Andrew Owen has been hard at work on Ultima 3.5: Pax Britannia over the past couple of weeks, and has posted several short updates to the Ultima Dragons Facebook group in that time.

On March 31st, for example, he announced his intention to create a manual for the game:

A small update on the Ultima 3.5 front. I really wanted to do a classic Ultima manual for it, but I wasn’t comfortable just lifting content from the existing manuals, so I’m going to be assembling one from the materials in the wiki. This means that the manual will be published under the same license as the wiki (CC BY-SA 3.0).

A day later, he had a working draft thereof:

Well that’s the rough draft of the U3.5:PB user guide complete. Comes in at 62 pages (in pocket book size). It *is* going to need some editing.

He didn’t specify whether he wanted help with editing the tome, but I’m sure he wouldn’t turn down a reasonable offer of assistance. Drop him a line on Facebook if you’d be interested (or leave a comment here, but I can’t promise that he’ll check this post with any kind of frequency).

This week, on Tuesday, he posted the dungeon tileset he’ll be using:

Tiled goodness!

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.

And on Wednesday, he added this screenshot, from the game’s character creation sequence:

Bigger abacus, indeed.

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

And finally, yesterday, he posted a look at expanded set of paths the game will feature:

The Virtues and then some!

All in all, it seems like he’s making very decent progress on Pax Britannia. Very decent progress indeed.

And look: a project entry at the Inspired Works subdomain! You can find even more screenshots there.