Xbox and PC sci-fi city builder Surviving Mars gets new developer diary

Unlike creating sprawling cities on Earth, the game is all about colonizing Mars and surviving its rigors. It's more of a survival-builder than a traditional Cities: Skylines-like experience. According to the developers, it's a focused game about creating interconnected systems and testing them against the threats of the hostile Mars environment.

Hot on the heels of the video developer diary Paradox Interactive shared earlier this month, the publisher and Haemimont Games are back for more. This video goes much deeper into Surviving Mars' game mechanics. This isn't about the overall picture anymore but more about the day-to-day functioning of the colony and how to get started. Resources play an important role and striking the balance between gathering and constructing is key.

The developers provided the following statement with the short video. They said the following.

When work was starting on Surviving Mars it quickly became apparent to us that a traditional city-builder resource system won't do at all. Concentrated efforts have been made to emphasize elements that are not common for the genre but are tightly tied to the survival aspect of the game, such as scanning for resources, deposit scarcity and transportation problems... Our main objective was to create a rich, deep system where resources feel different from one another and are not just requirements for placing new buildings, but instead present different kinds of thematic problems. Your water towers may freeze. A metal deposit may run dry. A critical building may stop working because the electronics required to repair it is not available.

Surviving Mars features new mechanics in the genre. Hopefully they won't be too cumbersome when the game launches next year. Be sure to keep a lookout on Windows Central for more coverage of this game in the coming months.

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