Believe it or not, but after posting about “Phase 2” for over five years now I’m putting the finishing touches on a soon-to-be-released beta of the game! Actually I already realeased a beta over at a german forum to see how it works with other people’s hardware configurations, but since that version was missing a lot of english translations and was missing some stuff that I wanted to finish off before going public, the “international” release of the first “Phase 2” beta will take a little bit more time.
So for the past few days I’ve been adding the missing english translations (that was a lot of work, cause during development I tend to only put in german translations), proof-reading texts and fixing some smaller bugs. And though this beta will be missing some planned features and also content, there are a few features that I want to get done before releasing the beta, so I decided to give myself a few more days (or weeks) in order to have a beta ready that people will actually be able to enjoy.
Two of the features I’m currently finishing for the beta are some of the global projects that weren’t usable up until now, one of this being the pandemia which will now have a nice particle system when activated and that’ll then spread across the infected regions. Another feature that’ll be in the beta is the data net espionage, a feature that took me ages to implement (and which still isn’t finished yet). So in the beta you’ll be at least able to use data net espionage (sabotage will follow in a later beta) but is now shaping up to be nice addition to the game, especially when playing against human players. You can see these features in progress on the two screenshots.
I can’t give an exact date, but I plan on releasing the beta next weekend, though it may take a week or two more. So stay tuned!
P.S. : I won’t repeat the mistake of not getting anything playable out for a long time, cause teasing people for years doesn’t look good at all. So once the first beta is released, I plan on doing regular releases.