Beta Update news - Shadows of War

Now, the update 0.8.0 for Shadows of War is out, which means it is finally in the Beta phase.
If you don't own the game, you can buy it here: Indiedb.com
What does that mean exactly? It means that we now have implemented those features we think needs to be in the game, and has no more things we would want to add. To shorten this: Shadows of War is feature complete. However, that in no way mean we will stop adding things if we get good ideas or users give feedback about things that should be added. If we get such good ideas, we will definitely look into it and see if adding them is a good idea. However, that Shadows of War is feature complete means that we now will focus on bug fixing and making it stable, as well as improving the last things that we haven't had time for improving. We will definitely continue, listening to ideas and feedback that can improve Shadows of War and we always appreciate such feedback and ideas :)
Here a little picture promoting the beta release:

Now, what are actually some of the changes we have made for the Beta release? Let me explain some of them.We have moved the Analytic data collection from Flurry to Google Analytics to get data that is more accurate.Since many felt that the game is slow, we have re-added the 2x Speed button so you in the boring passagescan speed it a bit up. The Campaign has now officially been added, you can play it to gain insights about the when, why and where of Shadows of War. That is not everything; the GUI has been improved with a new Background image, a new Map has been added and there is a music piece more to listen to Ingame. Still, that is not everything. Procedural Map Generation is a feature we also have implemented. With this, you will get many new map constellations and you can choose a size between 4000 and 13000. Therefore, this new feature allows you to play on maps that are 1.625x the biggest size yet available. Over time, we will add more map pieces to give you even more variety in the Procedural Map Generation. A few bugs have been fixed (Some of them were very overdue to be fixed). In addition, some very important things have been improved: The air unit Animations as well as infantry animations have been improved and updated. All Unit & Bullet sprites are now using Downscaling (2.5x), since we have updated the resolution accordingly to that (2.5x as high as original). The Map & Unit collision Polygons have been improved. The Physics Collision detection is improved, this have been a bit overdue but it now should be better and more accurate. Now to another big improvement, some of the maps have gotten an overhaul to improve their visuals. As well as the Jeep MG & Pavelow model has been updated. Regarding the new Desert Map, a feature specific for the map is not just the sand wafting on the map, also that the Dunes on the map begin rising/lowering as the sand is blowed onto the dunes/away from them.Therefore, this is the first map in Shadows of War where the map layout changes as you play. As you can see the Beta updates has improved a lot as well as updated much of the existingand added some very important features and things. So what happens next? We will now wait/work for at least 1 weeks for feedback and bug reports and when we think most of the bugs have been found and fixed, then we will push the game into the 0.9.X branch as a RC for the release, and make the same (1 week of work). Therefore, the release of Shadows of War is at least 2 weeks from today if everything goes smoothly. If we still have open, Bug reports we won't push the Beta into the RC branch or the RC into Release branch. To round this up: We want the release to be as bug free as possible, however, we also know that the game now is feature complete and the last few things actually missing are only Bug Fixes, that's why we think 2 weeks is a good space to fix most things if not everything (Which most likely is impossible). Thank you for reading, be sure to check out our Twitter & Facebook, to get the recent news about SoW and other projects ;)
- Conti