Gates of Umbra

Each of the 10 tesseracts contains 8 rooms, for a total of 80 potential nodes, though only 40 rooms are unique: each room exists in two tesseracts simultaneously, depending on its elemental pairing. A room cannot share the same element as its parent tesseract, nor its opposing element (e.g. light cannot appear in the darkness tesseract, and vice versa).

The identity and content of each room are defined by the interaction between the tesseract’s element and the room’s own. For example, a Water room within the Chaos tesseract would differ in design, puzzles, and ambience from the Water room in the Order tesseract.

Rooms are structured as cube-like spaces, with exits on each face leading to adjacent rooms within the same tesseract. In the center of each room, players may find a unique "switch" (a symbolic or physical element such as a rune, lever, or obelisk) which, if activated, shifts the room's element tesseract by "turning the room inside out." This mechanic allows for cross-dimensional traversal and complex, non-linear pathfinding.

This project was a deep dive into systemic dungeon design, spatial logic, and player agency, created entirely as a solo exercise. It allowed me to blend worldbuilding, encounter design, progression systems, and mechanical abstraction into a cohesive framework. While originally conceived for a TTRPG campaign, the design philosophy and logic system could easily be adapted into a digital format or narrative puzzle game. 

In the end, it was a blast watching players understand the dungeon logic through experimentation, and learning how they could reach any point in the complex with a couple of room movements.