Almost exactly a year ago I decided to make a game and wrote a UI system for it, releasing it on the Asset Store almost as an afterthought. You may know this system as NGUI — it turned out to be fairly popular. People liked its simplicity, design, and well-commented, elegant code.

Although NGUI has halted the game’s development for a short while, I did persevere, and six months ago I started working on adding multi-player functionality to that game. I tried out 3 of the top solutions, but ultimately was not happy with either. I ended up just sticking with one of them due to time constraints, but never stopped wishing that I could write my own, applying all that I’ve learned from my development of NGUI — the simplicity, power, flexibility, and well-thought out, open code.

A few weeks ago I decided to do just that and started on a new project, called Tasharen Networking Framework, or “TNet” for short. This project is now ready to be released.

Read More: http://www.tasharen.com/forum/index.php?topic=2513.0

I’ve been spending all my time on the forums, and have seemingly all but neglected the front page for the past 6 months. So what has happened since then? Well, let’s see…

NGUI continues to be fairly popular, and has participated in the Asset Store Madness twice now (with the current latest madness happening right now). It’s currently holding #1 spots on both the top grossing and the most popular lists. More importantly though, the developers around the globe seem to be enjoying using it, and that is what’s truly important to me. With Unity’s own upcoming GUI solution still being in a fairly rough development stage, many of you guys seem to choose to go with what NGUI has to offer — and this inspires me to keep at it, to make small changes and improvements based on your feedback.

On the other side of the fence there is Windward — the “short 3-month project” that has been in-development for — what? 7 months now? It has been eating a pretty significant chunk of my time for a while now, and will likely continue to do so until the end of this month. October 1st is the “polished beta” release date, and I aim to make it! After all, a person can only take so many months of 100+ hour development weeks…

But on the bright side it’s really coming along well. It’s fun, it has a small but active community hosting multi-player games, and it gets new content on a daily basis. It even has a pair of locked ships for players to obtain for extra flair (and of course — power). It will soon be available via Desura, and is also currently trying to get noticed on Steam Greenlight, for what it’s worth. So if you want to help out, give it a vote. :)

The Next-Gen UI kit has continued its climb up the charts in the past few weeks, currently sitting at #2 up on the Asset Store — right behind the current juggernaut (the 2D Toolkit).

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Sadly that’s how little sleep I got while pushing to get NGUI finished by Friday. Remarkably I was pertty wired the entire time. I blame the adrenaline — it was a very fun project, and it was extremely rewarding to see it all come together at the end.

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