Mars is open for business! Developer Caleb Houlding is partnering with publisher Aquila Interactive to announce Harwell: Mars Industries , a sci-fi economic strategy game set on Mars, coming 2027. This is the start of an exciting journey, and we'd love for you to head to the Store page, wishlist and come along with us for the ride in our Discord . What is Harwell: Mars Industries Each corporati…
New Features · Cosmetic delivery ships now fly between your HQ and distant buildings with smooth arcs, steering, and dynamic shadows. · You'll now get a daily notification when you don't have enough workers to keep up with demand. Improvements · There's now a loading overlay while the lobby loads so it doesn't just feel like nothing's happening. · The sync overlay got a full redesign with a cle…
New Features · There's a brand new sabotage system with 17 cards across five categories: destruction, disruption, finance, intelligence, and labour. · The black market menu lets you browse, buy, and manage sabotage cards to build your hand. · You can now control game speed with five settings (x1 through x16), and if your system can't keep up it'll automatically step down — in multiplayer, every…
Hello! Just a post about a relatively small feature that I think will make a large impact to gameplay: construction time. Building instantly is no fun, so Harwell now has a fancy new construction shader which dynamically builds the building in sync with its construction time - Ooooo! This should add more strategy to when to place buildings - you have to be patient for your profits! Currently, a…
TL;DR Players should now see HUGE performance improvements, up to +150% on low-end devices, and there's MOAR graphs. New Features · Market multi-threading for improved performance · Centralized ProfitCalculator class for consistent profit calculations · Player profit tracking with actual purchase costs and sales revenue · Financial graphs added to the financial tab · Custom monitoring statistic…
TL;DR The visuals won't be quite as glitchy, tooltips will consider inventory goods, and multiplayer will work a bit better. New Features · Disabled tooltip for HQ building preview · Disabled physics interpolation for building preview Improvements · The construction tooltip now takes inventory goods into consideration when calculating total cost · Balance changes · Multiplayer fixes Bug Fixes ·…
TL;DR The AI is a bit more competent, and there should be a bit more polish. New Features · Added housing and labour icons · Added auction scenes and UI (for upcoming updates) · Added sparks particle effect Improvements · AI behaviour improvements for better early game selling and industry building prioritization · AI companies now invest into different industries rather than duplicating effort…
Greetings! I'm Caleb, developer of Harwell. As part of update 0.18 Harwell got a huge update - actual, functional multiplayer, and it involved an ever so slight complete rework of the multiplayer system in the game. Here's what it entailed! Main Menu The main change in the main menu is this new panel on the left side which displays your Steam and Nakama IDs and lets you update your display name…
New Features · Added icon graphics for uranium. Improvements · Tidied up the market entries. · Re-organised the UI controls panel and labelled it. · Balance changes for Power resource. · Updated the clock & day counter to use Sols instead. · Updated the debug menu to work with the new Sols. · AI Improvements, including better building selection and performance improvements. · Updated to Godot 4…
New Features · Added Sulfur and Uranium map textures ready for implementation · Added Sulfur, Concrete, Explosives, and Soil icon graphics · Redesigned admin menu/pause menu and moved them from the bottom right (now bound to Escape key) · Redesigned lobby screen with rearranged game settings · Replaced static parallax background stars with dynamic twinkling shader · Restructured AI behaviour sy…
New Features · Implemented a new system to dynamically adjust building performance based on terrain and proximity. · Added for real-time evaluation of placement conditions. · Modifiers are now fully integrated into production logic and financial previews. · Added a modifier preview tooltip during building placement to show active bonuses or penalties before you build. · Added efficiency modifie…
Hello! It's Caleb, developer of Harwell. I decided to write a part two to my last development showcase, Building Modifiers. I've made some improvements and added some polish so this one is going to be much less technical and much more screenshot-ey. Tooltips! I've reworked and improved how modifiers are displayed in-game. As well as polishing the tooltip when placing buildings, the modifiers no…
Development Showcase: Modifiers Hello, it's Caleb, developer of Harwell. It's been a little while so I thought I'd write a festive write-up of what's been going on, and the most recent implementation in the game - building modifiers. Modifiers have taken some work to implement - having to build in JSON files, adjusting the building system, building them into the inventory system, and more. They…
Performance & Optimization · Improved base_building and player_manager to fix performance issues from buildings · Created the building_manager to oversee building purchases and perform batching & queueing · Optimized the building manager to prevent lag spikes on each tick · Refined transaction batch processing to improve performance · Updated the game to run on every tick instead of every 5 tic…
Development Showcase: AI-Controlled Companies Hola, it's the developer of Harwell - Caleb - here! In this development showcase, I'll be covering the implementation of AI-controlled players and how they'll interact with the systems and compete with the player. This Dev diary is not about LLMs and stuff, just about the game "AI". Names & Characteristics The AI get given randomly selected names ba…
Development Showcase: Renderer (Vulkan vs OpenGL) Afternoon wherever you are in the world! I'm Caleb, developer of Harwell. If you're not familiar with it, it's a capitalist RTS where you build up factories to make stacks of profit to buy out the other players, and it's pretty neat if I do say so myself. I've decided to move the game from Godot's Compatibility renderer (which uses OpenGL) to Fo…
Development Showcase: Quality of Life & UI Overhaul Afternoon! I'm Caleb, developer of Harwell. This feature showcase will be about the smaller improvements that make the game feel SO much greater. It might not be a long dev diary, but this one has greatly improved game feel. I'll go over auto-selling to replace the tedious process of buying and selling goods, tooltips that display figures on t…
Development Showcase: Modding Hiya, it's Caleb, developer of Harwell. If you've been keeping up with these I'm sorry for the delay on this one! I've been focusing hard on improving Harwell and rewriting large sections of it to be more modular so I can build the game with modding in mind. Changes One thing I was thinking about was moddability and modularity in the game's design. I potentially wa…
Social Media Channels We've now opened up a Discord server! Join for the latest development diaries, updates, and for community support. Discord Join our Discord community here: Join the Discord Reddit If you didn't know we also have a subreddit: View Subreddit Steam Visit the community content and this Steam community here: Visit Steam Community Website Visit the website here: Visit Website
Development Showcase: Buildings Hello, Caleb here, developer of Harwell. In this dev diary I'll be showcasing the implementation of various buildings in the game, along with their resources and the code which makes them run. I'll be showing you custom tooltips which give live information on net profit and dynamic construction costs, along with how the buildings operate and fit into the gameplay…
Development Showcase: The Mars Market Hello! I'm Caleb, creator of Harwell, thanks for checking out the game. It's still a work in progress but development is moving along nicely and things are starting to take shape. It's a huge passion project and a dream game so there will be a lot more of these coming in the near future. Follow these development showcases to see what I've been up to and wha…
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Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.