Happy August, Mayors.
Let's start with the NewCity-sized elephant in the room. You have probably noticed a lack of updates in your library from us. Lone Pine Games is still dedicated to NewCity and its growth, but we have fallen behind expectations. We have a note from supersoup on that in this Steam Workshop post, and I will transpose it here as well:
This is our fault. We set an unsustainable pace with the first year of development. While weekly or bi-weekly releases are nice for players, for a small team they often lead to cut corners, more bugs, and more time spent putting out fires than focusing on forward motion. Perhaps this is why many indie teams stick to longer cycles or "when it's done" right out of the gate. But since this is our first game as a team we had to learn as we went.
I see your concern. But please understand that the game is not abandonware, nor have we given up in any sense. Future releases will generally be "when it's done," and as discussed here on the forums and on our Discord, not every release will have lots of front-facing content. Sometimes we need to spend a significant amount of time on backend systems. Sometimes we'll need to set up additional updates in the future. And while we weren't able to meaningfully or consistently do that with a weekly/bi-weekly release cycle, we're taking the time we need to do so now.
The next release will offer "just" keybindings, sure. A necessary if not flashy feature. But the system underlying it will represent a more robust save file system and other possible improvements in the future. All with the focus of working toward v1.0 by year's end and a more stable, playable NewCity. Thank you for your patience in the meantime.
I am pleased to announce the results of the NewCity Summer Spectacular! We are so happy with the results and want to thank everyone who participated, voted, or even just sat there idly while the contest and thought it was neat.
Our winners will be receiving messages on Discord for their Steam keys and entries into our buildings and citizens' name database. And our header/thumbnail image are also courtesy of contest entrants u-train and 0kuu, and you can find a full writeup about the contest in the blog post below.
We will most certainly be running another event like this in the future, and we hope you'll join us on Discord when it happens!
-Swordless Mimetown