Introduction
You the player take on the role of Justine Spider, an interstellar land development scout. You are an independent contractor who works alone, using your finely honed survival skills to spend days on end exploring, navigating and documenting alien areas for hire. With a backpack, compass, and mapping tools, you find the means to explore the entire area you’ve been hired to scout, while using materials you must hunt down to survive the elements over the period of a few weeks. As a seasoned explorer, you have a set list of priorities that you must meet during every period of daylight, in order to make it through every night, including adequate shelter from weather and predators, the means to make a fire to boil water, cook food and provide warmth, and sources of water.

Genre
The game type will be rather unique to the Unreal Engine and FPS genre. In an attempt to develop a completely original idea, I skipped the “player versus player” or “player versus computer enemy” and am focusing completely on “player versus environment.” While many previous genres have included some challenges involving tricky landscape and hidden items, none so far has focused solely on exploration and navigation. In some ways this will be more like a typical RPG in that navigating and finding and using items is the primary goal, and some predators will threaten the avatar’s safety. On the other hand, any predator contact will be slower paced. The player must be aware of potential stalking predators, but defeating them will not be combat oriented as much as clever avoidance through caution and preparedness.

Level Description
The level begins with the player transported into the bottom of a narrow canyon. The sky is an odd orange, and a strange mist hovers everywhere. The surrounding dirt and rocks are sand and rust colored and the olive drab fountain grass is sparsely dotted near shady spots. The only trees to be found are leafless, dead and dramatically twisted. Behind the player, an impassable canyon wall rises up and curves around to the left and right. To the player’s left, the hint of a gap between two rocks in the distance appears. To the right, a pool of deep water shimmers in the distance. The canyon wall curves back around from both sides to meet in front of the player, as if he is in the bottom of an isolated, rectangular basin; however there is the hint of a cave or two in front of the start point to the right.