Given my lackluster attendance on the forums here of late, it's difficult for me to say exactly how much has been going on in the latter half of this year. Since the last devblog, we've been making a lot of headway, and I'm quite pleased with the state of the project as it is now. However, if you download our latest release, you'll quickly find that it, ostensibly, is bafflingly incomplete.
Thrive has yet to become a game.
Despite this, I'm happy with where we're at. If you peel away the immediate simplicity of release 0.2.1, it becomes clear that the, if you will, cytoskeleton, of microbe stage is at its core strong. Major components of the eventual game are lying in wait, unused by this current iteration but ready to be implemented when we've built enough for them to be useful. At this point, building becomes easier, so long as our blueprints are clear, and each step forward is more noticeable. Soon, you won't open Thrive.exe and see yourself, compound emitters, and scattered identical AIs. You'll see AI cells of many shapes and sizes absorbing and emitting compounds, attacking each other and defending themselves. Further iterations will bring a microbe editor, procedural evolution and population dynamics, a dynamic background with competing bacterial colonies for you to feast upon or shy away from, and a complex environment of furrowed rock that restricts your movement across the plane of the game - unless you have the tools to destroy it. All this and more is planned.
While my vision for the microbe stage is grand, it's just a vision without the talent and hard work of the team here. To all of the programmers, artists and designers who have been working on building, shaping, and organizing work on the microbe stage, I owe a debt of gratitude. You've been doing a fantastic job this year, keeping the project strong and my spirits high.
As we look forward into the often inscrutable fog of the future, I'd like to take time to wish the whole development team a happy and productive 2014, ideally full of all the wonders I mentioned above. It's always a pleasure working with you all, as geographically and culturally dispersed as we are, and I hope our collaboration will yield even more positive results in the coming months. As always, keep soldiering on.

~scio