It’s been a while.
A very long while even.
First I can only begin by apoligizing : about a year ago, the website suffered an attack that essentially crippled it, as well as deleting all our media content, meaning everything had to be rebuild, we’ve had a splash page for many months and barebones website for a while, but with no updates, and as Team Leader, the reponsibility is mine for the lack of update.
Let’s be blunt : Ultima Return haven’t been doing much progress in the past year – the main reason for this is that we decided last year to essentially start from stratch. Those who follow twitter and the Ultima Codex might already be aware of it, but we decided to drop the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine, and switch to the Unity engine. There are multiple reason for this that we will expand later on, but the core of it is that we feel that due to the amount of time such projects are taking, tying them to a single existing game tend to be a bad idea in the long run and thus this will allow our project to be released as a stand alone game eventually.
But Ultima Return is only the start of what we aim for about the Unity engine and Ultima… but we will expand on this later. 😉
However this lead to to progress on the project per se to have been very slow, altough we have been doing some preliminary expriments with Overland maps and Jaakko has been working on creating a GUMP based inventory system, inspired by the original Serpent Isle.
We also plan to be more transparent about the development of the game and its content rather than keeping quiet to avoid any spoilers. To begin with as a gift for our return, we’ve update the media page with a small surprise : more extra tracks from Panu “Grotto Dragon” Aaltio that you can listen there. I’ll detail this into a later post ! There have also been updates to the FAQ and Team pages as well.
So we’re back, we strive for Unity, and we’re hopefully there for good !