Firaxis Games, the legendary studio behind the Civilization franchise, delivered another milestone in grand strategy with the release of Civilization VII earlier this year. Building on the series’ rich legacy, the game pushes boundaries with new systems, refined visuals, and a modernized user experience. At Coherent Labs, we’re proud to have supported this vision through our UI middleware, Coherent Gameface, which powers the game’s responsive UI across all the platforms. To offer a glimpse into how Gameface contributed behind the scenes, we reached out to Firaxis’ UI team for a short Q&A on their experience integrating our tech into their custom AAA engine.

What were the main UI goals that Coherent enabled you to achieve? What do you see as Coherent’s main benefit for your needs?

A major goal of Civilization VII was delivering a polished, unified UI experience simultaneously across PC storefronts, consoles, and handheld devices. Coherent’s Gameface enabled us to efficiently create a consistent interface tailored for multiple platforms, significantly reducing development overhead and ensuring a seamless, high-quality user experience regardless of device.

Can you share any specific insight about the impact Coherent had on your game’s UI performance?

With Coherent Gameface, we were able to deliver a stable and responsive UI across all platforms. This was made possible by Gameface’s flexibility in supporting various computing architectures, whether single-threaded or multi-threaded. Additionally, integration with Chrome’s Inspector allowed us to quickly identify and resolve performance issues early in development using the built-in profiler and heap analyzer.

Would you recommend Coherent to other studios and why?

Yes, for studios seeking a robust, off-the-shelf UI solution supported by a team of developers, Coherent’s Gameface is an ideal choice. Gameface’s implementation of open web standards such as HTML5 and CSS accelerates the onboarding for developers. We found the comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and flexible rendering API helped to streamline our integration into our custom AAA game engine.

How do you see your project evolving with time?

Looking ahead, we’re excited about Coherent Gameface’s roadmap, particularly its increasing compatibility with modern frontend frameworks such as SolidJS. We are also excited to see what our modding community will be able to develop and run on this Gameface-based UI system.

With Civilization VII now thriving in players’ hands, the road ahead looks just as exciting: Firaxis upcoming Update 1.2.2 packs in Steam Workshop support, Large & Huge map types, new advanced setup options, and another round of UI polish. We’re thrilled to see how both Firaxis and the community leverage our adaptable UI framework- right as we at Coherent expand keep working on our exciting roadmap for the year.

Stay tuned for the more behind-the-scenes stories as our journey unfolds!