I have to apologize to Slashland and Exodus Destiny Dragon; their new project — Britannian Underworld — was formally announced over a week ago, and it has taken me until now to get around to posting news about it.

The project aims to re-imagine the eight Anti-Virtue dungeons of Britannia, roughly circa Ultima 4, using a custom-made raycasting engine. The game itself will take the form of a lightly-plotted action RPG (first-person, of course), heavily inspired by Ultima Underworld. Players will explore eight multi-level dungeons, solve puzzles, and defeat monsters, in pursuit of six Stones of Virtue.

And once that task has been accomplished, the Stygian Abyss awaits.

Exodus Destiny Dragon has, thus far, implemented the basics of the raycasting engine, and has added features like floor & ceiling textures and angled walls. Trapped floors and flooding rooms have also been implemented, as have water tiles and “look up”/”look down” controls. The team are hard at work on the project on an almost daily basis — Covetous is currently being designed and implemented — and maintain a development wiki on GitHub for those curious about what is being worked on.

Right now, the development team are looking to bring aboard a few additional people, including:

• Pixel artist(s): We are aiming to have a wolf-3d like engine; we will need:
  • 64×64 sprites for the environment
  • Props for the different levels
  • Animated sprites for the enemies (also 64×64)
  • Sprites for items, including paperdoll
  • User interface
  • Cutscenes
• Level designer(s): We are looking forward to create 8 dungeons, each one with 8 levels with puzzles and dangers. This is a critical part of the project and should be pretty fun! The idea is to get inspiration from the original dungeons but make them much more interesting, imagine you are playing a mix of UW and U4 :).
  • Some constraints apply here: The engine we are creating is on par of Wolfenstein 3D; that means levels should be single depth, and build around a grid, interaction will also be keyboard only probably. Details will be supplied.
• Sound Effects Designer: To design the sound effects.
• Music Composer: Ambient music similar to Ultima Underworld.
• Graphics Artists: To create art for the website
• Website designer: To create the website for the project

If any of the above-detailed roles appeal to you, drop a comment here and Slashland will get in touch.

Oh, and of course, there’s a project entry for Britannian Underworld.