooms, the player becomes accustomed to the pace and begins to rely on their intuition and spatial sense more and more until they escape the room.
Early concept art
How does ROOM-9 play?
The overall structure of ROOM-9 is actually quite simple, and is divided into two main pieces: corridors and rooms.
Firstly the player advances through a horizontal corridor, above which a layer of black mist slowly presses downwards. This layer of mist won’t hurt the player immediately, but it will keep giving you a sense of time pressure so that you can’t stop and think for too long. The game will not fail until the player stays in the corridor for too long.
In the corridor, the player will see several room entrances. It’s up to you to judge which room to enter. The game doesn’t tell you which door is the right one, nor does it give clear hints; you have to go with your instincts and then decide whether or not to go in.
Once you enter a room, the viewpoint becomes top-down, and the player needs to complete a small challenge within a short period of time. Each room is uncomplicated in design, but there will be some differences in pacing or layout. When the challenge is finally completed there will be a prompt if the room is the correct room, if it is then no time was wasted and the correct room was found, if it is incorrect it means that time was wasted.
The whole goal is to find three correct rooms out of eight randomly generated rooms in order to escape the building. There are clues and background explanations possible in each room, and players can get closer to the truth the more they play.
Concept art for a game made on figma
How intuition comes through in ROOM-9
In ROOM-9, at the beginning, players may hesitate and make wrong choices, but as they continue to enter different rooms, they will begin to get a sense of the space.
For example, the player will slowly notice the regularity of room entrances, the feelings brought about by the first sight upon entering, or the tension brought about by certain layouts. Later on, many of these judgements will become quicker, and even have a general expectation of the challenge of the room when they first enter.
This changes not because the player learns any rules, but because of continued experience. To me, this is the most interesting thing about intuition – it’s more often than not not a sudden inspiration, but an optimal solution that comes from experience over and over again.
In Phase 3, ROOM-9 was still a basic prototype, and the graphics and levels were kept simple. However, this stage had already confirmed one thing for me: using space, rhythm, and pressure to make the player go by feel is a valid and worthwhile direction to continue to work on. That’s why I chose to keep ROOM-9 as my main focus in the later stages.
Prototype example
Below is my simple gameplay demo, showing only the most basic gameplay of the game, briefly outlining the corridors and inside the rooms.