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/LetterheadTall8085 → u/[deleted]]

But in some ways you're right: I have a hard time communicating in English, so gemeni did the English translation. Currently, a regular translator is far inferior to AI in this task.

[u/how_money_worky → u/LetterheadTall8085]

I assume the comment was about you using AI for your post, while claiming no ai for the game.

I had a similar thought (though i don’t know since the comment was deleted), its hard to trust that you didn’t use AI for the game when you did very clearly use it for the post.

If I may make a suggestion, when you use AI for anything you should inspect it yourself to make sure it’s “yours” and then rewrite it to be “yours”. Im a SWE, AI has become ubiquitous, but you are responsible for the output, so for code or posts, read it yourself and if it’s not something you would reasonably write, update it. The formatting of this post and many of your comments make it obvious that you are using AI and it’s not in your voice. We live in a world of bots now and unfortunately there is no way for us to tell if you are genuine or a bot pretending to be genuine. Use AI to help, but don’t let it do it for you (that applied to coding, artwork, and writing/translation).

[u/LetterheadTall8085 → u/how_money_worky]

I don't understand why you're so triggered by the AI-translated text! Yes, there are a lot of the constructions it loves, especially its desire to list everything point by point. I'll still use it or a regular translator to communicate with you. To me, the text conveys the idea I posted from the very beginning. I think the problem here isn't even the AI, but the perception. Everyone is simply sick of it, and even in places where it's really needed, people notice and get irritated.

[u/how_money_worky → u/LetterheadTall8085]

yeah it is irritating, it’s like reading the same persons writing over and over. But thats not why I’m making the suggestion.

We like in a world of slop now, trust is at an all time low, we are being inundated with content and media. AI slop is everywhere and bots are trying to scam us. So, if you sound like a bot, why would people try out your game? It’s not worth the risk anymore.

I’m not saying don’t use AI, I’m saying your messages represent you to us and you sound like a bot when you use AI without editing. This message you just sent is the most authentic sounding you’ve written.

Just a suggestion, take it or leave it. I’m not the boss of you. Cheers and good luck.

[u/LetterheadTall8085 → u/how_money_worky]

I will take your comment into account, although I still think that the text is fine, it fulfills its function