There has been a bit of a pause in both the communication and the development of the game, as I am sure most if not all of you reading this will know. There are three things I need to tell you.

First off, the company, Scion Studios, was about to run out of cash before the summer. That had to be solved, and it has. Part time contracting work has put us in a much healthier position. If the company folds there will be no game.

Secondly, the cash issue led to another issue; A mad dash to profitability, code quality be damned. Over time this built up and made the code... less than ideal to work with.
Over the past month a truly massive amount of work has been spent on paying off all the technical debt the project had accrued. We're talking in the tens of thousands of changes.
From a technical point of view, the project is in a great state now.

Third and perhaps most importantly, I don't know about you guys but I was always somewhat disappointed by how poorly the game came together. The mechanics feel like they are somewhat fighting each other instead of elevating each other. This last point has been the one causing me the most both heartache and headache. I realized I was out of my depth and that I need help. A few months of daring to venture outside the development-basement I have now made a few new friends, two of which happen to be world class game designers. Over the coming weeks I am going to be putting together the grand master plan for how to finally achieve greatness.

The starting point for the grand master plan is this;
A Game of Humans is fundamentally about humans. There is a deep simulation going on and things happening, yet it matters little to the actual running of the city/game except for productivity.
I am moving the game towards something where the goal is to expand and attract more people, but more people will only come if the existing ones are happy. To make the existing people happy you have to deal with the drama they generate (new mechanic), applying faith powers and sometimes choosing the lesser of two evils. It is likely that the way feelings work will change, into a much more interactive mechanic.

What do you think would make this game better?

(and sorry about the news hiatus, in-between pushing myself too hard and running out of cash, it turns out I managed to burn myself out. It's been a life lesson)

Patch 0.5 features a brand new pathfinding system. Some things see some reworking, while other things see some upgrading.

• New pathfinding system (faster, better and more flexible)
  
• Added prompts, characters now ask for permission when buying work plots
  
• Increased max zoom distance
  
• Improved behavior when camera pans to a character
  
• Added new thoughts

• Changed Sense of Urgency into an over time effect
  
• Added Chatterbox god power, similar to Sense of Urgency but for social

• Updated terrain edit visuals (block markers when building/removing terrain)
  
• Now shows people beliefs if the god power panel is open
  
• Added floating text for sleep & nature needs
  
• Procedures (e.g. oven when baking bread) now always display their progress

• Added Feelings to the Status bar, you can now see min/max/avg/median happiness/mood
  
• The workplaces tooltip in the status bar now shows employees, in addition to jobs
  
• Stats and record GUIs are now easier to read

• Increased performance for character behavior in large towns

• Added a bunch of character sound effects
  
• Added some world & GUI sound effects

• Fixed an issue where sometimes a tile in the river would falsely be marked as flat ground
  
• Fixed a rare issue where one character would sneak in an interaction with another character in the middle of doing something
  
• Fixed a number of small, rare issues that could cause a crash (animals mating at the exact same time a plot is deleted etc)
  
• People can no longer get stuck midair

• Fixed a crash that occured when the tax collector plot was deleted just as someone was about to accept a job from it
  
• Fixed a crash related to sounds effects on certain system configurations
  
• Fixed a rare issue with characters interacting, causing one to remain frozen
  
• Characters now greater prioritize demolishing objects on top of terrain edits
  
• It should no longer be possible for a bucket of water to end up in a stockpile (if the bucket isnt used, its now deleted)

EDIT:
The minipatch is now hotfixed (0.4.8.24b), solving a crash the minipatch introduced :(