A Place To Stay For A While

Creating the background for Martian Alchemist has been one of the most unexpected challenges I’ve faced in game development so far. I knew from the start that I wanted the game to feel cozy, but how do you make a rocky, barren Martian landscape feel inviting? How do you turn something that’s essentially red dirt and jagged cliffs into a space where players would actually want to spend time?

Part of it was I think I was trying to decide what the lore was going to be. How terraformed was Mars going to be? Is this going to be a realistic future or completely unrealistic? And then if I’m unrealistic, how much realism do I bring in? Obviously there’s magic and the occult in my game, but besides that, I found it challenging to find that line between fiction and reality. Especially for the landscape.

I’ve spoken before how I’m not a landscape artist. So drawing the rocks and mountains themselves was an uphill battle. Rocks seem like they’d be simple, but getting them to look right in both form and texture is harder than you’d think. They kept coming out too sharp or too smooth, or, even worse, not fitting in with the rest of my assets at all. Finding that sweet spot between realism, stylization, and the already prior assets I’ve made took hours. I wanted the terrain to have depth and texture without crowding the eye—something that would support the foreground elements without overshadowing them. Should I add interesting rock forms? What about a canyon landscape? Maybe I should add the silhouette of a city in the background?

A couple weeks ago I mention that I had made a breakthrough with my background and I was able to make the foreground into something that I was proud of and something that I felt fit the rest of the game. This is true. The problem was what went behind the background 🤣 It took me a while and a few more tries to finally get it to where I like it.

I didn’t just have a struggle artistically, but there was also a bit of a technical trouble too. You see, I was trying to implement parallax so that as you moved around in the game, the background would move with you, but proportionally to how close the background is to the camera. This way, closer objects move quickly and farther objects move slowly, giving the illusion of depth.

In order to have a good parallax background, it’s recommended to have the background elements repeat themselves. (This also reduces the amount of time required to make assets if you can reuse or tile assets). And since they’ll be moving at different rates, it is important that each asset aligns itself perfectly with each other and that imperfections aren’t hidden up by other layers. Harder said than done, especially once you take into account shading and texture. It was challenging to create seamless edges so that each asset can repeat itself.

Finally though. A good looking background that’s interesting, doesn’t draw attention from the game, and that fits the mood and vibe nicely. I threw in some dust in the engine and I’m really excited about this feature! Because it’s dynamic, I’ll be able to programmatically increase or decrease the amount of dust, depending on if there’s a dust storm or not.

I know I want to add a day/night cycle so I'm curious to see how that changes the vibe. I’m excited for the technical and artistic challenge though. I’m sure it’ll be a beast. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this latest build of the game! I feel like I’ve struck the right tone: the rocks and mountains—once my nemesis—finally have the right shape and weight, giving the scene a sense of place without overwhelming it. The background fits the scene, complements the foreground, and most importantly, it feels cozy in its own strange, Martian way. It’s a landscape that invites you in, a space that makes you want to stay awhile.

Ps…I’ve made the rover… 😏 I think he’s adorable.