Welcome, Revenant

This is the concept page of a videogame. In this game, the player takes the place of a Revenant Mariner, a dedicated explorer sailing through a deadly ocean to discover new lands. It's meant to be a sort of Uncharted Waters clone, but without the manual tile-based navigation. The game's mechanics will be primarily focused on exploration and discovery, with a secondary focus on combat and trading.

Aetherhaven

Aetherhaven, your home. Surrounded by a sea cloaked in perpetual mist, this city is a beacon of advanced magical technologies and towering multicolored skyscrapers. It pulses with the energy of arcing lightning and the hum of arcane innovations, attracting adventurers, scholars, and mystics from all corners of the world. It is a post-scarcity society, with high minded and utopian ideals. The people of Aetherhaven are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and discovery.

Drifter

The Drifter is a ship that the player uses to navigate the ocean. It's a small, cheap ship that the player will want to replace as soon as possible, but an upgraded ship will require more influence and crew to maintain.

Revenant Mariner

You, the player. The Revenant Mariner navigates this world with the aid of a Revenant's Mark, a powerful magical tattoo that transports the wearer back in time any time they die. Revenant Mariners chart and navigate The Lost Haze by repeatedly dying and returning to the past. When the tattoo is activated, the tattoo is updated with the cause of the Revenant's death, as well as the last known direction the Revenant had set off in, and an updated count of the number of times the tattoo has triggered.

The Lost Haze

The Lost Haze is a vast and deadly ocean filled with monsters, storms, and other dangers. Though it may seem like an ordinary mist-filled ocean at first, The Lost Haze is modelled as a gently sloping hyperbolic plane, with islands of stability and safety scattered throughout. Due to its hyperbolic nature, slight deviations in course lead to massive changes in trajectory, making conventional spatial mapping impossible. A Revenant Mariner may only navigate The Haze by charting a course in advance and seeing where it leads.

Gameplay

The Revenant Mariner navigates the ocean by charting predetermined courses and seeing where they lead. In practice, this will essentially be implemented as an idle game, where the Revenant Mariner sets a general direction, and the game fast-forwards through a series of possible algorithmically generated courses with random seeds, telling the Revenant what the tattoo shifted to and the number of deaths so far each time. Over multiple cycles, the different courses will be plotted on a scatter plot, and over time patterns will emerge that allow the player to get a better picture of what lies in the Lost Haze, and how far they are from discovering a new land. If the Revenant discovers a new land, they will be able to explore it. Over time, as new locations are discovered and charted, the Revenant will be able to upgrade their ship, hire more crew, purchase and commission new ships and fleets, and establish trade routes.