Things have been a bit on the quiet side lately. Between end of the year stuff and some personal stuff (Rex is doing much better, thanks for all the well wishes) Alpha 5 has taken longer than hoped.
It still won't be quite ready before the end of the year. We could maybe rush it out, but we won't be able to support it properly over the week surrounding Christmas and it won't be up to our own internal expectations, so we aren't going to do that. But don't fret just yet. By the end of the day on December 20th, we will be posting a public test branch here on Steam for adventurous players to test out. There will be bugs, there will be issues, you are promised that. However it should be fairly playable and we hope that over the winter holiday players may give it a few minutes and take a moment to either leave feedback or just allay their fears that the development has halted. We're 100% on board and focused.
We will then hit the ground running in January 2017 and wrap up Alpha 5 with a proper release, while also updating the public test build every few days until the release. We think that'll work pretty well. We then hope that Alpha 6 will be back to a 4-6 week turn around as undoubtedly some things from Alpha 5 will need additional balancing or polish.