I handled the full set of effects for the CCTV room, from the screens themselves to the atmosphere and the generator.

The screens run on a shader I built in Unity Shader Graph that gives them the look of old CCTV monitors. Rather than a clean feed, the image sits behind distortion and noise, so the picture rolls and breaks up the way it would on hardware that has been running in a basement for years. I built a separate static shader for the dead screens, which gives me a range across the wall instead of every monitor looking the same. Most of the wall plays prerendered footage, but one screen carries a live camera feed, and that's the one where Ben talks to Ava on the phone. The distortion had to work harder there, since it needed to sell the age of the hardware without ever costing the player the read on what they were looking at.

The whole wall is dead when the player arrives and comes up with the generator. Smoke and sparks fire in sequence with Ava switching it on, driven through a timeline, so the machine coughs to life instead of just changing state, and the monitors wake behind it. That single action is what turns a dark room into the room where the story happens.

For the room itself I layered dust and fog particles. Dust picks up the flashlight beam and gives the air some weight, and the fog carries the smoky quality that comes off the running generator. Both were tuned to sit under the flashlight rather than fight it, since heavy particles in a dark room can wash out the beam and cost the player their read on the space.