The easiest and also most interesting and stressfree part of game design is the part usually called level design - building the environment. The feeling of creating a whole new world from a scratch is just breathtaking. Going to the Unity Asset Store, looking around, imagining all these lovely things being in the game, enriching the player's experience, giving the right flare to the game - it's just lovely, cheerful, interesting.

Yet it can also be quite misleading. When creating Man Off Mars I was also tempted to use many-many different and beautiful assets - rock pack, terrain packs, all kind of gadget packs and so on and so on. I even downloaded some of that stuff, tried it out but luckily I managed to force myself to say a stern 'NO!' to anything that did not fit the style. So I dropped all the beautiful rock and terrain assets, did not let myself be seduced by all kind of gadgets and settled with the bare minimum.

Beside the style question there was another reasoning behind that - it was my first game to be released, it was complicated to make, I wasn't sure if all the Playmaker FSMs will work together, if all the sounds and voiceovers will launch in the right moment and if the game just, well, functions. So I wanted to keep the amound of game objects as low as possible. No, don't get me wrong - there are hundreds and hundreds of items in the game. There are some 250+ rocks in the game alone. It's not the sheer amount that startled me, I just didn't want to have too many too different and too specific things in the game and I wanted to be sure I am able to - at least vaguely - remember what is what and why do I have all this stuff in the game. In the end it all worked out, as visible on the small picture of the game hierarchy - everything is neatly ordered and even if I don't remember what is what, it's traceable.

Man Off Mars is a small game, but there's a real and present danger in game dev just to scoop all kind of cool stuff in the game without the developer really remembering later on why is this or that necessary. It takes up hard disk space and also uses processing power. So - I was aware of this problem and always thought twice before adding anything.

The same goes to the actions all these things do - do I need this thing beeping and this other thing blinking a light? Yes, maybe I do, because it adds to the user experience. But do I need the wind to blow here, in the remote valley, which is meant only to be observed from the distance? Maybe not...

So these are the considerations I had when developing Man Off Mars. It's a beginners work and these are more or less beginners thoughts. But maybe they help other beginners. :)