Mini Mars

Spoiler warning: this post will discuss the design behind my game Mini Mars. If you want to play the game first, head over to my itch.io page.

♫ Life on Mars?

David Bowie

There was life on Mars until you decided to play a little too rough with the astronauts.

Making cars go brrrrr

Little kids have some of the purest forms of play. My favorite is when a kid takes a toy car and zips it across all available surfaces and makes *car noises*.

Car goes brrrrr. Big crash. Abundant laughter.

As a big kid myself, I wanted to make a game that embodies that style of play.

The image that came to me pretty quickly was of a simulation game where players have to manually move things across the screen to accomplish tasks.

Games like Sim City mostly simulate things as players sit back and watch. I want the player to be involved in micromanaging.

Scientific discoveries

I'm not very skilled at making my own art assets and often purchase other people's work to save time during prototyping. A consequence of this approach is that the theme of my games are largely determined by the art assets available to me.

For this project, I used a space-themed art pack by Kay Lousberg. The assets immediately reminded me of The Martian and astronauts making scientific discoveries to survive.

What if the goal of the game is to make scientific discoveries? What if players had to combine structures to create other structures, which in turn let them create other structures?

The first version of the game I gave to playtesters was exactly that. Place buildings on Mars, combine buildings to make other buildings, win the game if you find all building combinations. Good luck, have fun.

Short story: this game sucked. The best “strategy” (if you can even call it that) was spamming buildings everywhere until something happened.

It wasn't a total failure though.

At the last minute I added little astronauts players could pick up. They walked around aimlessly and transformed structures when they got close to them.

For some reason both playtesters spent most of their time throwing the astronauts across the screen and moving the camera to watch them go on walks.

Message received. It's fun to make cars go brrrrr.

Annoyance as a feature

I put the building combination system on ice for a bit and decided to focus on the astronauts.

What if instead of players placing buildings, they instead placed blueprints that the astronauts used to construct buildings? Maybe astronauts collect resources to build the buildings?

This idea seemed fun to build so I started by adding a system where astronauts can mine nearby rocks.

This caused an immediate design issue.

What does the astronaut do with the rock after it's mined? Does it automatically bring it to the nearest incomplete building? Does the player explicitly assign them to a building?

I didn't like either idea. So, like all of life's hardest problems, I ignored it and opted to have the astronauts throw the rocks in the air after they finished mining.

I love this. The astronauts look like they could care less about the mess they were making. This gave the astronauts a kind of annoying personality. The player is no longer an omnipotent god. They are a glorified babysitter.

Each miner seems to be saying “I mine rocks, clean-up is someone else's problem.”

And so that's the design I went with. Each astronaut can only be assigned one task and the tasks should be as simple possible. One task to mine things, one task to move things, etc.

Following the funny

I don't know if this is a “valid” design philosophy but the more the astronauts made me laugh, the more I wanted to add more features that were funny.

If the astronauts had to do something, they better do it in the stupidest way imaginable.

For example, I knew players would have to eventually build tall structures but I didn't know how the astronauts would reach them.

Inspired by the idea of multiple kids in a trench coat, I thought it'd be funny if you could stack the astronauts on top of each other.

This is probably my favorite feature.

Reflections

Do I think Mini Mars is fun? In short, yes. In long, yes kind of.

As a puzzle game, I think it's decent. Playtesters were excited when they figured out a new mechanic and everyone I tested with was able to beat the game.

As a simulation game, I think it's better. The astronauts are cute and stupid and fun to move around. I think there is a lot of design space left for new interactions and humor.

As a city-builder game, I think it's a failure. There is no incentive for players to build cool bases. This is, in part, because the building variety is limited. Adding more buildings would help this.

But deeper than that, the buildings don't serve a purpose beyond resource extraction. There is no lasting reason for a building to be part of your base.

Play now!

If you've made it this far and still haven't given Mini Mars a try, what are you doing?

Head over to my itch.io page and download the build for your operating system.

Future posts

My timeline for starting game development full-time has been slightly delayed to the start of November due to unforeseen work circumstances.

I am starting development on my next game next week but the release date is currently unknown.

Credits

The 3D models used are part of Space Base Bits by Kay Lousberg.

The icons used are provided by the Lucide community.

The project was proudly built using the Godot game engine.

Thank you to Charlotte for telling me to change the name from “Micro Mars” to “Mini Mars”. You win, it's a better name.

Thank you to Charlotte, Felix, Isaac, James and Ryan for playtesting.