The two devs have gone back to doing some development work on it, yeah. I haven't been keeping up with it that closely so I don't know much more than that.
The same two devs that stopped working on it and caused a hubbub?
The same.
I thought it was the one dev causing a hubbub by paying the other dev who then realized it wasn't worth the money because it was based on future sales even though the original dev had already sold a bunch on the promise of future developments?
But either way, if anyone is more in-tune with the Towns forums and can translate for us here, that'd be great.
I lurk there sometimes when the drama's minimal. From what I gather just by reading the mod posts:
Xavi/Supermalparit and Burningpet got burned out on doing the game and didn't make an update for some amount of time. The forums apparently got toxic, but I only caught snippets of that and it wasn't pretty. Eventually the decision was made to call the game "finished," which led to a pretty hefty outcry from the fanbase. Then the decision was made to pass off the development to another coder, Minecraft-style.
The new coder was met with general approval and enthusiasm. Two months later he stepped down. Apparently his contract stipulated his pay on a percentage of future sales, with the intention that his work would be rewarded financially and he was motivated to do great work and fix the game up. The month after he was hired, sales took a steep decline for whatever reason. The month after that, new dev took a look at the potential earnings he'd have to live on until he had time to learn the code and implement fixes, new stuff. It wouldn't work out, so he stepped down.
Then Xavi had some internal debate about whether to make the game open-source or not, eventually settling on trying to hire another coder, which didn't pan out. The game was put up for sale, and an unnamed company expressed interest, then backed off because of the potential investment risk.
At that point Xavi and Burningpet decided to work on Towns again, to do some cleanup of the game and add some stuff like tutorials and a campaign. The cleanup pass is out, and I believe there is supposed to be a campaign/content patch out at some point in the future.
That's the plain facts as I understand them, distilled from some pretty large threads over there. The one dealing with the most recent push starts
here if anyone wants more direct information and has time to sift through.