Just the other day another indie game dev asked on Twitter, where and how do devs start when beginning to work on a new game. I gave him a short answer stating that it depends of course on the game, but I mostly start by thinking it through, importing most of the assets needed for the game to function and then create some sort of environment. After that I'll deal with other stuff - like the functionality of the game, building a more concrete setting, placing the assets etc.

But yeah, it depends... Man Off Mars is a simple game and in a way it is an environment-game or an environment-dependent game, which mostly relies on the place and the feel of the place. So, of course, here I took a generous amount of time to build the game-world. I imported the Terrain Tools Sample Assets Pack from the Unity Asset Store, created the landscape, imported the  First Person All-in-One assets pack and tried the landscape out with the first person 'character' from the assets pack, scuplted the landscape some more, started placing rocks and particle effects (sand storms) and so on and so on.

At some point I dared to place points of interest - the crashed Mars pods, which play an important role in the game. But I didn't dedicate too much time on them - first I marked their spots with some lazily placed pods and only after trying out the movement on the game map and moving the places of interest couple of times around to avoid too long empty swathes in between them, I finally fixed the positions and added some extra rubble, smoke, sounds and so on.

So yeah, long story short - first the general landscape, then smaller and smaller details while still sculpting the landscape to be sure it fits to the gameplay, that it sort of helps the game play and doesn't hinder it. Actually I added some hills quite late in the development just to be sure I'm really giving the player some markers or hits regarding the movement direction. But the general process was clear: I moved from large to small, from general aspects to details and started really playing attetion to small details in the end, when I was sure I am really using these assets and I am really doing the thing I am doing.