Ultima VI: The False Prophet is my favorite game
of all time, and it's because it set the bar so
high in terms of systemic immersion. You can sit
in chairs, use telescopes, churn butter, even
kill anyone, or just move into their houses and
live there as roommates and move the furniture
around. Oh plus also there's a game part with
like a story and quest and all that stuff you'd
expect.
At the same time period I was playing
Super Mario Bros. on NES, and The Legend of
Zelda, this game was out for DOS on PC, and U6
took the Zelda style experience to a higher
level of richness imo. It added more depth
WITHOUT just piling numbers and menus in your
face like some games do (*cough* Neverwinter
Nights). And with modernized controls and a new
take on the game's systems, it could be made
even more intuitive and immersive.
It's
high time we evolve some classic mechanics by
challenging traditional accepted game design
wisdom to get back to the core of what games CAN
do, not just what they HAVE done. Zelda wasn't
supposed to be game formula. It was supposed to
be a bottle in which Shigeru Miyamoto could
capture the essence of exploring the forest
behind his house as a kid and re-invogorate it,
and share it with others. I'm sure Ultima and
other similar ideas come from a similar place of
immersion, exploration, and adventure. The best
games don't have to be re-skinned casinos aimed
at children. They don't even have to be "games"
and that label has probably done a disservice to
the potential of interactive software. Just
watch some Star Trek holodeck episodes to expand
your brain about what interactive software can
be.
After trying to play The Witcher 3 in like
2018 and going
into a cabin only to find it was essentially a
non-interactive plastic sculpture with unusable
stoves, beds, chairs, etc. I realized that
I'm constantly frustrated that games today seem
to have forgetton some of the core tenets of
games like U6, and I want to bring that back
with #NotSSgame. In that process I also really want to make
my own modernized, fresh version of Ultima VI, but focused on players being immersed in
the world, story, and characters, and with less
focus on the combat, leveling, menus,
inventory management, etc.
For me a side
project like this is a litmus test; if I can
make the world of U6's Britannia nourishing and
fun to exist in WITHOUT adding quests and
upgrades and combat, then I know I'm on the
right track with my system development.
So it'll feel like Ultima VI but also like if
you mixed an an RPG with the Tudor Monastery
documentaries from the Absolute History youtube
channel. It should be a chill adventure. The
AOCT is in full force here, with my motto of
"immersion before gameplay." Below is a brief
video I made explaining my AOCT game design philosophy.
Yes, I know I could arrange the letters to be
COAT or TACO, but I'd rather not bring in other
associations since I hope this is a fresh
concept to plant like a flag in the dirt.
Basically, I don't want games to be theme
park rides. I want them to be theme parks. The
game world needs to ACTUALLY EXIST, before I can
care about SAVING it. What's the point of saving
a world where no one can sit in chairs? What
kind of hellscape is that? And yet, that's
almost ALL games. I don't want a game, I want a
holodeck experience. When you go on vacation you
don't need quests shoved in your face, for the
experience to be worthile. All about he AOCT
below.
Below are
all the props and setpieces from Ultima VI: The
False Prophet custom modeled and textured in
Blender by me. The real key is having a grid of
reference imagery along with a grid of named
nulls or cubes in a Blend file. once all that is
set up, the actual modeling is pretty fast, like
a weekend of work. Then making the texture atlas
takes a few days, then just uv unwrapping all
the models to use the textures, is a real
tedious process that takes about 2 days. But
they you have a whole atlas of objects to use.
And below is the world map I've crafted by
mashing together all the Ultima games, trying to
include everything relevant geogrpahically. This
is part of why I call this project the Age of
Singularity - all Ultimas in one, at least the
locations, I mean. The other aspect is that
Singularity is the central virtue of the
Gargoyle race in the game, the focus point where
the other core virtues of Control, Passion, and
Diligence meet. (These are different from the
human virtues in the game in which the core is
Spirituality.) The third angle is that Age of
Singularity almost has a vibe of peacefulness
and serenity, the kind you'd find on a vacation
away from modern, fast-paced technology, and
that's definitely one of the nourishment goals
for the project.
For the map the next phase will be about
making plates for each town and extruding the
walls of each building and adding roofs, then
doing quick texturing. After all that, I'll play
around in Unity or Blender's 1st person mode, to
get a feel for if certain buildings need to be
expanded or re-shaped to feel better for a 1st
person perspective. The goal is not to rigidly
copy the original game, but to craft a world
that FEELS the way the original game makes me
feel, in a more shareable way.
And a
later phase will be about modeling all the
monsters in Ultima VI. The first part of this,
as I've said above, is gathering reference
imagery. In this case, and in the case of some
Project Ultradeep monsters, I can paint the
simple ink black-on-white manual art to get a
baseline reference image, as briefly shown in the video
below.
And below is the final bestiary roster
I'll need to model. I've added color based on
their in-game colors, trying to split the
differen It's interesting how much more readable
the colored version is to my brain. It's easier
to go "ah that's what that is" regarding
details, when there's color.
#AgeOfSingularity Devlog (this will all be
organized better later):
