Greetings our players! :)
We wish you to enjoy your Christmas time, a lot of presents, delicious food and a lot of time to spend with your closest persons.
At first, we should apologize for very slow development. We are very sorry that this project had hopes to be developed in at least a small team (around 5-7 people) to bring a decent amount of new stuff per taken time. Which this project would deserve. Unfortunately you might see that the budget did not allow us to work more than in core team of one artist and one programmer which is crazy state as these high detailed things takes quite a good amount of time... On the other hand, we absolutely understand, that it is very fair to wait with purchase up to the time, when game brings at least some more playability. Two months ago we realized, that even though we will be able to bring village simulation at around promised time, it would still need some extra more features, to not look weird and have a positive effect on sales. For example time of day, when AI respects the time of day to determine their actions. And with that, there is more stuff connected to it as for example tree optimization, which will not work with the change of lighting... and so on...
So we had to do one quite unpleasant decision for you and to raise the budget for WoC from other game than WoC, which we will be able to finish very soon and will not need much time after release, so we will be able to fully focus on only WoC again. That game was already finished and should be released 8.th of January 2019.
What is important to you, is that we will give this game for free to all our WoC players for Christmas!!! :) Unfortunately before Christmas steam had too much work around, so we do not have verified steam page for that game yet and also steam does not support any way how to give you the free steam keys. So we will add the game to the World of Castles folder with the upcoming patch. Later we will try to find a way how to distribute keys to you directly so you will have a nice extra game in your steam library ;) You deserve it as an apology for all the problems we were and still are struggling in WoC.
That given game is Called Transport services and it is a dynamic transport tycoon game, where you try to solve passenger and good transportation among expanding cities. There are cars, trains or planes for your solutions. The game will cost for non-WoC owners 9.99$
There is a trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhvsAnin4MY&ab_channel=HammerGames
I hope you will enjoy it. Just take in mind that you have even pre-release access, so it might have some bugs.
That's enough about transport services. Now go back to WoC. In the upcoming patch, there will be some new objects like this windmill. Do not expect any gameplay changes. The current state of dev version village simulation remains the same as two months ago. We made core mechanics for villagers, they are able to cut trees, gather apples from trees, take resources to storages. They do not have any free time activities after work yet. Just go sleep at night... Also, the AI does not know how to behave if something abnormal happens. So it will need some time to get solved and be somehow more playable... The patch is expected to be out 26.12.2018. I hope that the decision with transport services will show as correct and help us to give more to WoC again :)
Enjoy Christmas! And our new game :)
Jakub