IndieDB are having a big vote going on to choose their game of the year.  If Kenshi wins then publicity ==> sales ==> more features added to Kenshi.  So click the link below, scroll down the page a little and click on the "vote for this game" button!

By the way, 0.21 should be released some time later today, here is the feature list:

FEATURES

• characters are now aware of what other characters in the squad are doing and are less likely to do things like heal the same target while someone else is bleeding to death.
• you can now bring up the right-click menu by clicking on a characters portrait
• characters in a squad can communicate.  If a character needs to heal, he can ask the squad to halt the patrol.  If a character is wounded and has no medkits he can ask someone else to heal him.
• when a whole squad is defeated, any character that gains consciousness will stay down until all enemies are out of range.
• removed a few old items, added new ones.  Spike armour, chain head-wrap, martial artists Gi, and tricorner hat.
• Due to unpopularity, the plank has been changed to a lighter, hacker class weapon, but its still cool
• when you right-click an enemy it commands your character(s) to attack all of them, instead of targeting that single enemy.  If you want to attack a certain enemy you can choose it from the right-click menu.  This should stop new player confusion syndrome.

BUGFIXES

• stopped graphical flickering bugs
• reduced video card requirements to vertex shader 2.0
• some people had a crash when opening shops, this may be fixed now.
• player characters don't get de-selected when you click an NPC, reduces new player confusion syndrome

Now I've gotten most of the major bugfixing out of the way I'm starting to improve the AI a little.  So far I've got AI squads working as a team a bit more.  After a battle a squad will hang around and heal each other before moving on.  Also when a whole squad is wiped out, if any characters happen to regain consciousness they will stay down until their enemies have left the area.  This sorts out the problem of defeated enemies suddenly getting back up and charging at you out of the blue.

-There is also a chance now that a passing allied faction will heal your defeated squad and save you.
-You will also be able to run up to allied squads and ask for help, they will then run off and rescue your wounded characters and fight off any enemies.

So aside from assorted little improvements, here's the next few features I will be adding:

• Beds will be functional.  Sleeping will speed up healing rate, but you will need to pay for the use of a bed in town.
• Bandaging won't be enough to get a character on their feet anymore (only a certain percentage of the bandaging will get them up, and thats based on medic skill).  You will have to carry badly wounded characters to safety, preferably a bed.
• You will be able to buy your own building.  To start with, you will be able to have your own beds to heal up in, and storage for equipment.
• Imprisonment.  This means characters, including your own, can be captured and imprisoned by enemy factions, by police, and caught by slavers.  So you could wake up and scrape your squad together after losing a fight and find you have a guy missing, and you will have to go rescue him.
• You can gear out your buildings for research and crafting.  The higher level equipment in the game now will no longer be available in shops, and you will have to craft it.
• Later on you will be able to use your owned buildings to open a shop, or a hospital.
• Cannibals.  They like to capture people to use as a fresh food supply.  Don't fall asleep in the desert without someone on watch.

PLANNED FEATURES

This is a more generalised list just to show you what is planned for the game overall (in no particular order):

• Lots more factions and complexity to the world, improvements to the AI
• Nice big research tree and crafting system, with the addition of mining and paying for resources.
• Ability to join factions and do dynamic missions for them.  AI factions will also give missions to other factions and NPCs, not just you.
• Increased multi-threading.  Will mean that I can have a ridiculous amount of active characters at once, and there will be huge armies running around.
• You will be able to build buildings out in the desert, and start your own outpost or fortress, possibly towns.
• Building and town siege warfare.
• The world map will be a lot bigger.  Towns will be procedurally generated, meaning I can fill the whole world single-handed and it will be different every time you start a new game.
• Mining and farming.
• Ranged combat.  Crossbows and harpoon turrets.
• Unarmed combat
• Thief skills, stealing, sneaking, escaping from jail.
• Survival elements, you will need a supply of food and water, and need shelter to survive storms.  Endurance and fitness will factor in to combat.
• Limb amputation, and robotic replacements
• Blood sprays, splats, lots of blood
• More animations to represent impact, injuries, damage and exhaustion.
• Dialog system that will be linked into the AI.  Characters will say things at times based on their intentions, motivations, opinions and events.
• More races are planned, other than just humans.
• Doors to lock up your buildings, town gates to keep the bandits out.
• Wildlife, creatures, monsters, herds.

STUFF THAT WILL GET DONE WHEN I HAVE THE MONEY TO HIRE SOMEONE TO DO IT

This is not because I'm being lazy, just that these features are easy to separate from the main code, so are ideal to outsource and save me some time:

• Dynamic shadows
• Foliage, rocks, grass, stuff to fill out the map and make it actually interesting to travel.
• Deferred lighting:  Means that I can have a nearly unlimited number of lights in the scene, and can introduce the day-night cycle
• Pathfinding overhaul.  This will also get rid of those long Loading messages.
• More armour, clothing, hair styles, more buildings and variety in all the artwork.
• Audio and sound effects.

Just wanted to clear up a little misunderstanding about my game design views, as I've noticed a lot of people picking up on this quote from me and translating it as an arrogant hatred of turn based games:

"Unique real time combat system, [......] Despite being an RPG, combat is action-game-grade and fast paced. No longer do characters stand there like idiots taking turns to hit each other. There are no "dice rolls", game mechanics are not based on archaic board game rules."

I can see why, I wasn't very clear when I wrote that, so I will be clearer now.  I LOVE turn based games.  I went with a realtime-with-pause system for Kenshi purely because I wanted it to handle large battles, and I wouldn't like to wait for 200 NPCs to take their turn.

That quote was actually refering to the realtime-turnbased hybrids you get in a lot of games, particularly D&D based games.  Though I loved baldurs gate and dragon age, the combat systems just aren't quite right.  You need to go with proper turn-based, or proper real-time, not dawdle in between.  It looks wrong, in dragon age they had all this cinematic atmosphere and "visceral combat" and the characters just stood there waiting for their internal timers to allow them to play another attack animation.  Its not the end of the world I guess because they were still good games, I just think its an area that needs a lot of improvement.  Combat got boring fast.  Temple of Elemental Evil on the other hand had a proper turn-based system and it had some of the most riveting battles I've ever had outside of X-Com.

So yeah, I wrote that quote while thinking "the game industry needs more proper turn-based games".   I am words good.