When I started this project about one and half years ago with madman ambitions I was adamant from the beginning that I would roll my own engine. Therefore, a big part of the development of Macrocosm has been spent developing an original engine from scratch. 

For someone who came from a professional statistics and analytics as opposed to software development background this was extremely challenging at first and most of the first year of development was just spent going back and forth, doing basic application development and software design without much time spent actually developing game content (down the line I will do some long-form technical writing on lessons learned).

Today, I think I have finally reached a point in the development cycle where the engine and the basic bones of the gameplay loop can be put into the hands of a third-party and shown off. 

This first initial release (let's call it v0.1) contains the tile-based engine and the elements of the core gameplay loop - i.e. trading commodities between settlements in a procedural-generated world while managing the survival of the caravan. 

I have performed as much testing as I reasonably can as a solo-developer so I welcome all criticism as I am sure bugs and performance issues lurk.

The initial builds will only be available on Linux, this is due to do the fact that cross-compilation from my development environment to Windows is a bit too much overhead when there is so much else to do. I am still in the process of debugging and overcoming some technical hurdles so I will release a Windows build once I have developed a more robust workflow for the environment.

-K