Written by Frilly Wumpus
Thursday, 29 March 2007
I’ve noticed a renewed interest in Ultima and am starting to see much more activity in the Ultima community lately and this just reiterates my belief that the community is pretty solid. The activity may die down for periods of time, but it seems to resurface again and again. As another Ultima fan posted recently, there is definitely something to this 20+ year old game that still keeps people entranced. With that, I’ve been inspired to relate a little bit of my personal history with Ultima. This may get a bit wordy, so you’ve been warned….
I’ve noticed a renewed interest in Ultima and am starting to see much more activity in the Ultima community lately and this just reiterates my belief that the community is pretty solid. The activity may die down for periods of time, but it seems to resurface again and again. As another Ultima fan posted recently, there is definitely something to this 20+ year old game that still keeps people entranced. With that, I’ve been inspired to relate a little bit of my personal history with Ultima. This may get a bit wordy, so you’ve been warned….
>LOOK
You see someone who wishes to tell a STORY.
>TALK
>NAME
Shaddock “Frilly Wumpus” Heath
>JOB
Co-Producer – The Ultima 6 Project
Co-Founder – Project Britannia
Technical Director – Ultima V:Lazarus
>STORY
I have been a long-time fan of the Ultima series, cutting my teeth with Ultima III on an Apple 2e in ’83. Around this time, the Ultima Construction Kit was released by a 3rd party and that opened up the ability to modify the towns and cities in Sosaria and allow players to create their own content. This was exciting stuff and really ignited my increasing interest in programming and custom content.
I veered away from Ultima for a few years and came back to it for Ultima V. I stayed with it through VI and VII + SI, and then got away from it again with VIII. Throughout this time, I was teaching myself programming by trying to develop an RPG/Trade Sim based upon a lot of the concepts I saw in the Ultimas, Bard’s Tale series, and Wizardry series along with some 2e classics such as Santa Paravia and Taipan. Eventually, I got into corporate programming but still kept up with learning game development at night. I spent many years focused on building a game framework that could be built on by content developers based upon my experiences with the Ultima Construction Kit. Every few months I’d try something else, or rewrite it, or something… nothing ever got finished, but I learned a lot. At some point during this, I decided that if I really wanted to create something, I would need a boost…a system with the infrastructure in place that I could build on top of, but that was flexible enough for me to really customize.
Jump forward to the spring of 2002. I was really anticipating the release of Neverwinter Nights as a platform to build custom content. A modder’s dream. I had also heard of another game called Dungeon Siege that supposedly had the ability to create custom content. I pre-ordered both, thinking that Dungeon Siege could keep me occupied until NWN was released later that summer.
Dungeon Siege arrived and after installing it, I was spellbound. I was totally hooked in a way that I hadn’t been since the late night gaming sessions I had enjoyed as a kid. I don’t know what it was, but I always wanted to find out what was around the next corner. The seamless world also contributed to this since there were no defined “levels” so common in most of the other games out there and I ended up pushing forward for much longer stretches than I would otherwise. Also, the world was absolutely stunning to look at..more gorgeous than anything I had seen previously in an RPG. I was also taking lots of notes and admiring the work of the world builders with the aim of digging deep into how things were built once the editing tools were released.
By the time NWN was released later that summer, I was totally entrenched in Dungeon Siege… learning the world building tools and the custom language and trying out different things. NWN is an excellent platform with a huge and vibrant community and lots of custom content, but for some reason the engine just never did resonate with me the same way Dungeon Siege did. Subsequently, I never did get that magical feeling with NWN and it ended up gathering dust on the shelf.
I spent about a year or so working on my own custom world called “Lala’s World”. This was a demo world that I was building to try out different things and learn the tools. The more I built though, the more Ultima-like it became. I even subconsciously had built some circles of stones like the moongate circles in Britannia. As I realized how much effort it was taking to do the worldbuilding, coding, writing, etc. myself, I determined to start poking around to see if I might join a team to allow me to hone my skills. I saw that two Ultima mods for Dungeon Siege were looking for volunteers, Ultima V:Lazarus and the Ultima 6 Project.
I ended up contacting Zephyr and Sliding Dragon of the Ultima 6 Project team to see if they needed any help and was immediately brought on board to help build the reagent based spellcasting system. Over the next year, I ended up helping out in many more areas, prototyping the ship navigation system, the moongate system, helping Zephyr integrate the conversation system, etc. We determined that releasing a technical demo of our progress would be a good thing to do and ended up importing some of the regions I had built for my “Lala’s World” demo in. We hooked in our new tech and threaded a simple story through to demonstrate some of the technical features we had built. There was a pair of moongates, some random monster generators, a branching conversation system, reagent based spellcasting system, a ship, some custom quests, and a couple other features. We bundled it up, released it to the world, and continued working.
Not long after our technical demo was released, we were contacted by Tiberius Moongazer, the leader of Ultima V:Lazarus. They had also released an Alpha version of UVL which consisted of their custom art and worldbuilding around Moonglow, but their tech was still mainly core Dungeon Siege. After a few meetings, we realized that U6P was very strong in tech, whereas UVL was very strong in art and worldbuilding. As a result, we decided to collaborate on a joint venture project utilizing both of our team’s talents. This project was to be called Project Britannia and would be used as a basis for both projects to build on. U6P would benefit from UVL’s world building and art talents, and UVL would benefit from our technical talents. We would also release Project Britannia to the world so other individuals or teams could base their work on it.
Over the next couple of years, I focused almost strictly on Project Britannia. I ended up becoming the Technical Director on Ultima V:Lazarus during this time as well as being technical director for Project Britannia and U6P. During the last part of 2005 and early 2006, I was focused solely on cleaning out bugs in Project Britannia and helping to ready UVL for final release.
After the release of Lazarus in March, I basically collapsed and needed a break for the summer. Somehow we released our 2nd Milestone of U6P that year thanks to Zephyr and the others pushing forward and I was grateful that we decided that we would release in small chunks more frequently until we were done instead of releasing the whole thing at once like Lazarus did.
As we close in on our 3rd Milestone release, and our technology has stabilized more, I find myself asking more gameplay/content type questions. Instead of just “How do I get this to work?”, I’m asking “Is this entertaining?” and “Will this fit in with the Ultima mythos?”. Having our Milestone releases will allow us to experiment with different gameplay elements and judge the reaction. If things just don’t work, we have time to change them or pull them out completely.
I’ve also started really noticing some of the other teams and indivuals out there. There are a lot of really passionate and talented people doing stuff. I see that some news sites such as Aeira, Dino’s, and the Reconstruction pull these different efforts together, but I don’t see much discourse between the different development teams. Is this something that other teams are interested in?
Even though the technologies and goals may be very different between projects, could there be some crossovers? Could there be a sharing of knowledge or information or even cross-project plot references? Maybe just a central place where different Ultima developers could share ideas or just talk about what they are doing. I really don’t know the answers to these questions, I’m just wondering if others feel the same way or are interested in sharing thoughts. Is there an Ultima Developers Forum or gathering place out there already? If so, I’d like to hear about it. If there’s not, would that even be something other developers would be interested in?
>BYE
Until next time…