There was a question on Twitter directed at the indie game community about game plots: do game devs create a plot during the game development or do they write it down first. It's a very good question. And I certainly cannot or will not answer for anyone else but me. But maybe, just maybe, my answer could help others. So here we go!

The story of Man Off Mars was born watching the video courses of David Wehle's Game Dev Unlocked. I recreated everything he did in his videos on my computer and during that process I learned how to create a story driven first person adventure game. It wasn't easy. But it wasn't so hard either that I couldn't have been starting to think about doing things a bit differently and playing around with the techniques and methods I was learning.

So I decided pretty quickly that I want to develop a game of my own. Nothing too big. Nothing too fancy. But something which would really be mine, not just a glorified copy of the game dev courses. And I have always been a big Mars fan. So I started thinking and producing a Venn diagram in my head - what kind of game could I do, what kind of game would I like to do and what kind of game would others like to play.

The first one was pretty easy. The second one a bit harder. And the third one for a noob like me - impossible to grasp. So, knowing the limitations my skills were setting me, I concentrated on the second problem to tackle. I looked around in the Unity asset store (for that, read my dev log 'Where to start' and 'Environment and Assets'), tried the found stuff out in Unity and all the while I was asking myself: 'Mars, Mars, Mars... A story about Mars? What should it be about?'

At first, the working title of the game was First On Mars. But then I understood, it would either be technically too complicated or too unrealistic - why should there be just one astronaut on Mars? Where would everyone else be? What would this lonely astronaut do? How would I justify this whole situation?

Obviously, too many questions which wouldn't be answerable on the technical skill level I had. Then, upon looking around in the Unity asset store some more, I stumbled upon quite good asset pack called Mars Pod and the story in my head started to take shape. And I wrote it down as I was already in the midst of level design - a crashed astronaut who's desperate to get off of the Red Planet alive. Why did the astronaut crash? What happened to the rest of the crew? I knew the game would not have the scope to answer these questions, but I also understood I now had the narrative means to ask them in a way they made sense and also in a way where it would make sense to leave some of the backstory vague.

I started writing, I divided the topics into short chunks which could be used as voice-overs and so the narrative design and the level design started to intertwine - the amount of voice-overs and the amount of in-game places of interest had to correlate, so I played around with both of them to allow me to tell all of the story in the form of reasonably short voice-overs.

I first wrote down all of the-voice overs to the very last one, and only then returned to level design. And I noticed it was much easier that way - I didn't have to think abstractly where would what happen and where should I lead the player next, but thinking of the already existing voice-over texts and sometimes checking the document file I knew exactly where I was with my level design and where I had to get to. 

It doesn't mean I didn't allow myself any creativity at all. I did. And for example upon finding this nice Mars Rover asset on OpenGameArt.org, I decided to use it in the game and wrote an additional short voice-over to justify the existence of the rover in Man Off Mars.

As a conclusion I would say it's good to have a general concept, then start with the level design and see where does it leads to. And at some point, when there's enough ideas and also enough clarity and maybe also the environment gives the game dev some hints or inspiration about the story unfolding in it, the plot should be written down. As precisely as possible. It will serve as a guideline or a crutch to lean on and helps to keep the goals and intentions visible.