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Show HN: I created a Mars colony RPG based on Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books (underhillgame.com)
ariaalam 3 hours ago [-]
I 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!

captn3m0 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
ariaalam 33 minutes ago [-]
Another person just mentioned this to me, looking into it.
pmontra 1 hours ago [-]
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?

ariaalam 40 minutes ago [-]
Thanks for giving it a click! Let me know how it goes on desktop. Actively trying to improve the phone experience now...
magicmicah85 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
ariaalam 39 minutes ago [-]
Thanks for this, I'll address it now.
lazyasciiart 26 minutes ago [-]
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/

ariaalam 24 minutes ago [-]
Try it now! And no I didn't but that is very cool.
lazyasciiart 21 minutes ago [-]
Much better, now it opens up the game. Is this open source?
AnotherGoodName 14 minutes ago [-]
Terraforming Mars is a board game that heavily references these novels which i highly recommend.
oug-t 23 minutes ago [-]
Interesting game, love the design.

Struggled a little before understanding the instructions.

ariaalam 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
xcf_seetan 34 minutes ago [-]
I am on Firefox and it does nothing, no movement, just flashing resource monitors with zero values...
number6 38 minutes ago [-]
Great, how did you build it? Also I have to read the books
ariaalam 29 minutes ago [-]
vanilla JS and canvas plus a hefty bit of technical help from Claude.
desireco42 23 minutes ago [-]
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.

ariaalam 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
deafpolygon 52 minutes ago [-]
It’s not really clear how it’s played.
ariaalam 39 minutes ago [-]
Thanks for trying it out. Can you say more? Was it the controls or more about what you're supposed to build/do first?
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