Mars Life
Role: Game Designer
Genre: Action Adventure
Engine: Unity
Platform: PC
Duration: 6 months
Mars Life is an adventure game about exploring Mars and discovering its most famous landscapes.
The project was developed during the second half of the year at the Digital Bros Game Acade.
​Mars Life is a game developed with Mars Society, an American worldwide non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the human exploration and settlement of the planet Mars.
​I held the role of Lead designer: working with a team of 13 students (designers, artists and programmers) I had to coordinate and manage the design team.
I designed some level of the game; I had also the opportunity to contribute with UX design principles by working on the game flow and preparing wireframes.
Game pitch
We started from a pitch about Mars and its future colonization, then we decided to develop a third person adventure game.
The player is an astronaut that must complete different tasks, based on what could be the needs
of a possible mission on the Red planet.
We decide to use a low-poly mood for the game, with “Astroneer” and “Firewatch” as main inspirations.
Level design
My personal contribution in level designing is an interpretation of Noctis Labyrinthus, a notable region of Mars surface, known for its maze-like valleys.
During the first part of his mission in Nocits Labirinthus, the player is asked to solve a simple task: taking a picture of the labyrinth.
As the player reaches the spot at the top of the hill (the yellow arrow), a cut-scene occurs and the camera moves around different areas of the map, showing the structure of the labyrinth and some smoke coming from the crater.
Now the player has to reach the impact zone and follow a specific path (blue arrow).
After collecting the object in the crater, the first task is solved.
Trapped in the crater, his only way back to the rover is hidden behind some sharp rocks.
Once he is finally outside, the player can reach the rover (the green arrow) and complete his first mission in Noctis Labirinthus.
UX Design
During the design of the game I had the opportunity to apply some basic notions of UX design acquired during the academic year.
The goal was to produce solutions to problems such as: providing the player with the right tools to orientate within the game world, creating menus that contain the information required by the client and useful interfaces to the players.
For the first point, a virtual compass was adopted: it appears at the player's feet and can be activated or deactivated at will and it points to the next objective.
For the second point, a codex was created, that contained the required data, catalogued by topic and available through an in-game computer.
Finally, an useful information for the player was the oxygen level: it appeared as a bar above the protagonist's backpack.
This feature was later removed: during game testing we noticed that finishing tasks without running out of oxygen was too difficult.
Project Management
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One of the biggest challenges of this experience was organizing both the design department and the more general communication and management of the rest of the team (coders and artists).
Given the scope of the project, being basically our first development experience with a client and given the amount of things to produce, I wanted to try my hand at organizing workflows, managing them through Trello pages and periodically consulting with other team members.
Although it was a very challenging experience, even in a "protected" environment such as a school, it taught me as much about how to relate in a heterogeneous team and made me grow, both as a person and as a professional.