When Less Is More

There’s an ice cream/coffee shop near my house that makes the most delicious, unique, and refreshing soft serve I think I’ve ever had. They’re so extra the shop is frequently overrun with food bloggers and instagram influencers trying to get the perfect shot of their confection. This is the place where your basic vanilla ice cream cone is served not one, not two, but three dollops high, dusted in red velvet cake powdered sugar, and garnished with fresh chamomile. The drinks are always a perfect gradient of beautiful colors and topped with fresh pansies, chamomile, honey comb, or matcha, depending on what you order. With them, extra doesn’t even scratch the surface. With them, extra IS their signature. The more extra, the better.

But what do an extra ice cream/coffee shop and game development have in common? This past week I was working on Martian Alchemist (while enjoying an ice cream cone more times than I’d care to admit this week lol) and I started sketching out the storefront. This is a very important location in the game since this is where all of the customer and merchant interactions will take place. This and the potion-making-station are arguably THE MOST important rooms in the entire game.

As I started filling in the room with some of the assets that I used in other rooms, I started following the same pattern that I used when making the bedroom, greenhouse, and mine. When I was making those rooms, I noticed that having lots of little details, lots of subtle things here and there really helped the scene feel alive and lived in. For those rooms, adding MORE really was the answer for creating a sense of cozy and inviting atmosphere.

But as I was filling in the room, I noticed one big problem. It was too busy. Too much was going on and it was actually hard to visually distinguish the main bartering device from the rest of the background noise. And given that this room is also going to have NPCs walking in and out, I determined that it was just too busy. I needed to scale back and remove some of the items I had already placed in the scene.

Here's the original version of my storefront that I drew in Procreate on my iPad. The hexagons are windows that I will turn into windows once it's in Unity. You can easily see how the bookshelf competes with the bartering device for attention. Something I definitely don't want.

So after completely scrapping the bookshelf and all of its trinkets, I decided to just add another small floating shelf and a few decorations and call it good. It was important to me that the player could easily and intuitively understand what was going on in the scene without me resorting to other gimmicks to point the player in the right direction. Don’t get me wrong, tutorials are important and I’ll definitely have one, but I personally believe that most things in a game should come intuitively and/or be picked up very quickly by most players.

In this case, less was definitely more.

What the storefront looks like with the bookshelf removed and the floated shelf added (in Unity). I've added some lights that will also turn on and off depending on what's going on in the game. The BARTER text is temporary.

Overall, I’m happy with how the storefront turned out and I’m excited to work on the next rooms. I only have two more left. After that, I’m going to make just a handful of ingredients and some core characters to build out the MVP of the game. Once I have that, I plan to open up the Steam store page and start getting some wishlists! Ideally, the MVP should be done in the next couple months or so.

Anyway, I hope you’ve all had an amazing week and I’ll talk to you all next time 🥰