Hey, long time no see. Sorry if this is a poor explanation as its in middle of night for me haha. I think you'd be happy to know there has been plenty of progress on Sui Generis. Exanima is the prelude to Sui Generis, so everything made for Exanima is made with Sui Generis in mind, which is why Exanima is taking so long. So Exanima basically serves as a small and controlled testing ground for the things developed for Sui Generis, as well as a source of income during this extended development time and later some extra PR for Sui Generis.
Some progress made so far is for example the AI and role system which is a overkill for the purpose of Exanima and took a long time to finish, the dialogue system, massive improvements to the physics and animation, plenty of engine tools and performance improvements, etc,.. and thaumaturgy which has also taken a long time to develop and soon finally seeing its way into Exanima. It took so long time to develop because mind thaumaturgy (which is the first type to be released) is directly tied to the AI and role system which makes it really complicated. And there is plenty more things to be implemented too but not necessarily vital for Exanimas sake, such as multiplayer which they soon will have a look at, once Exanima is finished with a fully released 1.0 version then hopefully most will be just plug and play for the devs when they develop/build the world of Sui Generis.
The reason for the extended development time is because they had a change of hearth in how they wanted to do the development, and in my opinion was indeed the best solution. Originally they indented to release a playable version of Sui Generis in 2014 where they essentially would have just rushed all their systems out and given the game out with all the flaws that would inevitably come with it and then just try patching things up later as they continued working on the game. Instead they decided to focus on quality and try releasing things in as much working order as possible. Now i have tested the very first release of the combat alpha and the latest version of Exanima (and every version inbetween), it's like two completely different games with how they perform, i can imagine that if they rushed things out back in 2014 as originally planned then it would have been very low quality compared to what it is today and have a lot of missing and unfinished/buggy systems and features, so i think they would have "no man sky'd" themselves (without the all lies), dont get me wrong the combat alpha was really fun so im sure a rushed Sui Generis would have been fun too, but by that i mean by the time they would eventually fix everything that was broken and get things to the quality and performance that it has today, people would not be interested anymore because of how bad it would have been in the first release and those who did play/complete the game early on would be less inclined to play and complete it again, just as with no mans sky when they finally updated it, even though they did redeemed themselves somewhat they still got a very low rating and they had nowhere close to the playerbase they would have had if they had released it later with the with the features and quality as originally promised.
As for you having to buy the game again, I don't think so, if i remember right those who purchased Sui Generis will also get Exanima, have you checked the account page(link at the bottom of this site)? It has a different login than your forum account. If you have Sui generis on your account (should say "digital release copy" or something like that under the "current reward Tier") but dont have any download option for Exanima, then contact Brendand
