I’m really excited to share some more information about something that I’ve been hinting at publicly for quite a while: the launch of a public beta for an updated look and feel for Earth Empires!

When we built this game, it was under immense time pressure. Even after that, doing a UI redesign project was never made a priority. The interface is effectively stuck in the 90s, with a few pieces of early Web 2.0 (War Room, for instance) peppered in here and there. This work marks the first time we’ve made an attempt to build something that is modern, mobile focused and something we can iterate on much more quickly than what we have today. It’s been an effort that’s been in the works off and on for over a year off and on with a big push this summer.

There is still lots to do to get things polished to the point of being able to be made into the default UI for players, but we want to start getting feedback from our players and put it in your hands to see how we can make it better.

To start, we’ll be looking for feedback on conceptual things — is the way we do navigation good? Do the forms perform well? How is the mobile experience? Are some of the new UI concepts improvements? Stuff like that. Some of these topics are already posted on the New UI Project forum.

We’ll move into both the design aspects (colours and general look stuff) and some more of the nitty gritty bug fixing and experience improvements as we move through the beta, but the big conceptual things sort of need to be set before we can move onto other items. I’ll post more about this when we officially open the beta later this week.

This is phase one of a multi-phase project to revitalize the game and community with the goal of an official re-release in December for Earth Empires’ 10 year anniversary.

The tentative schedule of activities is as follows:

- Mid August 2019 - Open beta starting
- Fall 2019 - Content/help documentation improvements
- Fall 2019 - Creation of new quality-of-life improvements, Patron/Premium access and credit system to fund development activities + NPC bot improvements
- December 2019 - Email blast to former players + official re-release of the game
- Winter 2020 - Internationalization and additional marketing efforts
- Later in 2020 - Clan hosting integrations within the game and other new feature work

It's an exciting time -- probably the most exciting time in the last 5 to 8 years, so I hope all the diehard players are as excited as I am! Look for more information on how to play on the new work we’ve done in the coming days.

Thanks for being a part of this community and a bit thankyou to everyone who has helped make this work possible :)

-pang