How Will We Colonize Mars? This Game Designed a Tech Tree to Show Us. Computer Lunch Follow Mar 23 · 6 min read

The process of making a video game can seem mysterious and strange. How are games created? Does the Video Game Fairy place them under your pillow in the middle of the night? Do they grow on a tree? Eh, not quite.

My desk at Computer Lunch.

My name is Nyssa Shaw-Smith Gendelman, and I’m a writer and researcher at a video game developer called Computer Lunch. There’s no fairies, and I usually end up chugging about five cups of coffee a day— but it’s a pretty cool process, all things considered.

Our most recent game, Cell to Singularity, is an idle game where you start as a single cell organism and upgrade your biology, intellect, and technology until you engulf an entire planet with a civilization on the brink of technological Singularity. It’s a science-based game where you have to move through a huge tech tree to track the history of human evolution.

Originally, the game traced evolution from the primordial soup through the first creatures to crawl on land, the origins of human life, and the development of civilization all the way up to the modern day.

We decided we wanted to go even further and include futuristic content, which presented a whole new challenge. We wanted to include spaceships and aliens — the whole shebang — but we’ve always tried to keep all of the information that we put in the game as accurate as possible. Starting small, we decided to focus on writing a new expansion to the game that would cover the beginnings of space travel, and specifically on human efforts to colonize Mars.

Anyone who’s written a report for school knows that the first thing you’ve got to tackle is research. Doing research on a new branch of the tree can take us anywhere from a few weeks to over a month, and it doesn’t stop once we start programming.

For research for our Mars expansion, I looked in a lot of different places for my information. I read The Martian by Andy Weir and The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin. I checked out NASA and SpaceX’s databases. I read enough academic articles to make my head spin. I watched Total Recall three times and concluded that, while completely unscientific, it’s definitely my favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

“The Martian” was a big influence on our first space exploration branch.

Once I’d been working on research for a while, I began planning the new section of the game. The structure and layout of the game’s tech tree is as important as the actual descriptions of upgrades and creatures.

I do most of our layouts in Sketchboard, an online collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming and idea mapping. Sketchboard is a really great tool for visual planning like the kind that I do on Cell to Singularity, and it’s essential to the way that we visualize and plot out the progression of the game. Our game is a giant tech tree, a living mind map, so we needed a great mind mapping tool to help create it.

Since these whiteboards are collaborative, any member of our team can make notes on them, add new nodes, or change their placement — which is super important, since we’re constantly tweaking the maps for optimal gameplay or better programming. We have to be able to move things around and still be able to keep the game accurate.

First, I created a key based on the main components of the tree. We have two different kinds of nodes, Factories and Techs, that produce currency and create upgrades. If you’ve played the game, you know that a certain number of techs are required to unlock each new factory and advance through the tree.

Using Sketchboard’s customizability tools, I used color coding to make all of the nodes easier to see and identify. This makes it much easier to translate the map to the programmers — it helps us communicate game design info in a quick, efficient way.

Drawing connections between different technologies helps to predict the path of scientific progress.

I knew at the beginning of the process that the final step — the goal of the expansion — would be a fully colonized Mars. It was up to us to figure out the steps to get there: where should we start?

We needed to figure out how to get from our modern exploration of Mars — using probes and rovers — to an actual human expedition. Figuring out what technologies would logically lead to one another helps us to figure out what we would need to potentially send people to Mars for the first time. We were careful to only use concepts that have been predicted by real scientists. We could even link to reference images, which our 3d modeler used when she created the new visuals and animations for the game.

Reference images help the team to visualize and plan the visual design of the game.

Things on the tree are interconnected. You usually need to unlock at least three techs to make the next factory available. Sometimes this can get pretty messy, and things need to be moved around a lot. Doing this in paper and pen is possible: I try to draw maps out when I’m in the earlier stages of research, but oh man, is it a pain. It’s much easier to have it all digital, so that we can swap the places of different techs, balance the progression of the tree, and make any other changes without giving ourselves carpal tunnel.

This is what the entire Mars branch of the tree looked like when I was done mapping it out:

All of the connections were drawn out clearly, the whole thing was color coded, and I’d written descriptions for each tech and factory.

This is what the tree looks like once we’ve programmed it into Unity.

Once the map was in this stage, our programmers could use it to actually build the new branch in the game. Unity, the engine that we use to develop Cells, has a visual-heavy interface, so knowing the placement of everything on our maps makes the whole process go much faster than if we were all working off pure text documents.

Creating new branches for Cell to Singularity is a team effort, and we’re always working on improving the game! Right now, we’re drinking lots and lots of coffee while we work on creating one of these maps for our interstellar travel branch, The Beyond — and we’re about to start programming on our new branch of plant evolution. The Video Game Fairy is bringing a lot of new content to Cell to Singularity very soon.