Aquila Interactive has announced a publishing partnership with solo developer Caleb Houlding for Harwell: Mars Industries, a sci-fi economic strategy game set on Mars targeting a 2027 PC release via Steam. Houlding is based in Leeds and works in IT as his primary occupation, with Harwell cited as a passion project inspired by his interest in grand strategy and 4X games.
Harwell: Mars Industries is a singleplayer and multiplayer economic strategy game built around a dynamic real-time market where supply and demand shift in response to player decisions. Every corporation begins on equal footing, with players building companies, controlling production chains from raw Martian resource extraction through to refined advanced goods, and engaging in a trading economy where outproducing rivals or buying them out entirely are both viable paths to dominance. Each corporation carries its own stock price, making the financial management layer as central to the game as the production systems beneath it.
A Black Market mechanic introduces diplomatic disruption options, allowing players to interfere with rivals when the economic calculus makes it advantageous. The dynamic market means that flooding a resource category can collapse its price, creating strategic decisions around when to produce, when to hold, and when to pivot production capacity entirely.
The game is presented in a retro pixel art style and is being developed with community input as a stated priority, with expanded moddability planned for future development. Multiplayer support is confirmed alongside the singleplayer mode, though the specifics of how the real-time economy functions in competitive multiplayer have not yet been detailed.
Aquila Interactive is a London and Hong Kong-based publisher focused on complex strategy games. Harwell: Mars Industries is available to wishlist on Steam now.
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