I'm not one to celebrate the new year much- where I live, It just means four months of freezing weather and little daylight- but I'd like to take a look back at what we as a community have done in 2011, and peer forward into 2012. At times our project seems awash in uncertainty, and I think we might never reach our goals. It's at times like this when I stop to think about what Thrive has accomplished. Think of all that we've done this year...

-we've amassed an even larger following, and spread the word about our project in new places
-we've welcomed talented and intelligent new members to our development team, who are quickly learning the ropes and contributing ideas like they're old veterans.
-we introduced the system of biomes to deal with environments in the game, and finished describing the basic attributes of earth-like biomes
-we've begun tracking our development forums, and I'm pleased to tell you that in less than a month and a half, our site has been visited
--3,257 times
--by 1,140 different visitors
--from 74 different countries, including 8 visitors from Belgium
-we've produced music, concept art, concept videos, and thousands of different ideas for the game, including ideas for plant gameplay, planetary structure, and sandbox mode
-we've cleared the biggest conceptual hurdle in our project by visualizing a dynamic and accurate evolution system, and laying down the steps for it piece by piece, so that it can be coded with relative ease
-we have begun to code

Here are some factors that make those accomplishments even more impressive:
Our budget: $0
Amount of money we've spent on this game: $0
Current popularity rank on modDB: 604
Highest popularity rank: 1
Times our ModDB page has been viewed: almost 50,000
People watching us on ModDB: 432

We've had a wonderful 2011, and I for one think 2012 will bring even greater things.

And to reach these great goals, we have some work to do. This January, I'd like to double the amount of information on the Wiki. That means that anything and everything that we've agreed on needs to be on there. Editing shouldn't be too hard, and if you don't have a wiki account, message me so I can get you one. Remember the Wiki is supposed to be the perfect reference, and our project could be much more efficient if we had all of our confirmed concepts in one place on the wiki. Let's make it happen.

Thanks for a great year guys. Happy 2012.

~sciocont