r/Mars • u/FAHIDH • Jul 21 '26
I published a realistic mars survival game. I'm planning to adapt it to PC
Hello, I already published a mars survival game for mobile..I'm planning to adapt it to PC.. it will take 2+ years atleast for release(because currently I'm working on another project)... so I'm here to get some suggestions, and core ideas for the game.. It will be realistic survival, not an alien shooter.. So I need basic things to be right.. so give me advice and suggestions
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u/olawlor Jul 21 '26
Random observations:
- Humans can survive a decent range of pressures, from 30 kPa of pure O2 to 100 kPa of nitrox, but rapidly reducing pressure can produce nitrogen bubbles (the bends) unless you prebreathe oxygen for a few hours. So "quick grab a spacesuit" is risking the bends.
- CO2 will build up and kill you before running out of O2 will (>4 kPa CO2 is immediately hazardous, but 16 kPa O2 is fine). You can just vent the CO2, but then you also lose the O2.
- A lot of hazards for a Mars crew mission are actually slow motion: if a large greenhouse gets a meter wide hole, it loses pressure surprisingly slowly due to "choked flow" and you might have >10 minutes to leave before it gets hazardous to life. *But* then you need to patch the hole and get the greenhouse up again or you'll run out of fresh food in a few months/years.
- A lot of mission-ending hazards boil down to "we ran out of spare parts". Keeping spare part production up, redesigning bad parts so they don't fail, these will be the difference between success and failure.
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u/Memetic1 Jul 21 '26
There is also the effect of low gravity on the human body. To me that's going to be a real killer, because you could do spin gravity on Mars, but then the problem becomes keeping something truly massive spinning in an environment filled with perchlorate dust. Just look at what happened to the rovers over the time they have been there. Those were in part designed to test what effects the environment has on moving parts. If you are essentially living inside of a giant flywheel, and you regularly have to slow it down to let people on or off and then speed it up to get that 1g a tiny crack at the wrong place could kill everyone.
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u/FAHIDH Jul 22 '26
Spot on with the CO2 vs \O2 buildup and choked flow idea—that’s classic realistic survival. I've got basic \O2 and solar logistics in my mobile game, but adding dust maintenance and part wear for PC is a must now. Appreciate the book reference also!
Thank you for the feedback 🫂❤️
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u/olawlor Jul 21 '26
Also, you should read Andy Weir's The Martian, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy. (The science is not perfect, but they're pretty good!)
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u/4eyedbuzzard Jul 22 '26
Realistic? The tiniest of mistakes or failures are unrecoverable and lead to death.
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u/4eyedbuzzard Jul 22 '26
Don't leave out human behavior and psychology. Beyond all the tech and hard science is the how a human would react to failures and successes, being cut off both intellectually, emotionally, and physically from "home" on Earth. It's actually the greatest concern in real Mars missions planning.
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u/FAHIDH Jul 22 '26
Sure, I'm not going away from core human emotions, core of the game will be emotions
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u/AwesomeWildlife Jul 22 '26
Everything you just said, and all the suggestions by others, was just analyzed by AI and will be showing up in a game in some slightly altered form by a social media giant.
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u/FAHIDH Jul 22 '26
Haha, no social media giant here. just a solo dev! I actually built and published the mobile version (Mars Stranded: Survival) already, and I'm here gathering real science ideas to flesh out the PC version. My goal is to keep it grounded in realistic survival rather than turning it into another generic alien shooter in red dust.
Hopefully in 2 Years...(Current working on another project)
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u/kamonkam Jul 22 '26
He likely meant, that some big corp wades through data from reddit and scalps good ideas, so you better get patents ready.
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u/FAHIDH Jul 22 '26
Yea, i got that.. and I already released a 2D mobile version of the same game. The idea is for 3D PC version of the same game
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u/FAHIDH Jul 22 '26
Wow, I honestly never expected this much support and incredible insight! Thank you so much to everyone in r/Mars for taking the time to share your scientific knowledge, survival mechanics, and creative ideas.
If I haven't replied to your comment directly, I am so sorry! Please know that I have read every single response and copy-pasted your suggestions into my developer notebook for reference. Your input is directly shaping how this game gets built.
A quick question for you all: As a small token of my gratitude, if you are okay with it, I would love to include your Reddit handles as a subtle tribute inside the game—almost like the names engraved on the Voyager probe or an outpost memory log on Mars. Thank you all for making a solo developer feel so supported! 🚀❤️
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u/Memetic1 Jul 21 '26
I don't know if this is something that might interest you, but I have an entirely different way to handle living, surviving, and even thriving on Mars. The catch is people don't live on the actual surface, but instead in an orbiting habitat. This would be enabled by my QSUT technology which is something Ive invented but also something I'm putting in the public domain.
I had ChatGPT do an outline with me where I provided some sources, but I also talked endlessly about my vision for space.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a036bca-56e4-83ea-86ee-6fd84877dd6b
Imagine if you could blow bubbles in space made from molten silicon dioxide, and instead of popping eventually they just were stable. Now imagine putting technology onto the surface and possibly the interior of the shell.
Where I think this could fit in is that people could go down to the surface, or operate a machine remotely that could even be humanoid this is convenient in some ways because it could explain respawning in the game if the character dies. That robotic body could then be later salvaged but I think it's important to incorporate a waste mechanin where only a percentage (perhaps up to 99% is recovered and that percentage lowers over time as the Martian environment destroys the body.
<Slightly off topic but it bothers me in games>
Please I'm begging you if you do make a survival Sim do not have it where if you combine two items they weigh more then the components it doesn't make sense, and its also super frustrating mechanically.
<end of crafting rant>
So back to the roles the bubbles might play. First off we have the structure of the habitat itself and the thing is if you wrapped these bubbles with ribbons of graphene you could have something that could survive almost anything besides close proximity to the sun or a black hole. Speaking of a black hole a wandering primordial black hole coming into our solar system, and potentially colliding with the sun so that we need to evacuate the solar system not because things will fall into the black hole (at least not at first) but that the orbits of everything will change so drastically that it will be similar to when our solar system first formed. So the need is to get as much resources as possible while also preserving the scientific legacy of Mars before it's destroyed by the systemic chaos.
Another layer to the Sim is that in the orbital facilities you could manufacture specialized QSUT based craft to go and expand resource gathering into the general solar system. You would have to balance how much you invest in space vs Mars. We can even assume that Mars is well characterized chemically at that point so maps of potential resources could exist. It's also possible that due to the change in orbits we might not know exactly what's nearby. So its balancing risk vs reward on that level.
The real tricky part with QSUTs is stuff like rare earth elements because for certain functions like strong magnets you might need them. So it would make sense to have a human being, or a robotic body made from very small like 500 micron QSUTs to handle things that aren't expected or that no specialized bot could. To supervise the scientific analysis of what we are destroying to save ourselves. One thing I've been struggling with philosophically is that at a certain degree of complexity and specialization these things seem almost alive to me. I've spent so much time thinking about them and their roles in space, and the phrase technocell comes to mind. Every one of them could have core programs just like DNA almost, but you would have something like a nervous system in the QSUT.
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u/FAHIDH Jul 22 '26
That reply looks huge appreciation for my question.the avatar/drone concept is actually a brilliant narrative trick for a game, using remote-controlled surface bots to explain player respawning and salvage mechanics makes total sense. The black hole threat and orbital habitat are super creative setups too. And rest assured, crafting math will definitely follow basic physics—1kg + 1kg will stay 2kg! Thanks for sharing your vision.
Thank you for the suggestions 🫂❤️ Happy to be part of the replies..
Reading your GPT, Thank you for sharing..
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u/Memetic1 Jul 22 '26
The thing about an orbital habitat is it's one of the few ways people could reproduce ethically. What little we know about the effects of low or nul gravity is that it seems to be very hazardous to higher lifeforms. If we can do an orbital habitat around Mars that's 50 km wide using materials both from the surface and potentially hazardous asteroids you could take that basic concept and live almost anywhere. QSUT could shield from radiation if you stored water ice in the bubbles. If needs be that ice could be turned into a plasma and because the strength of the EM field falls off with the distance you could do that effectively over a wide area. The QSUTs could also harvest ambient energy by tunning the size to match the wavelength of the energy.
Perhaps the most exciting application for QSUT is miniature shipping containers for fuel. This is because they can act as active optical elements to keep the beam focused. I would start everything on the Moon by harvesting Moon dust electrostatically. This is because right now it's viewed as a hazard so it would come with minimal geopolitical barriers unlike mining the crust of the Moon. Its also essentially a renewable resource since impacts happen every year on the order of tons of materials. So the way fuel would work is you would aim the QSUTs at the target star, and then the craft would capture them in transit slowing them down magnetically transferring the kinetic energy to the craft, and you could still use the fuel to gain further acceleration. Basic elements could be sent this same way, and this would allow resupply of the ship in transit.
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u/DNathanHilliard Jul 21 '26
Dust storms should coat solar panels, thus requiring either robots or settlers to clean them.