Development

I’ve removed the tedious sleep traps and replaced them with a twisty passage.

Posted a preview of the cloth map to the UDIC Facebook group. Because I could only get the map produced in batches of four I gave three lucky Dragons the opportunity to get their own beta maps for just £7.50 (excluding shipping).

At long last, after much thought, I present the map. The challenge was coming up with something that was recognizably a transition form Sosaria to Britannia that would also actually work as a game map. My solution was almost entirely algorithmic, the main exception being adding a narrow channel to Britannia Bay to prevent it being an inland lake.

There’s a line in the U4 manual about landmasses rising and falling, so at the point of this map the main recognizable landmasses from U4 have risen but the old ones from U3 haven’t completely fallen. Or to put it another way: with a 128×128 map it would be a shame to give a quarter of it over to open water.

There’s something of an Ultima tradition of having NPCs based on real people, so I thought why not do the same. I can’t promise to use every submitted NPC but I will try and use as many as I can. All you need to do is to reply to this thread with the following information (example included):

NAME: Zedex
pronoun: He
LOOK: A dragon!
JOB: I debug the codex.
HEALTH: I am tired.
preferred location: Britain

It’s just U3.5 in a rather nice Celtic typeface that I can’t take credit for:

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/nicksfonts/ye-olde-block-nf/

 

I expect to have the beta character generator finished this year (because I’ve written all the dialog and worked out the mechanics). The actual game is going to take a lot longer. The observant will spot that the graphics are based on the MSX version of Ultima 4.

 

Here are the path cards for the professions.

With 11 professions … we’re gonna need a bigger abacus.

Coming up with the dilemmas is going to be the hard part because this *isn’t* the time of the Avatar and you don’t have to be virtuous.

I’m assuming the full deck of cards has more than eight cards in it, or it wouldn’t be much use, so in this instance you get 11 options. The virtue system hasn’t been established yet so think of these as paths. Each is associated with a profession, and a settlement, but these are not the formal associations of the age of enlightenment.

These are the available paths: compassion, deceit, valor, pride, courage, illusion, magic, spirituality, honor, faith, and justice.

The following paths have settlements associated with them, but no associated playable profession: truth, love, beauty, sacrifice. If you’re wondering what happened to Honesty, remember they didn’t call it the Age of Darkness for nothing.

Because of the engine, overlaying tiles is out, so there are no ladders. Instead you get proper stairs (like in Bloodwych). I had 17 tiles spare after creating the set so I’ve added some decoration. Hope you like the banner. The design was strongly influenced by the stone dungeons from Ultima 5, but I the limitations of the engine meant I had to design the tiles from scratch.

Comes in at 62 pages (in pocket book size). It *is* going to need some editing.