Settling On Mars by Daniel Whittaker
Settling On Mars. It probably wasn't a good idea...
You are tasked with leading the first alliance human expedition force to the red planet, it is up to you to ensure that the colony New Terra grows into a prosperous beacon of humanities potential amongst the stars. There is just one small issue, the non-stop meteor storms caused by the centuries of space waste left by careless billionaires littering the solar system.
Game Aim
Settling on Mars is a colony building/survival sim. You will attempt to grow your population and keep them alive by placing down buildings to extract resources from the barren red planet, increasing your population cap with houses, defending against deadly meteor strikes with turrets.
The goal is to hold out and keep your colony alive for as long as you can by keeping your population above zero. To do so you will need to keep your colonists well fed and housed. Survival alone is only half the battle however, with your second goal being to attain the highest possible peak population for a given run.
Repairing and Destroying
Buildings can be damaged by meteor storms. Damaged buildings do not produce as much resources! If your building is damaged (on fire) then you can repair it using the repair tool (ui icon or r key). Repairing a partially damaged building is free, repairing a fully broken building (one which is rubble) costs the same as building from scratch. So be sure to repair before that happens!
Buildings can be deleted using the destroy tool (ui or x key). This will refund 50% of its build cost. Rubble can also be destroyed (for no resources WE THOUGHT OF THAT)
Hotkeys
- Camera Move - WASD
- Camera Zoom - Mouse Wheel
- Delete Mode - X
- Repair Mode - R
Building Types
- Oil Pump Extract precious oil left from the fossilised remains of Martians long dead to fuel various buildings and contraptions in your colony.
- Drill Extract sturdy Martian minerals from deep beneath the surface to fabricate your buildings with.
- Farm Generate the lifegiving food and water needed to keep your population alive!
- Warehouse Increase your storage capacity for rock and food stocks.
- Oil Tower Increase your storage capacity for oil
- House Increase your population cap
- Radar Provide advanced warning for incoming meteor storms by displaying a timeline ui. The more radars, the further into the future you can see.
- Turret Defend against incoming meteors to prevent them from destroying your buildings
- Landing pad Provide a place for rockets containing shipments of new colonists to increase your population to land!
Ratings
| Overall | 204th | 3.938⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 377th | 3.667⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 524th | 3.479⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 91th | 4.25⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 149th | 4.375⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 928th | 2.548⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 257th | 3.917⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 21🗨️ |
What I liked
* Very cool graphics
* Wow, quite a playable strategy game for a few days of work, impressive!
Some improvement ideas:
* It wasn't clear visually where rocks were (there were other rocks too)
* I wasn't clear what the radar, rocket and population would help with (without reading your instructions)
* Radars didn't seem useful
* Show cost of repairs
* Are turrets to help defend asteroids? Maybe label then anti-asteroids because I was expecting aliens :)
* Make it clear that you don't need to connect the oil pump (maybe raw a line connecting things?)
* I'd make the mission the other way round: send people away so they are saved :)
With some balancing, polish and extra features I think this game has a lot of potential!
The meteor showers and laser towers are pretty cool. I do wish I had an end goal to work towards. As the end game for me looked like having to repair everything the whole time, which was starting to hurt my wrist.
Overall very good game!
A lot of your improvements are aligned with things we really wanted in the game but didn't quite have time for. The idea to flip the mission would absolutely make more sense now that you mention it, oops!
* It would make sense to show current resource near the buy price of new building; I noticed I was always looking at the build price, seeing I don't have enough. Going to the top bar to check how much away I am from building it. Then I have already forgot how much I need.
* Show the defensive radius of turret towers. Now I have no idea how close up or loose turrets needs to be to cover my whole economic zone.
* Add disappearing decals to the places the meteors hit the ground. This also ties in to turret towers. It would allow estimating if I need more turrets in the area, or am I good to move onto next region.
* Add explosions when meteors hits and damages buildings :) while it's nice we see visual change the building is damaged, I usually can only see it after the shower chaos. Sometimes making it too late.
* I also agree with some previous comments, that the disasters are scaling too fast, taking more than 80% of gameplay time. Making the game into frantic repair clicker, rather than strategic defensive resource utilization game. It also renders radar almost useless, because answer to question `When is damage incoming?` is `Always`. Maybe instead of doing whole-screen meteor shower, make them localized? That way radar could show with some probability where the impact will be.
* I also noticed sometimes it gets darker for a time and later brighter again. I assume this is to simulate day/night cycle. Is/was there some gameplay mechanic related to that?