Abyssal Cartography
Abyssal Cartography
Embedded Files
What is Abyssal Cartography
What is Abyssal Cartography
In Abyssal Cartography you play as a deep-sea explorer, who finds themself on a cobbled-together ship floating above a recently sunken world. The player's goal is to survive this new reality, and slowly figure out what happened. This would be deduced by a interconnected web of clues the player finds while diving into the underwater ruins of civilisation.
What does the player have at their disposal
What does the player have at their disposal
The ship is modest, with a bridge housing a worn-down console, sonar scanner, and an outdated heightmap of the country you find yourself in. Below deck, in the quarters, there's a LIDAR scanner used to map out underwater ruins in great detail.
These are the tools you have to explore, find clues, and figure out what happened to the world.
Practicing a different approach
Practicing a different approach
Abyssal Cartography is a prototype developed to explore how players process and connect information in deduction-based games. The focus was on information management; How well players track, link, and contextualize clues based on where they were found.
Because the project was tied to a research study, the prototyping phase lasted much longer than usual. This allowed me to base design decisions on objective data from extensive playtesting, rather than intuition alone. Taking this methodical approach gave me valuable insight into structured iteration, a contrast to my usual more instinct-driven process.
Examples of found clues
Examples of found clues
A large part of this project consisted of designing interconnected clues. The hints in these clues can sometimes be very subtle, where only after connecting it with other clues does some information become apparent.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse