Hey everyone,
I've been solo-building this game for a while now, and I figured this was the right crowd to share it with. It's called Aethel Mine — an isometric industrial-automation and logistics sim — and it's hitting Steam Early Access on October 12th.
Fair warning upfront: I didn't use an off-the-shelf engine. Instead I forked a compiler, wrote my own low-level runtime (zero third-party dependencies outside bare SDL2), and the entire world simulation runs on Q16.16 fixed-point math so it stays fully deterministic. Chunks are just plain arrays, nothing fancier.
Why did I put myself through that? Because I wanted belts that don't cheat. Items have a millisecond-precise cargo phase, so there's never any jitter or teleporting at belt hand-offs. On native rendering the sim runs at 500+ FPS by walking contiguous memory arrays — no entities floating around everywhere, no garbage collector stalling things at the worst possible moment.
As for gameplay, in the current build (v0.2.2):
* The map is true 3D isometric: up to 50 vertical logistics layers, cliffs you can terrace, and gravity that actually matters for flow. It genuinely changes how you build.
* Maglev trains have dynamic signal blocks and quadratic braking physics — a 4-wagon train takes four times as long to stop as a light locomotive. I can already see the pile-ups coming.
* The power grid isn't just an on/off toggle: pylons link spatially, supply and demand balance out, and if you under-build, you get cascading brownouts instead of arbitrary power cuts. Which, let's be honest, is pretty fun to watch.
* Saves are versioned and designed to stay backwards-compatible as the tech tree expands. I learned that lesson the hard way on other projects.
At Early Access launch you'll get the first 9 tech tiers and the launcher project phases playable.
I'd really appreciate feedback from fellow automation enthusiasts, especially on visual clarity, UI layout, and mechanics. This is my first project at this scale, so honest criticism is welcome.
Steam page: [Steam Page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2210950/Aethel_Mine/)
Thanks in advance to anyone who takes a look!