Here I've compiled many of my current ideas and eye candy about my Age of Singularity Ultima VI fan recreation project! I also added cool imagery and info related to my main game #NotSSgame, so be sure to check that out, too!
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, wait for a shop owner to open their shop in the morning. The game is so dynamic you can even kill any character (in some cases making the game unbeatable), 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 COTA Code is in full force here, with my motto of "existence before gameplay." Below is a brief video I made explaining my COTA Code 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. Some information about the COTA Code in the video below, but I want to do a proper video about it.
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 difference. 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.
Here's the original fb UDIC post.
