Hi backers. Just wanted to drop in and let you know how things are progressing.

The team is now 5 members strong, and on Monday we'll be adding a 6th member to handle all the audio in the game. Right now we are marching toward our first playable release, which will ship in December. This involves a lot of bug fixing, polishing, and work on three core game features.

Crafting

The core crafting engine is pretty much done, and we're fine tuning things at this point. The "crafting engine" is the infrastructure to defined a crafter, list all his or her craftable recipes (weapons, furniture, etc.), and the AI for the crafter to find the ingredients for each recipe in the world, collect them up, and turn those ingredients into a crafted item.

This has taken a while to get right, but the good news is that the whole system is data driven, which means it's very straightforward for us to add new crafters to the system. And if you're so inclined, so can you!

Construction

We've overhauled the construction system to give you a lot more flexibility in how you construct your buildings. You'll be able to define any kind of floor-plan you like, not just square rooms, and for each part of the building (walls, roof, columns, etc) you can choose from one of many styles. In December we will only support 1 level buildings. We'll add support for multiple stories soon after the first release.

Personality

We're investing a lot of time to really breathe life in to each of your citizens. We're adding enough randomization options so that no two citizens in your town will look alike, and have just started working on what we call 'ambient AIs' or AIs that run when your workers don't have an explicit job to do. When they are idle, town citizens will do their own thing, maybe going and finding something interesting to look at, conversing with each other, or just taking a nap.

That's in for now. I'll have a lot more to share about the December release next month. Thanks for your continued support!