I have a popup saying "terraforming complete" after 10 sols, but I want to keep playing and I cannot dismiss that popup.
The game is definitely fun but there's some papercuts that make it tough: no dismantle I can find, placement is difficult to understand.
Some feedback:
Colonists are really tough to talk to - you have to be in just the right spot.
There doesn't seem to be a downside to spamming buildings if you can afford it. There needs to be some ongoing cost to everything you place OR a downside.
Music shouldn't change in menus, or at least shouldn't restart constantly. That gets a bit annoying.
EDIT: Looks like these were almost all fixed, awesome.
I'd say there's a few QoL improvements you could make:
- The building choice for a colonist could probably just be a type of building, otherwise you're scrolling through 90+ buildings
- Add key repeat for scrolling long lists
- Draw a rectangle for the building footprint you're about to build to help position, allow mouse placement to shift it around if you need
- Maybe consider re-selecting the same building type because building an array of buildings requires a lot of keys (or a hotkey per building type?)
- Lists should probably wrap around too
Lovely series. One of the first science fiction series I read that gave a proper anarchist culture a shot. (A big thing most people don't understand about anarchism is that it's not a violent, crime ridden, disorderly society without rules, but rather a society built on the idea that everyone deserves care, and we should all put in some effort to achieve that in a self organizing way.)
Loved seeing things like gift economies, self organization and free association, and a general care for both the people and the planet in those books.
Indeed, sci fi has always been a way for KSR to explore and animate his politics. But he's so skilled a writer that the spectacle and incredible technical detail of the sci fi wrappings can obscure subtlety of the political philosophy (as it should be, imo).
Same. I thought his portrayal of anarcho-primitivism was really cool and interesting as well. Also, other people called it boring but one of my favorite parts was in Blue Mars as they hammer out the Martian constitution.
Not sure who is downvoting you. You're experessing a valid opinion even if I disagree with it.
I read this book series as a kid and was enthralled by the sci fi aspects of it. When I reread it as an adult the political undertones completely ruined the series for me.
This is so cool. How are you going to simulate Michel's longing for Provence? Seriously though I adore the trilogy. I started a Mars storymapping project which incorporated Underhill, Senzeni Na, the Moholes etc. a little while back too:
It’s BYO longing for Provence.
Very cool! A couple notes from my first few sols:
- I had a really hard time building a greenhouse, because I hadn't realized it'd be bigger than 1 square like all the previous buildings, and it just wouldn't build despite having materials etc. Maybe a footprint outline while hovering a build option?
- There were a lot of instructions from Dr. Kimura right off the bat. Hard for me to remember all that, and I was hoping talking to the doc again would replay those hints.
- My population seems to be stuck at 2.. I have landing pads and habitats and plenty of food etc, but don't really know what I should be doing next.
- that menus continue beyond the first couple lines was not obvious to me. Possibly because I'm on laptop, so the existing hint was way far to the right
Loud music warning for those wearing headphones.
You weren't exaggerating! I didn't even have headphones on, and it scared the sh*t out of me when I clicked on the little man.
The music was so loud from my monitor's speakers that I nearly jumped out of my skin and rushed to close it, and my volume isn't even turned up much!
Yeah, it's more horrifying than the premise - despite it being good, it's loud as hell
The 'mute' button is near the top-right, the leftmost option of the little rectangles ~80% from the top
It's a must-click if you're loading the site with sound - it would be great if OP would add a very obvious volume slider on load
I visited the site on my Android phone with Firefox. It loads and the UI fits the screen, however it seems slow. Words appear at 3 or 4 characters at a time, then there is a pause, then another 3 or 4 characters. Some music when characters appear, then it stops, then it starts again. I muted it soon.
It looks nice, so I hope to give it a try from my laptop. The Mars trilogy was a great read. When I saw the title of this Show HN I said, oh wow!
By the way, dust storms could be a plot device but are they really that bad with so low air pressure?
Thanks for giving it a click! Let me know how it goes on desktop. Actively trying to improve the phone experience now...
Terraforming Mars is a board game that heavily references these novels which i highly recommend.
It’s great but really needs the expansions, don’t play without
Played for a bit, liked the aesthetics so I bookmarked it to come back to it later and discovered a bug. On mac/chrome, I hit CMD + D to bookmark. By doing so, I setup some kind of autowalk bug where I kept walking to the right. I couldn't stop myself from walking, even pressing WAS temporarily stopped me but as soon as I let go, I kept walking right.
Thanks for this, I'll address it now.
This is one of my favourite book series ever; it has so many points for learning and humanity. Thanks for making this!
Got power water and o2 but can’t seem to scroll the list of items to build for food on Firefox/iOS (should also be Safari/iOS) since it selects on tap before the scroll.
Another person just mentioned this to me, looking into it.
dear god make the music quiet by default
I am on Firefox and it does nothing, no movement, just flashing resource monitors with zero values...
Hmm, I just get a black screen on my iPhone when I click your link.
Did you use any existing stuff like the mars-sim project? https://mars-sim.sourceforge.io/
Try it now! And no I didn't but that is very cool.
Much better, now it opens up the game. Is this open source?
I must have missed something because my HP keeps ticking down until I pass out and get warped back to the command center. Eating food and resting do not seem to change the situation.
Do you have permission from the publisher for an adaptation? If not, you're taking a legal risk basing it off the books.
It's based on it, it's not an adaptation.
Also, this would very well fit within fair use
It would not fit within the definition of fair use. Lack of commercial revenue isn't some escape hatch.
OTOH, if it were merely inspired by it (but not an adaptation) then there would be no copyright issues.
That does not match my understanding of fair use at all.
Great, how did you build it? Also I have to read the books
vanilla JS and canvas plus a hefty bit of technical help from Claude.
It seems you draw everything every frame onto the canvas? The result is quite GPU heavy, for your next game I would recommend looking into a graphic libary like pixijs, to make use of the webgl/webgpu .. then it would run smooth even on old mobile phones.
check out raylib, it should be amazing for this :)
I'm on mobile (Android, Brave), and I can do everything but interact with the people. Am I doing something wrong?
Oh and I can't scroll down on the hq menu. The engineer guy only spoke to me after 15 mins
Had 1000 of each resource, lots of income, landing pads and habitats, but never got more colonists?
Same, I'm stuck at 18 inhabitants.
I'm stuck at 0 lol
Interesting game, love the design.
Struggled a little before understanding the instructions.
are you on mobile? it looks like there's a bug where the opening scene/dialogue is not loading, so the instructions aren't clear. working on it now.
I'm full HP and hunger and slept - why is the character now walking so slowly?
Well, here we are!
Awesome work love it
It’s not really clear how it’s played.
Thanks for trying it out. Can you say more? Was it the controls or more about what you're supposed to build/do first?
Surviving Mars (2018) is another really good game in this category.
When the mars space elevator was brought down and wrapped around mars TWICE was one of the most memorable moments of any book I've ever read.
Spoilers! But yeah, that was a memorable scene.
With old obscure books like this spoilers can be strategic to entice people to actually read them.
Made me think of this gem:
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/ultima-worlds-of-adventur...
It is hard to understand and play... maybe make it more obvious. I made a solar panel, it says I should assign staff...
I would love to play if it would work. And music, thank god for the mute button.
are you on mobile? it looks like there's a bug where the opening scene/dialogue is not loading, so the instructions aren't clear. working on it now.
I think on mobile it’s natural to walk to the guy and tap on him. Not helped by the fact that the screen shows ‘tap’ over the highlighted tile, which does nothing. You need to walk and position the guy under your cursor, then press ‘act’.
The position yourself, then long press on ‘act’ to build when you can’t see where to put the building anymore is pretty awkward too. I’d expect to click to build, position it, then press confirm or reject or something.