Game design document · Pitch
Saltmarrow: game pitch
- Milestone
- Alpha
- Track
- Design
Saltmarrow
Rake salt, dive for memories, beat the tide home. A co-op exploration and crafting game for up to four players, set on tidal salt flats where a drowned archive city surfaces twice a day.
The hook
Every low tide opens a window of fourteen to forty minutes. In that window the crew crosses the flats, harvests salt to trade and dives into the archive towers for memory crystals. Each crystal replays a fragment of the city before it drowned. When the horn sounds, the sea walks back in faster than a loaded sledge, and anything left on the flats is lost.
Between tides the crew trades, crafts and slowly restores a leaning lighthouse. Each lens restored pushes its beam further across the flats, which makes later tides longer and safer and lets the crew reach deeper into the archive.
Why now
- Co-op survival-crafting players want shorter, denser sessions: one full tide cycle is 25 minutes.
- Calm and tense in the same loop: quiet harvesting, a hard deadline, no combat.
- A world told through found memories suits streaming and clipping: every crystal is a moment worth sharing.
At a glance
- Genre
- Co-op exploration and crafting
- Players
- 1 to 4, online and couch co-op
- Platforms
- PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
- Session
- 25 minutes per tide cycle; about 7 hours to restore the lighthouse
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5.5
- Team
- 14 at peak, prop outsourcing from Alpha
- Alpha
- 12 February 2027
- Price
- 24.99 USD, no microtransactions
Comparable games
| Game | What we take | What we leave |
|---|---|---|
| Sea of Thieves | Shared roles on one vehicle; the joy of a crew plan going wrong | Open PvP |
| Outer Wilds | A clock that makes curiosity urgent | Single player only |
| Valheim | Building toward a landmark the whole crew sees | Long grinds between beats |
| Dredge | A daily deadline that turns routine into tension | Horror tone |
Detail: Design pillars · Core loop · Target audience · Milestone plan