Hello everyone, I first of all would like to say that I signed up just now to post this and probably won't be active in the forums however I think it's important I express my feelings about the subject. I have been following the project since I saw the Kickstarter and I have been regularly checking the forums and the site ever since. however every time I check it I am met with disappointment. I completely fell in love with the game the moment I saw the first combat video. I had been looking for a game like this my entire life. Physics driven combat, emergent AI behavior and an immersive world... But I tend not to back or pre-order games I usually come across despite how amazingly awesome they may be. I may be skeptical or cynical but this is just one of my habits. If I can I will completely support the devs after release but I most of the time do not buy a game unless it's already in alpha/beta stage and may be accessed early. So, needless to say I am not a backer and I do not believe that I am 'entitled' to anything, but I am going to talk about what the relationship between the devs and the backers projects to the people who are not backers but are interested in the game. Personally I find your lack of updates disturbing. I think it's not a matter of not having any substantial content even in the early parts of development. Even if you are working with the internal workings of the engine making a few blog entries every once in a while about it is enough to excite the people interested in the game. 9 months down the road since the official beginning of the development, if you still don't have anything to present to the public apart from two kickstarter updates (which were very interesting and exciting to read nonetheless) it just gives the idea that the project is vaporware. I know it's not and that you guys are working hard on it but the average person checking the project out won't know that. I don't think running on a tight budget and having a small dev team is an excuse for it. Many other devs do it and if you guys did it as well I think it would improve your image a lot.
An example is Prison Architect the dev team is just one person (Chris Delay) but they still manage to release monthly alpha updates to the public through their
youtube channel and it's always exciting to watch even if they haven't made substantial amount of changes. I realize that they are already in alpha and they are already have previously published which in your case is not the scenario, but there's another kickstarted game that's exemplary in this regard.
The one man behind
Limit Theory (Josh Parnell) not only releases monthly video updates but also writes
dev logs about what he did "daily" even though it's still in pre-alpha stage. Even if it's internal engine work he explains what's exciting about what he's doing and that makes it interesting for backers and other people interested in the game alike. If that's not what interests people he can always show the relatively shinier stuff in a monthly update.
In conclusion I think that you shouldn't be this conservative about releasing content about your game to the public even if it's unpolished. If you state it clearly and emphasize it people do in fact realize it's an unfinished work and treat it keeping it in mind that it's still pre-alpha. I personally don't think that this is a problem about the allocation of resources but about business model. If you want your potential customers to be excited about the game as much as you are give them something to be excited for. If a single person was able to release daily development logs for 9 months you can easily release a public video once every few months with enough content to keep people interested.