Hi,

I am working on my game's map and I feel like something is off with it. The game would be some type of survey/puzzle game with the player remaining sat, meaning the entire map is only the following part.

However when I test it in Play Mode, it feels kind of empty, even though the dark background is supposed to produce a “mysterious” and “scary” atmosphere. Maybe the table doesn't have enough props?

If you have any idea or feedback let me know! Thanks!

I don't see a map. I thought you were talking about your map? Is that it on the table?

Oh yes, sorry the “map” was the world, like the table, chairs, screen etc.

My bad I think you understood like a paper map

BloodAlibi said:
Maybe the table doesn't have enough props?

Maybe. It's a background design problem, which i've always found to be the hardest problem taking most of the time.

There are two dominating aspects with this:

Composition. E.g. if you paint a bowl of fruit, you first want to arrange the fruit so the scene looks good. Probably you distribute them evenly, so not all fruits end up at one spot. Things like that. It basically means: Having painting skills to paint fruit so they look like real is not enough. You also need composition skills to arrange a nice scene, or move to a good spot from where the scene looks good before you take a photograph, etc.
In your case the composition is very symmetric and sparse, like this:

It's a cross formed by the few objects, it's centered, and it's all densely placed at the horizontal middle.
This won't give a nice painting of fruits, which may look like this:

There is a bowl in the middle, but the fruit also hang out of it or are placed at the side, so we have no empty areas in the image. No fruit should dominate or pop out except if we want so for a reason.

… that's probably why you feel there should be more props.
What you really want is to change the composition of the image, which may include adding more props, but could also just about changing positions and scale.

BloodAlibi said:
the dark background is supposed to produce a “mysterious” and “scary” atmosphere.

Due to the total black it also generates an impression of an otherworldly void. A strange, imaginary place, not on this earth but in some twilight dimension or a dream.
That's probably fine. But if you want the player should be trapped in some real world basement like in teh SAW movie, you would need to add some walls and background, just barely visible.

Thank you very much for your feedback! It really helped me to understand how to make this scene look complete. I'll try to move the props to fill the entire scene and not just the center, and also see if walls around make it better. Thank you!