Environment

To get an environment that looked similar to Mars we took a lot of inspiration from pictures taken by NASA. This was achieved by changing the colors of the skybox, and by adding some colored fog.

Terrain

We used Unity's terrain features to create our landscape. The terrain texture was a free one we found that did not fit well and had a lot of visible seams. The fog we added earlier hid it well.

Rendering optimizations

Anyone who has tried a Virtual Reality game should know that good frametimings are important. If the frametimings are too low, you will most likely feel nausea while playing. The hardware we were targeting was an Oculus Quest HMD, so a few optimizations had to be made if we wanted low frametimings (which we did).

Lower poly count

We noticed that some of our meshes had unnecessarily high polycounts so we tried to reduce them. The spheres were an ideal target for this optimization strategy, because they were almost always in view because of their sheer size, and were duplicated across the scene 5 times. The old model had 264.240 triangles in total, and the new one was just 50.236 triangles. No further optimizations was required.

Interactivity

We were looking for ways our players could interact with our mars base. The only criteria we had, was that the logic for it had to be simple, because this was our first Unity project and first time coding anything in C#.

Diesel generator

We searched for inspiration online and amongst our findings was a free diesel generator model. We decided to use that for our interaction. The player has to periodically pour fuel from a fuel canister into the generator to keep the base powered. If the power runs out, the lights will go out and the door opening animation will slow down. In hindsight, a diesel generator on mars made absolutely no sense.

Animations

To make the base feel more alive we created a few animations.

Automatic doors

All doors are automatic and opens when the player stands near them. It opens fast enough to not stop the player. If the power runs out this animation gets slowed down.

Rocket Launch

With the press of a button the player can watch a rocket get launched into space.

Realism

Originally we wanted this project to be a realistic representation on what humans inhabitting mars could look like. This was something we had in mind during our research phase. We also wanted our game to be fun, with lots of different activities close to the theme of our project. So naturally we had to research some of the labour that could go into the upkeep of a mars base. We concluded that although we might be able to make it a fun part of our game, we would not be able to create that as complete Unity beginners.