Debris
Jane Liu
Advisor: Yuliya Parshina-Kottas
A Base-building Game that tries to make an “Aufheben” Experience in a Retro-Cosmic World.
Project Description
In a world where the sun: the seemingly immortal authority, has collapsed and blackhole is growing, players build and expand a hexagonal raft to survive. By rotating hexagon tiles and deploying workers, they manage resources to sustain life and propel the raft away from the void, toward the collapsing sun, uncovering the truth behind the world's decay along their journey. The journey presents evolving challenges and resets upon failure to maintain the raft’s ecosystem.
The game explores duality and self-identity, using the conflict between sun and blackhole as both a survival mechanism and a metaphor for external control and political tensions. Through procedural mechanics, players make choices that reflect their path toward self-actualization, challenging the authority that binds them and redefining their place in a collapsing world.
Technical Details
A single player PC game. Isometric perspective in 3D environment. This is a Team Production developed using Unity 6 as the primary engine.
Design: Figma, Notion.
Visuals: Blender.
Sound: Fmod, Studio One.
Development: Unity 6, Visual Studio, Github.
Research/Context
This project draws on the theoretical foundation of procedural rhetoric, as introduced by Ian Bogost in Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2010). Bogost argues that videogames possess a unique persuasive capacity rooted in their rule-based procedurality, enabling them to express ideas and arguments through systems and interactions rather than traditional narrative forms. This perspective positions videogames as a powerful medium for exploring complex philosophical and ideological themes through gameplay mechanics.
In the realm of design methodology, Tracey Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play serve as key references. These texts provide practical frameworks for structuring game systems, defining player interactions, and crafting meaningful experiences through rule design and mechanics. The game also aspires to support emergent gameplay—where simple systems and well-defined interactions allow players to discover diverse strategies and play styles organically.
Several games inform the project’s visual and thematic direction. Cocoon offers a model of philosophical and spatial storytelling embedded in minimalist level design. Chants of Sennaar and A Red Boat contribute aesthetic references through their stylized rendering and strong, symbolic color palettes. For systemic design, Sid Meier’s Civilization series and Against the Storm serve as core inspirations, particularly regarding resource management, worker deployment, event generation, and feedback loops that influence strategic decision-making.
Beyond games, the project draws from narrative and ideological references. Emir Kusturica’s film Underground (1995) presents a darkly satirical take on national collapse and ideological manipulation through personal stories, offering a lens to interpret larger sociopolitical structures through individual agency. Similarly, the manga チ。―地球の運動について― (Orb: On the Movements of the Earth) illustrates the pursuit of scientific truth across eras, portraying individuals who challenge dominant belief systems in their quest to understand cosmic order. These narratives contribute to the project’s broader philosophical inquiry into authority, identity, and the search for meaning in destabilized systems.