Dev Diary: Designing an Oxygen Garden

Oxygen is a pretty important element for human life, which was why we designed an oxygen garden for the crew of our space station in First Moon of Mercury. This garden puzzle was one of the first explorations we did as a team for the project.

In this Dev Diary, we’re talking to some of the team who designed this station module. Meet Thomas Detko, Game Designer, Programmers Kirsten Sattler and Minh Vu, Art Director Jeffrey Flores, and Evan Sawatsky, Artist.

How did you contribute to the oxygen garden?

Evan: I modelled the blockout for both the unwrap and configure phases, the first two of three iterations of the configure phase, the maintenance drone asset, the first pass on materials, and created the basic anomalies.

Kirsten: I helped build the functionality of the oxygen garden with Minh and Thomas by setting up logic for the various puzzles and interactions, getting navigation working, and implementing art and audio.

Jeffrey: I helped with feedback and guidance during modelling.

Minh: So, I built the different systems that powered this module and the entire game. Systems such as the quest system, flow system, input system, and focus zone system. I also implemented the actual logic and interactions for the unwrap phase of this module.

Thomas: I was in charge of the player flow design and the puzzle design.

Steam post image Early oxygen garden sketches.

Why an oxygen garden? Why was this something that had to be in the game?

Minh: This is more of a design question but I believe the oxygen garden is one of the biggest modules that we have, where most of the puzzles will live.

Thomas: I worked with the narrative person Heather to design a space station whose parts would be at least somewhat related to what an actual space station that is meant to be permanently in space would have. So even though many of our modules might take some design-license to facilitate puzzle design, most of the modules are based on real space station modules.

Evan: Without the biosphere of Earth, astronauts either need a steady supply of oxygen shipped from planet side - which isn't feasible when you're all the way across the solar system - and so, the solution is to have a floating, mostly self-sufficient garden/greenhouse with one job: producing oxygen for the crew and recycling their CO2.

Steam post image More design explorations of the oxygen garden.

What kind of research did you do before jumping into the oxygen garden?

Thomas: Oh,various space agencies and scientific pages from NASA and others. Plus, various existing or past space station missions. There was lots of reading up on the International Space Station and its missions. And of course, movies. Rule of cool is not lost on us! It is a game after all.

Evan: I looked at games, movies, and other science fiction media to see what had already been done before with this specific concept, but also some minor scientific research into just how big something like this would need to be to support a crew of five plus astronauts for months or years.

Jeffrey: I read through Atomic Rockets about closed ecological life-support systems.

Kirsten: All I had to do was read through the documentation Thomas made for the module and specific puzzles.

How did you work with each other to design this module?

Thomas: Generally, ideation begins with collaboration on broad puzzle design choices. Evan Jones, the studio owner, is a great source for puzzles as he is an avid game player. Then, the detailed design is largely a solo effort. [Laughing] Basically, I focus on where the cool things I thought of don’t actually work.

The rest is largely through testing and feedback in the game or puzzle prototype. Often the quality of puzzles for any game relies on if they had enough time for testing and iteration during production.

Kirsten: At the start Minh and I worked with Thomas to build out his puzzle ideas that would be in the oxygen garden, and then we helped add the functionality and iteration changes for the puzzles and module stages as we got further into developing it.

We also worked with audio to get SFX and VO in, and with art in later iterations when we were implementing their work.

Working on the oxygen garden helped us build and refine systems that will be used for the rest of the game – it was a good way to learn what we need going forward.

Minh: Yeah. I collaborated with Thomas to transfer his designs into quick prototypes. Those prototypes were handed to the art team to create assets. Finally, we worked with the art team to implement the final assets.

Jeffrey: I was mostly working on the UI at the time so I wasn't as involved on the design aspects.

Evan: I adapted Kelvin Put and Jeffrey Flores’ concept art, developed the gameplay elements and surfaces in cooperation with Thomas, and worked under Jeffrey's guidance to adhere to our chosen art style.

Steam post image More detailed concept sketches.

What challenges did you face when designing this puzzle module?

Evan: Making a cool space station module is one thing. Making a cool space station module that ALSO doubles as a puzzle box is another entirely!

There were some growing pains in balancing art style, gameplay needs, and context within the narrative at the time, but nothing we weren't able to push past as a team. This was the first time I worked on a puzzle game, so there were gameplay considerations to take into account that I had never before needed to worry about.

Kirsten: We had a pretty big refactor in the middle of building the oxygen garden as we transitioned from rapid prototyping to production, which helped speed us up a lot once that was done.

Minh: We went through multiple iterations, sometimes everything was changed completely from the previous version.

Kirsten: We had a couple iterations as we learned what worked and what didn't – and feedback from testing the build as a team helped with this.

Thomas: Puzzles are one of the most difficult things to design for games. They require a specific way of design thinking, and a ton of testing and iteration and tweaking, more so than other game genres.

Where a genre game might have its core mechanics and typical design pipeline, a puzzle game will have its player affordances like drag, click, etc., but each puzzle is a different mini game. It can be more work to get the overall flow and pace of the game satisfying in terms of challenge and discovery than games in other genres.

First Moon of Mercury has multiple different evolving puzzles, rather than just being based on one evolving puzzle-type which also ramps up the development challenges.

Steam post image A later concept design.

What do you want players to get out of this puzzle?

Thomas: For any station module, which are generally multiple puzzles, we hope the player feels challenged but not frustrated, and hope they feel a sense of discovery along the way. I’d like them to be curious or in suspense of what the next thing will do once they have uncovered the next puzzle.

Minh: Enjoy the puzzles and the stories!

Jeffrey: I hope they find the layered approach to the puzzles enjoyable and unveiling of the oxygen garden itself unique.

Kirsten: I think it depends on where it ends up in the actual game. I think it's probably a later game module that will have more iterations when we get back to it again.

Evan: I hope there's a sense of exploration in scouring the surface for clues and puzzles, but I also hope players experience a sense of awe in the way the module transforms between stages and - for lack of a better term - blooms into something more grand and interesting.

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