Making A Purple Cow
Hello friends. I have so many things I want to talk about today. I got sick this past week and honestly didn’t have as much energy to work in Martian Alchemist as I had hoped, but honestly, it was good for me to take a step back and let all my creative juices recharge. When working in large projects like this, especially by yourself, it’s really easy to burn out and get overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of work. But by taking a step back and focusing on self care, especially when sick, you’re able to then come back to work with a fresh mind and enthusiasm.
That being said, I was able to make some progress on Martian Alchemist. I started designing the potion making station and I hate it. It just isn’t quite there yet. So, for the time being I tabled it and started working on the lava tube/crystal mine. I think that one is about 90% there but I will need to throw it into Unity first and play around with the engine settings before I’m ready to call it finished. I don’t know, though, which one looks better. Should I do with the rocks or without the rocks?
Now because this project is much bigger than anything I’ve attempted before, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can build systems for myself that will make the construction of the game more manageable. It will also help me in future updates too if I can make the game build modular and scalable. There’s nothing worse than having to reinvent the wheel over and over again simply because you didn’t build your wheel scalable in the first place. I’ve been researching about how to do that with code (by using classes and interfaces), but I’ve been a bit stumped about how to go about on the art side. Since the core gameplay revolves around the harvesting and processing of a large variety of ingredients, this would mean that I would have to hand-animate every. Single. Ingredient. This obviously is not sustainable. Especially since a lot of the same animations would be almost identical, albeit with slight variation depending on the specific ingredient.
As I stewed on how to solve this problem, it became obvious that I either needed to significantly scale down my planned number of ingredients and rein in my scope OR I needed to think of a way to automate and/or script this process. This led me down a rabbit hole of researching shaders. If you’re unfamiliar, shaders are scripts that run on the GPU rather than on the CPU. They control how different game objects are rendered and define the appearance of materials. What makes them so powerful is that you can essentially use scripts to manipulate the color, texture and lighting in order to achieve a variety of visual effects.
This means, the whole TLDR, that I don’t have to hand-animate every single ingredient. By hand-animating only a handful of core animations and using some custom shaders, I’ll be able to not only have my full list of ingredients, but I’ll be able to realistically scale beyond if I want to as well. And because of this research, I’m now going to structure my ingredients and all their metadata into a csv and use a JSON file to keep things nice and simple. (I’m also going to use this for my NPCs as well.)
I also had a really cool discussion with a stranger I met and randomly had an amazing conversation about game development with! He gave me some really good pointers that I’m going to implement in my game as well. We talked about little things that I can do to help improve the lore of Martian Alchemist and help the world building feel more immersive and compelling.
Lastly, I wanted to talk the book Purple Cow by Seth Godin. I’ve read his other books and in them he mentioned the idea of a Purple Cow: basically a phenomena/idea/business/product that is so remarkable you can’t help but talk about it. It’s a purple cow! In the book, he emphasizes the importance of being remarkable—like a purple cow in a field of regular cows. Pretty much every marketplace is super crowded and fiercely competitive. In order to stand out, we should be building products/businesses/ideas that are bold, innovative, and different enough to be noticed and talked about.
In the game dev community, there’s a common idea that marketing is what killed your game. It wasn’t that your game sucked, it was just that you didn’t market it well enough. You didn’t send enough ad dollars. You didn’t show your game in front of enough people.
One of many memes expressing this sentiment.
However, after reading Purple Cow, I’ve come to realize that it’s not just about marketing—it’s about creating something worth marketing in the first place. If your game is truly remarkable, people will talk about it. They'll share it because it stands out, because it’s different, because it’s a purple cow. So, as I continue developing Martian Alchemist, I’m going to keep this in mind. I want to build something that isn’t just another game in a sea of games. I want to create an experience that’s unique, engaging, and ultimately unforgettable. That’s the goal, and that’s what I’m striving for every day. Anyway, thanks for reading, and until next time, stay remarkable.
