What the actual hell is going on

So i was pointed to this game via a link in a 2011 thread about something like spore, just not dumbed to hell.

Then i started playing it and i loved it.

Then i noticed that my creature stayed “Generation: N/A” all the time. And i was seemingly not progressing after hours of gameplay. with literally everything but the starting organelles locked. (with some CTDs) Also i couldn’t save normally, just with quicksaves.

Then i looked into the wiki to see when the microbe stage is supposed to end, and saw lots of things mentioned that i’ve never seen in the game. Multiple types of organelles, some that i hadn’t even seen in game, biomes and whatnot.

Then i checked the version history, and saw that only the microbe stage was mentioned as of yet, so i thought maybe the game somehow wasn’t yet developed to the point that other stages were present.

Then i also saw that this version announcement was made in 2015 and that’s the last update on the version tracker page. So i thought the game had probably become abandoned.

Then i checked the dates on the versions, and looked into the github. I saw activity on issues and new issues only days ago. But at the same time there HAD been huge gaps with only two issues posted in 2016.
This was when i gave up and decided to just make a thread here instead:
So what is going on?
Was this abandoned and taken up again? The forums seem active enough with some posts being only minutes old, but despite ambitious goals set out what… 7 years ago, and releases for 4 years, i cannot even add a single different organelle to my microbe. This seems like such and awesome project, how the hell would it be stuck in development hell like this? I wish i could do more than very basic coding so i could help… that… single stage you had so far was so much fun, how come nothing else has been pushed to release since 2015?

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The next big update, 0.4.0, is being released in the next few months. This update includes an engine switch (less crashes and more optimization), a ton of bugs being fixed, and new features, such as bacteria. The engine switch took a long time, but after 0.4.0, updates (hopefully) should be released quicker. Also after 0.4.0 they’re planning on reworking alot of things like combat and reproduction, along with adding new organelles. This game is in very early development, but it has an active, skilled development team.

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From what I can see, this game had a rocky start, with very few people actually working on it. It had a lot of conflicting ideas, and a lot of obstacles. This game has been locked in development hell for a long time. But thats the thing. People stayed behind, while others moved on. A whole community stayed with this game and its devs, cheering them on. That is the reason this game is still being made, because people believe. The game may dream big, but its people dream bigger. This whole situation is laughably similar to the evolution of life on earth, staying unicellular for a very long time. But I believe that once multicellular stage is reached, big things will happen. Until then, we keep moving forward as one.

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Thrive is being made completely by volunteers so the amount of activity fluctuates a lot based on how much free time people have and how many developers there are currently.

It’s now been about a year since the last release. But as mentioned already we’ll hopefully have a new release out in 2 to 6 months.

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I’d like to second what @hhyyrylainen said

Also, we have been active on the fix_everything branch, not the main banch:

https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/tree/fix_everything

As you can see we make MANY commits a day.

This is the issue i have with us working on branches during big updates, people cannot see whats going on unless they know how GitHub works and what branch stuff is happening on.

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