Initially, I didn't plan on the world of Project O.R.B. being as open ended as it ended up being. The original idea for the game was a procedurally generated rogue-like that would have had maze-like elements, but ultimately would have boiled down to a relatively linear path through the world. But as the game came along, I ended up favoring a more hand-crafted world that eventually developed a loose story element to it. But the challenge then became, okay, so once a player drops into this ocean, what are they supposed to actually do?

And my goal was to have there be no right answer, at least not initially. Different people who have played the game have naturally had different initial instincts. I didn't want people to feel like they needed to read any of the numerous text boxes if they don't want, and so the early areas of the game were designed accordingly.

• If you want to do what you're "supposed to do", you can read the text boxes as they come in and follow the sonar pings towards an unknown beacon and follow a trail of bread crumbs (and maybe some capability upgrades) from there.
• If you're interested in the lifeform scanning mechanic, you can find a lot of new things to scan. The scanning effect has a pretty fun audio visual feedback mechanism that might make you want to do nothing but chase those little beep noises.
  
• If you like collecting crystals (who doesn't), you can just do that, and for a while you'll have plenty of things to find.
• Maybe you're interested in the light lore bits scattered around the various log capsules. Why did you drop out of a portal in the sky?
• Some players I've showed the game to weren't interested in any of that, but were happy to just pick a direction and go as far as they could, either horizontally or vertically.

But again, my goal was for there to not really be any wrong answers. If you choose any of these paths (except maybe the first one), you'll probably eventually run out of things to do in the immediate area, at which point I would hope the players will either switch gears and do something else or check the map/objective screen to get some guidance and throw out some sonar pings. But the design is such that you can pick pretty much whatever and can just go at your own pace until eventually running out of obvious things to do, at which point you'll hopefully get funneled into doing something that will unlock new areas to explore. Specifically, there are a lot of arrows pointing the player towards a small piece of wreckage near the start that will unlock an important long range sonar ability.

Once a player starts asking the question of what they're "supposed to" be doing, there are two main mechanics to guide them. The menu database and the sonar abilities. As you acquire upgrades, the sonar ability will allow you to locate different things at different distances. I also wanted to make sure the map, while pretty basic in terms of functionality, would usually have some icons pointing your towards locations of interest. It was also important that even though I didn't implement a full-fledged fog of war that there would be visual indications of partially explored regions, usually representing some kind of barrier that can be bypassed later with a future upgrade. There are also objective pages to give a little bit more context on what you're doing.

But it turns out, in the whole world, there's really only two things that meaningfully block the player's progress through the world, along with a few other pieces related to the endgame. But hopefully there's a lot to do even if you  don't care about the game's plot progression at all! If I were making more major changes, I might have considered one more "gatekeeping" mechanic to try and encourage players to explore the surface area before going deep, but even that I'm not sure about. I kind of like that adventurous explorers can just go down until it seems like you can't go down any more. But depending on which path you take, you'll stumble across different environments with different curiosities and could end up with a very different impression of what the world actually is.

And once you start collecting different sonar upgrades, that might make it easier to find and collect crystals, new lifeforms, or log capsules, again, with the idea that locating the O.R.B. capability upgrades in a different order could push players down different paths. But whichever path you take, I hope you'll explore and enjoy the rest of the world. I think there's some neat stuff hidden away in the depths.