Brewing Magic on Mars: The Game Design

Well friends, we are almost there. And by almost I mean not at all 😂 No but in all seriousness, I’m almost done writing all of Martian Alchemist’s game design. I know that I’ll end up making some changes as I work on building it out, testing it, iterating, etc. but I think it’s really important to start a project like this with a firm grasp of where you are going. This way, when I start putting the pieces together, I’ll know what pieces are going to be unique and what are going to be reusable.

One of the hardest things for me to develop was how players are going to actually brew their potions. It is really important to me that people get to actually experience making a potion. I really want a lot of the creativity, discovery, and problem solving to be done by the player, not predetermined by me. But I didn’t know exactly how I was going to visually represent this from a graphical and also storyline perspective.

After spending a lot of time thinking about it, researching other games, and drawing inspiration from other fantasy worlds and games, I’m really excited with what I've come up with! Basically you are going to navigate a cartesian plane where various potion effects are “hidden”. There are various void patches scattered around the map that behave similar to a worm hole. If you run into one of those, one of three things will occur: nothing, your potion will fail, or you’ll be teleported to a random location on the map. Below is just a reference that I made for me to use as I develop the game. Don’t worry, the real art assets will be much easier to understand and follow (not to mention that they’ll be much better looking too 😂).

The colored squares represent the locations of the various effects. The purple rectangles are the void patches. (For reference only. Not actual representation of the game lol)

One thing that is going to be very important to Martian Alchemist is the idea of the four classical elements: air, water, earth, and fire. Every potion and every ingredient will be classified based on their primary element. I’ve even implemented growing seasons in the game! There are also going to be random events that occur that are tied into the four elements.

I’ve also defined exactly what tools you’ll have available to you to use as you go about brewing various potions: a mortar and pestle, a knife and cutting board, a distillery, a quantum mortar and pestle, and your own Martian rover. You will have your own greenhouse as well as a personal lava tube where you’ll be able to find and harvest various ingredients. There are flowers, herbs, mushrooms, truffles, roots/tubers, grubs, crystals, creepy crawlers, ultra rare crystals, as well as Martian Dust.

Certain merchants will come to your shop and you can buy both ingredients and various tools from them. As you interact with the customers, your overall reputation will be impacted based on your choices. Reputation management will be important since it will significantly impact your revenue streams as well as clientele.

Right now I’m finalizing the pricing structure of the potions, tools, and ingredients. Then I have to finish up the special achievements and events and fully define the XP levels and how they’re calculated. After that, which I hope to finish all this in this coming week, I will finally be able to begin the construction process.