Unseen Diplomacy 2 is out in Early Access! We want to share some of the magic with you today. Ever wonder how we make your space feel bigger than it is?
Building Bigger Worlds Inside Small Rooms
When we built the original Unseen Diplomacy, one of our biggest challenges was space. We wanted players to crawl, sneak, and walk naturally through a spy base with no fake locomotion and only by moving their own body. In reality most people only had a few square meters of room available, so that wouldn’t make a very big spy base of course!
The answer was Environmental Redirection – a design trick we created where virtual rooms are carefully arranged so that a limited physical play area feels like a much larger space. In Unseen Diplomacy 1, that meant painstakingly hand-authoring a sequence of rooms that would get toggled on and off as you walked around, and never overlapped when they did. The player thought they were infiltrating a sprawling facility, but in truth they were looping back and forth within a 3m × 4m rectangle.
You can read more about the original design here
It worked, but it was difficult. As developers, we spent huge amounts of time making sure walls didn’t collide, layouts didn’t overlap, and transitions still felt believable. It limited the kinds of spaces we could create, and it wasn’t always reliable. It was fine for a jam game, but would be limited if we ever wanted to create a full title, and it required the 3m × 4m rectangle.
From Hand-Crafted Mazes to Runtime Portals
For Unseen Diplomacy 2, we wanted to break free of those limitations. The solution? Portals.
In the new system, every doorway is essentially a portal. When a player steps through, the game dynamically clips away anything they shouldn’t see and reveals the next room at runtime. Instead of worrying about whether two rooms would overlap in the virtual world, we can simply design what we want and let the portal system handle the transitions.Think of it like Doctor Who’s TARDIS.
This unlocks total freedom for us as level designers. We can build more complex bases, more varied missions, and more interesting spaces without being bound to a rigid room sequence. And for players, it means more surprising layouts, smoother transitions, and a stronger sense of exploring a real, connected environment.
Shrinking the Space, Expanding the Possibilities
The original game required a clear 3m × 4m area – which was already larger than many players’ living rooms. For the sequel, we knew we had to bring that requirement down. Thanks to the portal system, Unseen Diplomacy 2 can now run in as little as a 2m × 2m space when in full simulation, can go bigger to as far as your hardware can support (warehouse scale!), and goes all the way to seated only mode with fake locomotion.
But we didn’t stop there. We also built a space editor, letting players mark out the exact floor area they want to use – whether it’s a perfect square, a long corridor, massive arena, or an odd-shaped spare room. Once defined, the game automatically breaks that space into a grid, then fits and rotates level segments within it. The more space you give us, the more freedom we have to expand your mission.
Our goal is simple: to use as much of your available floor space as possible, no matter its shape.
Why It Matters
This change isn’t just technical polish – it’s about accessibility and creativity. By lowering the space requirement, and stopping it from needing to be a rectangle, we open the experience to more players. By freeing ourselves from rigid room sequences, we can create more imaginative missions. And by giving you control over your play area, we make sure every player feels like their home or play space has been transformed into a secret spy headquarters.
Environmental Redirection was the heart of the first Unseen Diplomacy and won the small jam game plenty of awards along with a BAFTA nomination for Innovation. With portals, room editor and unleashed layouts, it becomes even more immersive in Unseen Diplomacy 2 – allowing us to make bigger adventures fit inside smaller rooms.
Even if you’re just curious about how it all works; Buy or Wishlist on the store today!