The Black Gate Board Game: Unity Demo
Lucifuge Dragon has just released the most exciting video on YouTube this week:
Your eyes do not deceive, good Dragons and Dragonettes; Lucifuge has a working prototype of his board game implementation of Ultima 7: The Black Gate up and running using the Unity engine. One can only hope that he’ll release the finished version online at some point.
Interestingly, the game in its present form seems to support some manner of multiplayer. I would assume, for now, that it only supports “hotseat” play, with players taking turns in front of a single screen. But there are some excellent online multiplayer frameworks available for Unity; it would be exciting if Lucifuge could put together a game that could be played together by Dragons worldwide.
You aren’t wrong, this is the most exciting youtube this week! Will watch the video when I get home, but even without IP multiplayer this would be awesome.
That’s pretty fucking awesome, though it needs a zoom/pan system. Maybe the mouse wheel or perhaps something dynamic, like if the cursor is moving it slowly zooms in to the cursor but slowly starts zooming back when the cursor isn’t moving. Anyway, nice work.
So how long before this dies at the end of a C&D threat from EA?
If he tries to charge for it…five minutes.
If he releases it for free…well, how long did it take the C&D to arrive for Lazarus?
Releasing for free doesn’t guarantee anything in a situation like this, plenty of examples in the past for various categories – including Ultima related/inspired games.
The only recent examples of Ultima fan projects getting shuttered like that involve things like re-use of original assets (not the case here), and were (I suspect) caught up in the midst of EA’s legal dealings with GOG.
Projects whose teams shut things down voluntarily, because EA wouldn’t “grant permission” or whatever, don’t count.
And even if it comes, there’s a way to avoid certain doom that always begins with, “Arr!” and ends with the use of a controversial file transfer protocol. Just proxy while you seed and everyone else will bear that load into the future.