Hello everyone! Just stopping by to apologize for this update taking so long. The stat tracking server has turned into a massive undertaking. It should however be done in the next few days and then we can return to a more regular update schedule as before.

The long dev time is partially due to its complexity as its literally an entire separate web application, written from scratch, in a completely different language, that needs to live on a server and communicate with the game. Its also partially due to the fact that this is an area where I have very little experience and so am basically learning as I go.

I've been pretty quite on the forums/discord this last week simply due to the fact that I'm trying to focus completely on getting this stat server up and running.

One of the biggest problems I find with solo development is compartmentalizing my attention, so for huge programming focused tasks like this I find it difficult to keep up with discussion on balancing, suggestions features etc. without getting side tracked. So once this update goes live I'll be back online and looking for feedback on the next cycle of content and balancing updates.

Just to give a rough idea of what should be coming in the next update:

I got steams API integrated into the game and though I'm not using it for much yet (just getting user id stuff to send to the stat server), it was a huge hurdle just getting it running so it should be much easier going forward to start integrating more steam features.

One of the features I did integrate… just because (see getting side tracked is tempting!) was cloud storage, which is pretty damn cool. I was sitting with my laptop on a side table, playing games and then swapping over to the main PC and having it immediately sync.

The stat server is going to be pretty bare bones, particularly in the UI department at the start and will be completely web based, i.e. it will just be linked from within the game. I'll be starting a thread in the forums for feedback on what sort of cool stuff we can track here besides the basics.

I'd like to eventually get the web interface extremely complex with tons of different ways to sort, filter, and summarize various statistics about the game. Basically the more stuff the better, hence why I'll be looking for suggestions and feedback on this.

Then, some time in the future, we can start pulling what we consider the most relevant, or interesting stats and tables into the game itself in a much simpler form. This way, you can get a rough overview of global stats from within the game, and if you want to get more crazy details, you can use the more complex web site.

Extending Early Access:
I had initially planned for early access to take about 6 months but I'm now looking at something more like 9 months in order to get the amount of content, balance and polish into the game that I'd like. Based on my current output speed, working basically all day every day, I figure each of the following is going to take at least a full months worth of work:
- Balancing
- Fixing all bugs
- General polish and interface
So that's at least 3 full months of work just to get non-content stuff done. So in order to have enough time to actually add all the new content and mechanics I want, EA will definitely need to be about 9 months.

Conclusion:
So once again, apologize for the long update, its coming soon I promise! Thank you everyone for your patience while I figure all this stuff out, considering this is my first major game I'm having an absolute blast with it, and your guys support and feedback is a major part of that. Also thank you everyone who continues to provide feedback and suggestions (I'll be reading through and responding to it all once I get this update out and emerge from the dank dark programming cave), and thank you everyone who's reviewed the game!