Show HN: I created a Mars colony RPG based on Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books
underhillgame.comI built a desktop Mars colony survival game called Underhill, in homage to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Land on Mars, build solar panels and greenhouses, and try not to pass out during dust storms. Eventually your colonists split into factions: Greens who want to terraform and Reds who want to preserve Mars.
There’s Chill Mode for players that just want to build & hang, and Conflict Mode that introduces the Red v. Green factions. Reds sabotage, the terrain slowly turns green as the world gets more terraformed.
Feedback welcome, especially on performance and gameplay!
I visited the site on my Android phone with Firefox. It loads and the UI fits the screen, however it seems slow. Words appear at 3 or 4 characters at a time, then there is a pause, then another 3 or 4 characters. Some music when characters appear, then it stops, then it starts again. I muted it soon.
It looks nice, so I hope to give it a try from my laptop. The Mars trilogy was a great read. When I saw the title of this Show HN I said, oh wow!
By the way, dust storms could be a plot device but are they really that bad with so low air pressure?
Thanks for giving it a click! Let me know how it goes on desktop. Actively trying to improve the phone experience now...
Got power water and o2 but can’t seem to scroll the list of items to build for food on Firefox/iOS (should also be Safari/iOS) since it selects on tap before the scroll.
Another person just mentioned this to me, looking into it.
Do you have permission from the publisher for an adaptation? If not, you're taking a legal risk basing it off the books.
It's based on it, it's not an adaptation.
Also, this would very well fit within fair use
That does not match my understanding of fair use at all.
This is so cool. How are you going to simulate Michel's longing for Provence? Seriously though I adore the trilogy. I started a Mars storymapping project which incorporated Underhill, Senzeni Na, the Moholes etc. a little while back too:
It’s BYO longing for Provence.
Terraforming Mars is a board game that heavily references these novels which i highly recommend.
It’s great but really needs the expansions, don’t play without
Loud music warning for those wearing headphones.
You weren't exaggerating! I didn't even have headphones on, and it scared the sh*t out of me when I clicked on the little man.
The music was so loud from my monitor's speakers that I nearly jumped out of my skin and rushed to close it, and my volume isn't even turned up much!
Played for a bit, liked the aesthetics so I bookmarked it to come back to it later and discovered a bug. On mac/chrome, I hit CMD + D to bookmark. By doing so, I setup some kind of autowalk bug where I kept walking to the right. I couldn't stop myself from walking, even pressing WAS temporarily stopped me but as soon as I let go, I kept walking right.
Thanks for this, I'll address it now.
I must have missed something because my HP keeps ticking down until I pass out and get warped back to the command center. Eating food and resting do not seem to change the situation.
Had 1000 of each resource, lots of income, landing pads and habitats, but never got more colonists?
Same, I'm stuck at 18 inhabitants.
I'm stuck at 0 lol
I am on Firefox and it does nothing, no movement, just flashing resource monitors with zero values...
I'm on mobile (Android, Brave), and I can do everything but interact with the people. Am I doing something wrong?
Oh and I can't scroll down on the hq menu. The engineer guy only spoke to me after 15 mins
Hmm, I just get a black screen on my iPhone when I click your link.
Did you use any existing stuff like the mars-sim project? https://mars-sim.sourceforge.io/
Try it now! And no I didn't but that is very cool.
Much better, now it opens up the game. Is this open source?
When the mars space elevator was brought down and wrapped around mars TWICE was one of the most memorable moments of any book I've ever read.
Spoilers! But yeah, that was a memorable scene.
Great, how did you build it? Also I have to read the books
vanilla JS and canvas plus a hefty bit of technical help from Claude.
It seems you draw everything every frame onto the canvas? The result is quite GPU heavy, for your next game I would recommend looking into a graphic libary like pixijs, to make use of the webgl/webgpu .. then it would run smooth even on old mobile phones.
check out raylib, it should be amazing for this :)
Interesting game, love the design.
Struggled a little before understanding the instructions.
are you on mobile? it looks like there's a bug where the opening scene/dialogue is not loading, so the instructions aren't clear. working on it now.
Surviving Mars (2018) is another really good game in this category.
It’s not really clear how it’s played.
Thanks for trying it out. Can you say more? Was it the controls or more about what you're supposed to build/do first?
Made me think of this gem:
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/ultima-worlds-of-adventur...
It is hard to understand and play... maybe make it more obvious. I made a solar panel, it says I should assign staff...
I would love to play if it would work. And music, thank god for the mute button.
are you on mobile? it looks like there's a bug where the opening scene/dialogue is not loading, so the instructions aren't clear. working on it now.
I think on mobile it’s natural to walk to the guy and tap on him. Not helped by the fact that the screen shows ‘tap’ over the highlighted tile, which does nothing. You need to walk and position the guy under your cursor, then press ‘act’.
The position yourself, then long press on ‘act’ to build when you can’t see where to put the building anymore is pretty awkward too. I’d expect to click to build, position it, then press confirm or reject or something.
Lovely series. One of the first science fiction series I read that gave a proper anarchist culture a shot. (A big thing most people don't understand about anarchism is that it's not a violent, crime ridden, disorderly society without rules, but rather a society built on the idea that everyone deserves care, and we should all put in some effort to achieve that in a self organizing way.)
Loved seeing things like gift economies, self organization and free association, and a general care for both the people and the planet in those books.
Same. I thought his portrayal of anarcho-primitivism was really cool and interesting as well. Also, other people called it boring but one of my favorite parts was in Blue Mars as they hammer out the Martian constitution.