I tried.

Let’s do the TL;DR, and after that, if you’re interested, we can go into the gory details.

I have missed the May 6th date. Hilariously. Not even close. Phoenix will come out late this year. Before GTA6, you ask? I can only hope.

So what happened?

Writing games is hard - really, really hard, and as I’ve said more than a few times before, I’m literally developing this game by myself. It’s also hard to explain how intimidating the codebase can be - I’ve been developing games professionally for 27 years and for at least 15 years as a hobby before that, but picking my way through a codebase with almost half a million lines of code that’s 16 years old that was quite frankly written by an amateur idiot (me) is depressing and scary. Change the wrong thing and I’ve introduced a subtle bug that could take weeks to fix!

It can be genuinely difficult to force myself to get up and sit down at my computer and open up a frankly daunting codebase with what feels like an infinite and enormous and impossible task, but I’ve been plugging away as best I can. I completely forgot that I’d specifically mentioned the May 6th date, and I was sure that the previous date was a vague ‘6 months on’.

I’m ok, really, not feeling depressed or suicidal, honestly, but to a great degree, this game has to succeed, or I’ll be dusting off my CV and applying for jobs, and I’m sure at some subconscious level, I know that a game can’t fail until it’s released.

One of the ‘release goals’ for Phoenix has always been ‘It’s done when people look at screenshots of the game and don’t think it’s Evolved anymore’, and on that front I’ve failed so far, but it’s safe to say that 99% of that is the UI. (and the buildgun)

Oh UI. Divisive and difficult to articulate, it’s been a thorn in my side for a very long time. I’ve been dealing with vague ‘The UI is bad’ comments for a very long time, but few people have ever managed to give useful or meaningful feedback, so the UI just... stagnated. A few months ago I had a tiny game idea I wanted to do, so I put together a quick game over a week and decided, because the game looked so good, that was I going to force myself to sort out nice UI assets, and put it together using whatever Unity has decided is the current UI implementation and...

For the first time in a long time, I felt confident, nay, proud of my ability to create user interfaces, dialogues and menus, so I went back to the very first dialogue box you see in FortressCraft, and started what was going to turn out to be a very long process.

There’s still work to be done - it’s a little cramped still and the visual language of the palette isn’t quite right (originally we had white for changeable info, blue for static info and clickable things are orange), but it doesn’t offend me, and hopefully it doesn’t offend you either.

It’s funny tho - just looking at that picture now I’m showing it publicly makes me spot a ton of changes I want to do to make it better!

So we’re saying goodbye to the old NGUI stuff. Thank you for your service.

Also a hugely popular poll on the Discord has decided that Creative doesn’t need to come across, saving me dozens of UI panels to recreate and hook up. Didn’t vote? You should be on our Discord then!

https://discord.gg/wB2UWXa

Changing the UI for a new one is a long, long process, needing hundreds of new elements and panels to be setup, sanity checked, hooked up to the codebase and tested - and only then will I get to see if the testers like them. I suspect I won’t get to do all of them by the time I begrudgingly press the ‘Go Live’ button, but the plan is to do the main menu, then the hotbar stuff. Just the concept of rewriting the drag-and-drop code alone make me want to go and live in a cave, with a box of scraps.

One other area I haven’t dared to wade into yet is the networking; as I indicated in my last post, I would generally play the game end-to-end, fully networked, before any major patch went live, which just hasn’t happened.

One of the largely-agreed-upon things I’ve seen some people is that they want me to rip out and replace all of the old LidGrin networking layer and replace with Steam Networking. The main problem with doing this is that it’s an all-or-nothing, and doing so will break the entire game for, at a guess, 3 months. Once my current enthusiastic thrust into redoing the UI dies down, that’ll be the next major task.

I realise I’ve been very very bad at dealing with social media, too. Again, it gets intimidating to do constant posts like I used to. Am I being annoying? Do people care? If I start doing too many, will people unsubscribe/drift off? Is this actually worth doing? The imposter syndrome is real. Except Discord. On Discord I’ll happily post little one liners, code snippers, screenshots, whatever bullshit Unity is deciding to do today, the works.

To that end, I’ve been involved with developing a new approach to social media, converting Discord posts with context/videos/images into BlueSky/Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Threads and wherever else turns up from the social media overlords.

As ever, Patreons get early access to large posts like that for sanity-checking and feedback:

patreon.com/projectorgames

And another enormous Thank You to everyone who believes in me, not just with their words, but with their wallet. Thank you so much.

Fun fact: If everyone who follows me on Steam became a Patreon at $1/month, I’d have enough income to literally hire 6 more people. Every little helps!

And finally - UI and networking aside, things have been progressing all over, based on the feedback from the endlessly patient Patreons who have been playing the game end-to-end constantly. I regret implementing HDRP so, so much now; I mostly went with it because of the wonderful volumetrics. Time marches on, and now I’ve got a full volumetric system within the vastly-easier to work with URP, but rewriting all of the rendering from scratch? Perhaps not. But HDRP is a huge millstone around my neck, and has definitely been a bad decision. Other than that tho - the game itself is in good shape, and I’ve had several people play from New Game to OET Charge without any major issues. It's just that damned UI.

No AI was used in the making of this post. And I know I keep saying ‘our’ and ‘we’, but it’s genuinely just muggins here doing everything.

So I’m fine, Dora’s fine, writing games is hard, mental health is important, I’ll post more. Come see me on Discord - wishlist Phoenix!

https://discord.gg/wB2UWXa [dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1038080/FortressCraft__Phoenix/"]