I just crossed the last remaining things off from my todo-list for the demo (except for one point which is finishing one of the remaining nation backgrounds) and so far I have been very pleased with it’s progress since I started on the new version back in august 2006 (I still have a backup from that date on my disk in order to quickly check progress). Recently a friend of mine came by and after showing him the current in-developement version he was stunned by the professional looks of it so I guess it’s going in the right direction and all the work I’ve put into it in the end will pay out.
The game itself also is very close to my initial vision (except for the missing stuff that’ll be implemented after the demo), it already plays nice (although playtesting is still to be done), looks good and so far also works without any serious bugs or problems so I’m very confident that the demo will make it’s way into the public within the next two months although I may release some test-candidate earlier to see if everything works on different hardware.

In addition to this short status update I also decided to put up some new screenshots that have been taken only a few hours ago. They’re from the recent version and show the new main menu background with animated lightning and some shots directly from the game showing that I (again) did some changes to the user interface to make some parts look more like a game UI and easier to distinguish.