Yes, I'm still kicking, and I'm about to send out a new alpha to backers.  It's dirty and dusty and I'm sending it out in a kind of a hurry, but I feel I need to prove that I haven't dropped off the face of the earth....

Indeed it is, and has made substantial progress over the past couple of months.  Here's the newest YouTube video:

Here are the notes, adapted from the dev diary at Coin Door Interlock:

The big thing that's visible here is that sand and water now has a smooth surface.  In particular this looks nice when a single level of water is moving around at the surface of a pool.  At the moment this is only cosmetic, and a bit glitchy at that.  Notice how, when water meets up with sand at about the same level, the sand angles down but the water stays level, and so it looks like it's being held up by air.  This is a problem I have yet to solve; I'll probably do it by cheating the water out to the edge in this instance, or limiting how far steep slopes of sand are allowed to get.

Also, the known "map" areas out of sight but still onscreen are now displayed using outlines.  There is some intelligence there that outlines the edges of the region but not the tiles in the middle.  It's not perfect yet; you can see some dots in regions where aborted walls are drawn, and the line isn't complete sometimes at the sides of slopes.  Not to mention, in some cases where sand is underwater, a black corner is drawn on the sand.  (This is actually the same problem as the other sand glitch.)

The update engine now uses a hybrid of the first system, which was a simple pair of nested for loops, and the second system, which kept a list of all the tiles that might change this turn and iterated through them.  The first worked but was inflexible, and the second was flexible but required a computationally-expensive coordinate sort.  Now it iterates through the cells in a spiral out from around the "focus," which is either the player's location or the cursor.  It keeps a "dirty" flag on cells that might need updating next frame, allowing the game to avoid looking at every cell with complex interactions, like fluids, just to determine that they don't have anything to do this frame.  There are a couple of bugs with this too at the moment: sometimes the game forgets about liquids on "steps" and they are left to just pool there, and in edit mode placed fluids don't do anything until an adjacent space is modified.

The character you see in the video, it should be noted, is not the final version.  Far from it; I think it looks too much like Terraria, and I'm anxious to keep In Profundis distinct from that.  I'm thinking about either going with a more realistic character, akin to Aurora from my previous game Mayflight, or alternatively going with a very stylized character, closer to Placeholder Guy from before, who I think had a certain charm to him.

I've also started planning out how gases will be returned to the game.  They probably won't be updated as often as liquids, which befits a more diffuse way of spreading.

It must be admitted, this is still mostly engine work.  I am attempting things this this game that I can't rightly say I've ever seen done before, so I'm kind of feeling my way thought, designing as I go. 

I have not forgotten about the promised poster-size PDF and print comics, but focus has been laser-sharp on the game lately.  I'll let everyone know when I'm ready to move forward with those.