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,