What initially seems like a pretty simple environment quickly becomes much harder to accomplish due to the fact that water has fairly complicated physics.
Thankfully, accurate water physics are not essential for a game about the Grim Reaper. Instead, we've floated some approaches to bypassing water physics and the problems it poses:
1. Water physics is ignored and instead is rendered as a flat plane with an animated texture with the code causing the hook to drift around a little bit (randomly) within the water. It works, and certainly would for a prototype, but it might not end up looking super nice.
2. The Water is instead approached completely differently - with the "water" becoming this sort of ethereal nebula-looking body - It bypasses the need for surface physics (and waves) and supports the visual theme of souls, ghosts, and the abstract concepts of death. Potential pitfalls of this approach are actually rendering it (Using fog rendering techniques is a possibility, though potentially difficult) and causing player confusion. Some players might wonder where the water is or understand that what they're looking at is the "water." It would need to be like water, but entirely like it. It might cause more problems than it solves.
The rest of the environment can be done with meshes of rocks - rock meshes are extremely versatile and they also support the visual theme.
While it may seem like an overly granular and specific question for this early in the process, I think it makes sense to approach these ideas quickly, since they might require special attention. The two solutions listed above, for instance, are not interchangeable and have different technical, art, and production demands. Understanding the "development costs" if you will of these solutions will be essential to forming a proper production plan.
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