Why Deliver Us Mars frequently flashes back to good old Earth
KeokeN Interactive's Deliver Us Mars—a sequel to the 2018 game Deliver Us The Moon—is a neat little space adventure that riffs on the five-minutes-into-the-future aesthetic of films like Interstellar, The Martian, or shows like For All Mankind.
Stories like these are mostly concerned about exploring near-future adventures in space travel—and don't benefit from more pulpy science fiction's use of interstellar alien threats. Without far-future interstellar travel or alien invasions, most of these stories have to draw or riff on conventional spacecraft. It's a challenging effort to make games standout.
And yet, developers who want to make disaster space experiences still need to chase a unique feeling. So what are some ways to do it? According to game director Koen Deetman, one of the team's core techniques was to look back to the surface of Earth—and contrast a dying world with the colorful but barren landscape of the fourth planet from the sun.
Deetman and colleagues first managed to find success with Deliver Us The Moon, which stuck out in 2018 as the rare space game that chased a more realistic aesthetic. When making the sequel, he told Game Developer that the team wanted to tackle two major goals—improving the interactive puzzles that the players spends most of their time solving, and playing with the "versatile environments and color contrast" of the planet Mars.
Right away, building a digital version of Mars that resembles the real thing comes with some unique challenges. First, the only way to know what the planet looks like is to go up there, and landing rovers on the planet's surface is a relatively recent development.
But Deetman still said that Mars "provides a nicer setting to play with than the moon." "Many people
Read more on gamedeveloper.com
