Hey everyone. Been a while since I have been active on this forum due to losing my bookmarks the last time I replaced my computer and missing this site. I am seeing a fair bit of confusion over both my intentions with the game and why things had changed so I thought I might try to clear that up. This may be a long post as a result but I'm trying to include as much information as I can.
AH is not something I have lost interest in, at all. I am still very interested in it, and am looking forward to being back to monthly updates for it. The reason that the game originally stopped being able to compile was an engine limitation and not a flash limitation. Basically, once compiling the game took more than 8GB of ram, the engine would crash. The 100mb issue was something different and was a limitation of being able to upload to newgrounds.
During the time the game was down, I started doing Spiral Clicker as my monthly updating project, so as to show that I am trying to keep doing consistent work even though my main project was stalled out. During this time, I had multiple offers for AH to be ported to unity, and I had accepted several of them, but none ever worked out. I did turn down a few but that was because I was nervous about having a ton of different people working on the same thing, as it would be a large inconvenience for everyone who didn't end up producing the first successful port.
Eventually, I managed to get the developers of stencyl to understand the problem I was having, and they finally fixed it, allowing AH to be able to be compiled again. From there, I started working on AH myself again. But, by that point I had already been doing Spiral Clicker monthly for somewhere around a year if I recall correctly. So, I felt like switching over to AH as the monthly updating project would make me appear to be wishy washy and indecisive about where I want to put my development focus.
My intention is, and has been that when I get Spiral Clicker to "feature complete" I will switch it off to a slower update cycle, getting a new girl every now and again as I get the art for it, and then switching AH to being my monthly updating project again. Unfortunately, spiral clicker is taking a lot longer to complete than I anticipated. I had a very severe hurricane season last year, and got hit with several hurricanes and had to evacuate once for several days. I was lucky enough not to take damage but it was a very distracting series of events.
You'd think that would only put me a month behind, but it seems like it had sort of a ripple effect; my artists got well ahead of me during that month of me barely being able to code, so trying to catch up with them has slowed down how quickly I can program and test the new features for Spiral Clicker.
I have been catching up steadily each month though and I am starting to close in on feature complete. I have a handful of buildings to finish up functions for, a few more UI touchups to do, and one last special area to add and the game will be done and AH will be back to monthly updates. I just don't know how long it will take exactly as while it feels like I'm almost there, I've felt like I'm almost there for a while.
In the meantime, AH has been generally updating every 2-3 months. I have been trying to aim for every other month as a release schedule, but it feels oftentimes at the end of the second month like there isn't quite enough content to feel worth releasing so I give it another month of development before making a new public release. Which is why AH has been so slow lately.
Anyways, sorry about the long silence and confusion about things with the game. It's definitely not dead, and I will definitely be finishing it.
