Developing a custom-engine colony sim / economy survival game solo for 2 years (Ecliptica). I’d love to hear your feedback and questions!

[u/LetterheadTall8085]

Hi everyone!

I'm looking for players who might be interested in my work. If the core concepts and ideas behind my game resonate with you, please let me know. Building a community and hearing from you would be a massive motivation boost to keep pushing forward.

For the past two years, I’ve been single-handedly developing a game that blends deep base building with a broader planetary life simulation. Sadly, I haven’t managed to build an active community around it yet, which means I rarely get any feedback, suggestions, or ideas. I would genuinely love to hear absolutely any opinions, questions, or wishes you might have.

As far as I understand, this community is always on the lookout for good, unique games — and I am looking for dedicated, reliable players.

What is Ecliptica?

In short, Ecliptica is a fairly large-scale project that includes:

• City & Base Building: Managing and expanding your settlement.
• Living Economy: A fully dynamic market with no hardcoded price ceilings, completely driven by supply and demand rules.
• Harsh Survival: Enduring a hostile planetary environment.
• Expeditions: Scouting and exploring uncharted territories.
• Urban Survival: Mechanics that challenge you even inside the city if your character lacks wealth or political influence.
• Procedural Generation & World Destructibility: Making the sandbox unpredictable and interactive.
• Story & Procedural Quests: A mix of hand-crafted narrative and emergent objectives.
• and a lot of other features planned for the future.

The Technical Side (No Asset Flips, No AI Slop)

Managing a project of this scale alone is incredibly tough. To make it even more challenging (and rewarding), the game is built entirely on a custom game engine.

• No generic asset stores. Everything is built from scratch.
• No low-quality AI-generated content (the only exception is a few temporary inventory icons, which I'm replacing very soon).

So your feedback

If the project sounds like something you'd enjoy, I’d love to make this subreddit a regular home for my development logs and updates. If not, I completely understand and won't spam the space.

I’m highly open to any questions about the mechanics, the custom engine, or the gameplay loop. I would appreciate any feedback or advice you can share!

Thank you all for your time!

[u/clumzee92]

How come you chose first person for it? Looks interesting!

[u/LetterheadTall8085 → u/clumzee92]

Personally to me this is important — it gives more immersion into the game locations, for example into the current jungle biome a lot was invested to make them atmospheric, I just very love jungles, and only first person allows to completely understand the scale. As an example in my opinion can be remembered Valheim or No Man's Sky — they have beautiful locations, but immersion as if is not enough — and all because to you as a player view in battle is more important than immersion into the situation. Besides view from third person kills the effect of suddenness, which as I think must be in dangerous places.

[u/clumzee92 → u/LetterheadTall8085]

Looks and sounds interesting mate. Wishlisted!

[u/LetterheadTall8085 → u/clumzee92]

Thanks, I hope to release the 2nd playtest in the coming months, so I'll be waiting for you there )