Brad Hannah has, according to this recent post on the Ultima Dragons Facebook group, been having more fun with his Ebiten/Go-based take on Ultima 5 Redux than was the case for the original Unity-based version of the remake:

Progress continues! It has been this much fun developing Ultima V Redux in a long time!

Some simple features:

• working on input test boxes (move input away from right side output)
• new debug command system to save development time on complicated debug UIs – it is super fast and has an autocomplete
• Basic functions like Push, Klimb, Open, Jimmy, Get (some), Look, Enter
• Flood filling to only show stuff “the Avatar can see”
• Basic animations

I believe my “less is more” philosophy is paying off. Everytime I imagine “how awesome” something could be – I remind myself to do a basic implementation and get back to awesome bits later.

Attached to that post were a handful of screenshots showcasing some of the new features mentioned above:

On the subject of the departure from using Unity, the good Mr. Hannah also posted a brief comment — again, on Facebook — regarding the challenge of building a UI for the remake:

Because I am not using Unity game engine anymore – all UI has to be hand coded which is tricky. I am however working on a UI component library I can re-use in the game to save time. Here is my attempt at buttons – let me know what you think!

In my past version I had scaling for UI all over the place – I am hoping to generally only have a few preconfigured sizes and dimensions to keep it simple going forward.

You can see the aforementioned buttons in the image at the top of this post. As buttons go, they seem quite satisfactory.