vackrooms

An endless first-person backrooms game, presented as a damaged VHS recording from June 18, 1994. Everything you see is generated in your browser from a tape seed: the office maze, the furniture, the poolrooms, the thing that follows you.

Play it at vackrooms.vercel.app

Want sound? Watch the one-minute tape.

Built with Next.js, Three.js, Rapier, and vgpu. Runs on WebGPU, with a WebGL2 fallback. No accounts, no backend, no downloaded level data.

What's in there

Poolrooms. Recessed 25×16m basins with WGSL water, caustics, and wet footsteps.	Something else is in here. It stalks, freezes when watched, and runs when you do.
Working computers. Chunky 90s CRTs that load real websites, with a dial-up handshake.	Level Fun. Rare seeded party rooms.
Covered courtyards. Sealed upper-floor overlooks you can never quite reach.	Landmarks. Lobbies, food courts, and 170m corridors between the offices.

• Endless and seeded. New visits draw a generation-2 tape; existing unversioned links such as ?tape=199307 use generation 1. Cassette settings → COPY TAPE LINK shares both the tape seed and generation so others replay the same starting maze. How generation versions work.
• Rooms change when you are not looking. Unseen sections mutate; landmarks stay put.
• Noclip. Hold E on an unstable wall to fall to a deeper level.
• Spatial sound. HRTF panning, traced wall occlusion, per-room reverb, and footsteps that are sometimes not yours.
• VHS pipeline. Tape warp, tracking errors, chroma offset, bloom, and grain, all on the GPU.

Run it locally

You need Node 20 or newer (CI uses 24).

git clone https://github.com/pablostanley/vackrooms.git
cd vackrooms
npm ci
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000 and click Record. A WebGPU browser with hardware acceleration gets the vgpu pipeline; WebGL2 browsers get a GLSL compatibility pass. There are no environment variables or service keys to set up.

Controls

Input	Action
WASD / arrow keys	Walk
Mouse / click and drag	Look
Shift	Run
Space	Jump onto low objects
Space again while airborne	Bigger double jump (once per landing)
F	Toggle flashlight (off by default)
Hold E near an unstable wall	Noclip to a deeper level
E near a computer	Focus its live browser
Escape	Leave computer / pause

Touch devices get a movement stick, swipe-to-look, and contextual buttons. Standard Xbox and PlayStation-style gamepads work too; the full mapping is in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Sound, look sensitivity, tape damage, and a steady-camera comfort option live in the cassette settings and are saved in your browser only. System reduced-motion preferences are respected.

How it works

The short version: a seeded maze generator streams a 3×3 window of 57.6m sections around the player, each with one guaranteed landmark. Geometry, materials, and furniture are batched procedural meshes. Rapier drives a kinematic character capsule. A Three.js render pipeline runs the scene through WGSL tape shaders authored with vgpu. Audio is Web Audio with traced acoustics. The game loop is entirely client-side and deterministic per tape.

Path	What lives there
src/lib/game/maze.ts, landmarks.ts, world.ts	Generation and section streaming
src/lib/game/engine.ts, physics.ts	Game loop, controls, Rapier movement
src/lib/game/stalker.ts, entity-*.ts	Creature behavior, navigation, model, gait
src/lib/game/computer-*.ts	CRT workstations and the in-world browser
src/lib/game/audio.ts, acoustics.ts	Spatial audio and room acoustics
src/lib/game/renderer.ts, src/shaders/*.wgsl	VHS, water, CRT, and noise shaders
tests/	Node test suites for generation, physics, audio, and behavior

The module-by-module tour, including the computer browsing model and its iframe limits, is in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Checks

npm test
npm run typecheck
npm run lint
npm run check:shaders
npm run build

check:shaders validates the WGSL with vgpu; a passing Next.js build alone does not. In development, add ?renderer=webgl to exercise the fallback on a WebGPU-capable browser. The same checks run in GitHub Actions on every push and pull request.

Deploy

It is a static Next.js shell with a client-side game, so any Next.js host works. On Vercel:

npx vercel@latest deploy

Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights are wired in and do nothing unless you enable them on your own project.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. A few things keep the game feeling like itself:

• Keep gameplay client-side, deterministic by tape seed, and bounded to resident sections.
• When you touch generation, verify connectivity and matching boundary gates (the maze and landmark tests do this).
• Main rooms stay oppressively bright and fluorescent: sickly yellow, damp brown carpet, no natural blue. The only interface is the camcorder HUD.
• Check visual and interaction changes in a real browser, not only in tests.

AGENTS.md has the same guidance for coding agents.

Not built yet: swimming, ledge-grab animations, and more advanced platforming.

Credits and license

Made by Pablo Stanley, in the tradition of the Backrooms creepypasta and the many games and videos it inspired.

The source code is released under the MIT License.

Audio has its own terms, documented in public/audio/README.md: footsteps, creaks, cloth, and the flashlight click come from Kenney's RPG Audio pack (CC0). The dial-up and shallow-water recordings are third-party sound effects that are not covered by the MIT license; replace them if you redistribute the game.