Having our game out there in the wild with people playing and streaming regularly has been a pretty amazing experience. We’re seeing a pretty interesting graph of players, which seems to indicate organic growth:
All in all a great launch, not without it’s bumps, but wouldn’t want to make it boring would we? And so, what’s next…
Eco Mid to Late Game
Our focus for the next big update to Eco (which we plan to start doing monthly) will be to add much more machinery and vehicles. The goal for the end of the game is that players will no longer be doing labor by hand; instead they will be using massive machinery to transform the planet at a large scale. Bulldozers to flatten land, cranes to build skyscrapers, mining drills to harvest entire mountains, plows to create farms and combines to harvest them, logging machinery for harvesting entire forests, boats for sea transport and trains for land.
To succeed in stopping the meteor, half your planet will be covered in farms, more in skyscrapers, and several mountains strip mined out. Doing this without destroying the ecosystem in the process will be a challenge, and the arc of the game will see players growing in strength with their technology and economy and having to grow their civics and regulations alongside them, or risk internal destruction.
We’ll be putting together models and start building these out over the coming weeks, but we have a couple already made, boats and trucks:
Should be pretty easy to rig these up and turn waterways into a very important transport system.
Here's a mining machine we're working on that can do some serious grinding through mountains.
And here's a look at elevators, which you'll be able to use for mineshafts, and a variant (later in the video) you can use on the edge of cliffs.
Stay tuned for our new community road map, where we’ll be adding lots more features that are coming into the game and get the community’s feedback on them.
Translation
We’re asking for help from the community for translating the game into many languages, if you’d like to chip in join our discord at discord.gg/eco and hope in the #translation-team channel. Hope to get support for Latin languages pretty quickly, then move into Asian languages. We’re seeing a lot of interest from non-English speaking locales so really want to support them.
See you in Eco,
-JohnK