It was an interesting year for Ultima fan projects; some were closed down, some advanced into bold new territories, and some…kind of just maintained status quo. And a few new projects emerged, as well, which is always nice to see. Here, then, is the round-up of what Ultima fans got up to in 2014.

Hearth of Britannia

Rustic Dragon rang in the New Year — belatedly — with one last Dragonsmeet prior to his move to Austin, Texas. He also teased, later in the month, the possibility of holding a second Lords of the Hearth event…at Richard Garriott’s property in said city.

Sadly, not all was roses, and Rustic also reported that prizes for the Telethon of the Avatar would be a bit delayed in coming due to the general chaos that attending his moving from Indiana to Texas. That chaos also impacted the frequency of Dragonsmeets; it was not until March that another was held. And the next one thereafter was scheduled for May.

And then…things changed somewhat. Rustic Dragon announced, early in June, that he would be selling his entire collection of Ultima-related things, including many boxed copies of the various titles in the series. All signed by Richard Garriott, of course. He also went on to explain that the funds raised from the sale of these many and varied items would go towards funding the Telethon prizes.

At a Dragonsmeet in early July, Rustic Dragon announced that while Telethon prizes had been procured and would be sent out (sales of his Ultima collection having gone rather well), he had also been let go from his position at Portalarium.

At the start of September, a countdown was begun by Rustic Dragon, and a day later he explained that the future of the Hearth was in limbo. To help his deliberations, Rustic launched a survey and asked members of the community to reply to it. A few days later, he announced that September 15th would be the date on which he would decide whether or not to host the second HoBLotH event in November.

Fortunately, Rustic decided to host said event. And in short order, the HoBLotH began growing an impressive guest list; Scott Jones and David Watson signed on almost immediately, and other notable Origin personalities would soon join in the fun as well.

There were also a few more issues with Telethon prizes that cropped up in late September.

HoBLotH 2 (Legends of the Hearth) was held in November, and by all accounts was a great success. Rustic Dragon even had special cloth maps printed for all attendees; he graciously released the source artwork for these a short while later.

Ultimate Quest

This old-school RPG, inspired by (among other things) the early Ultima games, appeared on Kickstarter in early January. Sadly, the Kickstarter was ultimately unsuccessful, and it would seem that development on the game has stopped as a result.

The Black Gate Board Game and For the King

Lucifuge Dragon posted a news update shortly after the start of the year showcasing the addition of NGUI to the Unity-based version of his board game adaptation of Ultima 7: The Black Gate. He followed this up a few days later with a new video demonstration of the Unity version in action, this time showing off encounter cards and other newly-added features.

And then, rather suddenly and absent any warning, the project was cancelled in mid-February. Lucifuge Dragon announced that he would be devoting his efforts to a new project, using many of the mechanics developed for The Black Gate Board Game. This intent was confirmed again in late April, although there was no word on what the new game would be called.

In November, I found out that Sixth Circle Gaming had been renamed to IronOak Games. As well, I discovered that the project they were working on was called For the King; it’s a Unity-based game, playable on PC…but the screenshots really do look like a tabletop model.

Work proceeds apace on For the King.

Sanctimonia and Sylph

Early on in January, Kevin Fishburne began making a number of improvements to the game’s graphics, including the architectural GUI it uses and the persistent world object blocks from which structures are built. By early April, he had added more persistent objects, tweaked the game’s camera, and implemented doors and other portals.

And in late May, he rolled out a shiny new website for the game.

By August, howver, Kevin had put Sanctimonia on hold, and turned his efforts toward the development of a space-based SMMUP called Sylph: Project Miyaji. In fact, the third alpha release of Sylph took place around the middle of the month.

The fourth alpha release took place in mid-September, and with it came the news that a soundtrack deal might just be in the works for the game. December saw the release of the fifth alpha version of Sylph; this was the last news from Kevin for the year.

U3.5: Pax Britannia

Early on in January, a Russian translation of the manual for Andrew Owen’s Ultima-inspired RPG for the ZX Spectrum platform was published. Later in the month, he also announced an update to ZXodus, the engine the game is being built with. Which, by the way, also got has its own Facebook page.

In February, Andrew released a revamped 3D tileset for the game, followed a few days later by an example of its opening titles. He then went on to showcase the 3D dungeons in the game, in action, noting at the time that the supporting code was nearly complete. Toward the end of the month, he also announced that NPCs would not only be human in the game; other races were being added.

In March, the Dungeon Crawler Construction Kit for the ZXodus engine was shown off in a short video. And in early April, Andrew confirmed that boxed copies of the game would include a trinket of some sort.

Late in May, Andrew also offered up some details about the IDE and tools he is using to build Pax Britannia. And in late July, he released an image of Trinsic as it will appear in the game…alongside a rather cryptic image of runic text. A map of Minoc followed in short order, accompanied by the news that the NPC list for the game had been completed.

There was less news from Pax Britannia in August, although Andrew did come up with an idea for a custom Nintendo DSi skin, which made use of the game’s cloth map artwork. In September, Andrew showed off a Nintendo DSi actually running the game, and a week or so later showed off the custom keyboards he had crafted for the Nintendo port. A week or so later, he also demonstrated a fully-skinned firmware for the Nintendo 3DS, in which Pax Britanna’s artwork featured prominently.

I gather that Andrew has seen some transitions in real life (e.g. a change in employment), and I’m assuming that these contributed to the relative silence of the project for the remainder of 2014. But equally, I’ve little doubt that we’ll be hearing about Pax Britannia again in 2015.

The Ultima 1 Board Game

Joseph Propati announced, early on in the year, that he was very nearly finished the rule book for his board game adaptation of Ultima 1. This news was followed up, in short order, by word that said rule book was finished, and with it the game proper.

Joseph graciously allowed the Ultima Codex to host a copy of all the game materials for download in early February.

Remixed Ultima Tunes

Early on in the year, Pedro Luis Marcondes released a number of remixes of classic Ultima tunes via his SoundCloud account.

Nuvie

In early January, an Ultima fan who goes by the handle HiPhish created some custom paperdoll graphics for Nuvie, in an effort to give each of the companions in the game a more distinctive-looking inventory gump. It would be an understatement to say that these were very well-received, and they were soon added to the Nuvie source tree, for inclusion in future builds of the engine.

More custom paperdolls were added at the end of February. And early on in March, various custom companion sprites were added to the engine, including those for Iolo; he was once again able to visibly play music for the party at camp. This development was soon followed by custom Avatar sprites; the look of the Avatar in Nuvie will now change based on the character portrait selected.

And on the Ides of March, the team celebrated eleven years of development with the release of Version 0.5 of Nuvie. Which, despite the worrisome version number, does in fact support playing Ultima 6 through to completion; Eric Fry refuses to consider the engine to be at a 1.0 state until support for Martian Dreams and Savage Empire have been added. The team then turned their attention to adding support for Martian Dreams to tne engine; this effort occupied much of their attention in April.

May saw the Nuvie team working on both Savage Empire and Martian Dreams support, although more effort was devoted to Martian Dreams; the team focused in adding its introduction and lab sequence later on in the month. The lab sequence was mostly finished by the second week of June.

Support for Martian Dreams continued to expand in July, and in August as well; even the ruby slippers were made to work! It was also about this time that the Nuvie team began adding multi-language support to the engine. September saw still yet more work on Martian Dreams support, including the addition of the hypoxia effect and the various berries in the game.

Berry markers, object usage, configuration editing, and other features were added to the engine in November, furthering its support for Martian Dreams. And at the very end of December, just prior to the New Year, the team overhauled how the Ultima 6 UI handles typed conversations.

Eric Fry and his team do not rest often; they have more surprises in store for 2015!

Forgotten World

Iceblade started the year on a somewhat doleful note, posting a “help wanted” add for a C++-proficient coder…without whom the Forgotten World project could not really continue. Happily, JC of the Back to Roots project stepped forward to volunteer his talents in this respect, which revived Iceblade’s drooping spirits somewhat. He began teasing little excerpts from a book, a new text that would evidently be added to Ultima 9 in a future Forgotten World patch.

Those snippets proved to be part of a book called The History of the Revocanda, a harrowing tale of Mariah the Mage’s efforts to undo the damage to magic in Britannia. Later on in the month, Iceblade began looking for suggestions as to how the Sacrifice plot in Ultima 9 could be improved.

In March, the Forgotten World website got a fairly significant redesign (including a project status page), and Iceblade went on to release the first entry in a series of stories collectively entitled The Recovery of the Moonstones…another piece of Ultima 9-related fiction set to appear in his updates to Ultima 9.

In late September, an updated posted on the project website announced that active development on it had resumed. Iceblade went on to explain, in late October, that his current efforts were focused on locating the source of a crash in the upcoming Forgotten World patch. He also expressed need for a 2D texture artist, who would be tasked to create some new facial animations for Ultima 9.

The Ultima 6/Ultima 6 Project German Translation

In about mid-January, Tribun Dragon finished work on the German version of the Ultima 6 Project’s re-worked Compendium, as well as an English version of the project’s Cluebook. He also wrote up, in both German and English, a Prologue document for the mod, using the style of the Ultima 5 introduction.

The fully-translated Cluebook was released in mid-February, but Sir John later turned to the community for some help with translating certain Middle English expressions in the game proper.

By the end of March, the translation effort had been completed. Not that this marked the end of Sir John’s efforts, mind you; by the end of May, he had a German translation of Ultima 6 itself well underway. By mid-June, < ahref="https://ultimacodex.com/2014/06/ultima-6-german-translation-introduction-opening-sequence-and-character-creation-translated/">he had completed work on the game’s opening, introduction, character creation…as well as all of the in-game books. A patch, marked as version 0.1a, was released at the end of June, which also featured fully-translated game graphics and item names.

And in late July, Sir John also released what he called a “Nitpicker’s Delight” patch for Ultima 6, which aimed to address various lore inconsistencies in the game. This was followed by a release of version 0.20 of the German translation patch.

The Dark Unknown

Goldenflame Dragon’s browser-based, tiled RPG saw a few improvements made in the month of January, including the addition of a light spell, the implementation of sound effects and music (in Firefox and Chrome, at least), and the addition of traps. He also solicited feedback from the Ultima Dragons about how the game should handle wandering monsters in the event that these happened upon the player whilst the player was engaged in combat.

Early on in February, Goldenflame launched a new website for The Dark Unknown, and a few days later gave us all a look at the game’s player reference guide. As the month drew to a close, he also detailed progress made on the merchant NPCs in the game…and graciously volunteered some of his time to assist with editing duties here at the Codex.

Which, by the way, he was awesome at. Just saying.

Early on in March, we were treated to a look at the cover for the Sage’s Almanac, the manual for The Dark Unknown. And by the end of March, merchant inventories had been implemented, although they did not gain the ability to sell items out of their inventories until early April. By late April, Goldenflame had turned his attentions to naming regions of the map.

In early May, with all regions and points of interest named, Goldenflame turned his attention toward adding the ability for players to learn spells to the game, and as a result doubled back and finished up his work on merchant NPCs.

June saw Goldenflame focusing his efforts on building the conversation editor that would be used to craft much of the story of The Dark Unknown. And toward the end of the month, he revealed his concept for the game’s cloth map. And by mid-July, his work on the conversation editor was complete. He also set about mapping out the City of Onyx at this time.

Come August, talking doors, swappable palettes, and other mysterious things had been added to the game. Goldenflame also completed the rough layout of the Sage’s Almanac, and then turned his attentions toward implementing a location called the Palace of the Skies.

In September, magical fields were added to The Dark Unknown, and work on the Palace of the Skies came to an end. At the end of the month, Goldenflame Dragon announced the creation of Tapestry of Ages Games, his own development company, under which label The Dark Unknown would be produced going forward.

By the time November rolled around, work on the save/load system had begun. By December, Goldenflame had branched out somewhat, and was working on a number of different things in the game. And just before the new year, Goldenflame managed to create graphics for a bunch of shop signs, as well as other new graphics and colour palettes.

Tull

This somewhat Ultima-inspired RPG, built using the Oryx Ultimate Tileset, came to light in mid-January.

Ultima IX: Redemption

As January drew near to its end, Corv posted an update to the Titans of Ether website, further explaining the future of Ultima IX: Redemption, and thanking the community for the support they have shown to date. That support was made manifest and given powerful illustration a few days later, as Redemption captured the Fan Project of the Year nod for 2013.

To celebrate the victory, the Redemption team teased a revelation which would be coming “soon” on their website. That revelation proved to be an entirely new website and forum, and the promise of more news…yes…”soon”. A few days later, screenshots of Trinsic and the swampland surrounding it were released, along with a couple of soundtrack sample pieces and some other information. Toward the end of the month, they put out a call for book text submissions, making a contest of it; a new development diary was released at the same time. New screenshots of Paws ane Empath Abbey were also released.

In August, they also released a character creation video, showcasing their implementation of the tarot card casting. Since then, though, however, there has been little word from the Redemption team, although I’m assuming this silence can partly be explained by the fact that some of them have been contributing mightily to the ongoing development of OpenMW, which had a banner year indeed in 2014.

Exult

Near the end of January, Dominus announced that Exult had been given some “much needed attention”, including a fix for some of the issues involving the Altar of Discipline in Serpent Isle. He also teased the possibility of a new stable release.

In mid-May, Dominus published a lengthy missive on the state of Exult, and hinted at the need for new members to join the team to help maintain and improve the engine.

And in December, Dominus announced that he was working on restoring the teleport cheat feature to the engine; within a week, he had it fully implemented.

Ultima Underworld Translations

A near-complete Russian translation for Ultima Underworld was made available in late January. The person behind the translation effort stopped by the site to give a quick update on its progress early in February, but since then there as not been further news from the project.

Ultima Return

In mid-February, Team Return announced that their project would be abandoning the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine in favour of Unity. The team has lapsed into silence since the announcement, however.

The Gate of Sosaria

Red Dragon cancelled his fledgling remake of Ultima 1 at the end of February.

Ultima-Inspired Minecraft Textures

Andy Panthro released an update for his Ultima-inspired Minecraft texture pack early on in March.

Pagan in Minecraft

This project emerged in late March, headed up by one kodenkm. After previously attempting to remake Ultima 8 using the Neverwinter Nights engine, he turned his attention to Minecraft, and set about re-creating the world of Pagan therein. (He also made the files from his original remake attempt available. He even went back and made a few small updates to it.)

In June, kodenkm showed off some of the houses he had created in Minecraft, demonstrating a very Ultima 8-like aesthetic and colour palette.

By early October the sizes for East and West Tenebrae had been worked out, and kodenkm turned his attention to the Docks area. And in mid-December, he decided the project had come along far enough to warrant a “Milestone 1” video; new downloads of the project were also made available.

Ultima 8: Exile

This Neverwinter Nights-based remake of Ultima 8 was cancelled many years ago. But toward the end of March, Dino the Dark Dragon found a few unreleased screenshots from it, as well as a couple of soundtrack pieces.

Ananias

In early April, Slashing Dragon announced what was then called The Tablet of Ananias, a browser-based roguelike game targeted at mobile devices, which featured a decidedly Ultima-like art style. By mid-May, the game’s name had been truncated to just Ananias.

June saw Slashing Dragon launch an Indiegogo campaign to bring in some support and development funding for Ananias. Various perks were announced for backers of the campaign, and a few art samples were also released. He also added landscape mode support to the game, and continued to add new graphics and features as the month and crowdfunding campaign rolled on. A trailer for Ananias was released in mid-June.

Sadly, this first Indiegogo campaign seemed destined to fail, so Slash cancelled and subsequently re-launched the campaign in early July with a different funding option, so that he might receive some funding even if he didn’t reach his stated crowdfunding goal. Version 1.19 of Ananias was released near the end of July…and it was at about this time that I — at least — took note of the fact that the game also had an Android port available.

Three more updates followed in short order; by early August, the game was at version 1.22. Further updates to the game followed, allowing companion animals (a feature of Ananias) to be buffed by means of special amulets. These changes, among others, were included in the game’s version 1.23 release in mid-August. Soon thereafter, he also teased the possibility of an iOS port of the game.

Version 1.25 of Ananias was released in late August, adding pet selection and buffing to the game, along with a skill point display on the main UI. Version 1.26, which added level bosses, followed soon thereafter. Slashing Dragon even managed to push out version 1.27 of the game before the end of the month.

Version 1.28 of Ananias was released in early September. Slashing Dragon also kicked off a Patreon campaign at the same time, so that interested folks could continue to support the project. Version 1.29 followed soon thereafter, and version 1.30 a day or so later. Alongside the version 1.30 announcement, Slash mused a bit more on his plans for the iOS version of the game. Version 1.31, released days later, also saw the announcement of a playtesters community for the game.

Version 1.32 added a few new twists to the ends of dungeon levels, and version 1.33 made some changes to dungeon rooms and equipment drops. And the end-of-September update to version 1.34 brought various new potions and buffs to the game.

Invisibility potions were added to Ananias in early October’s version 1.35 update; the Knight character class was also nerfed somewhat by this update. The version 1.36 update, released a few days later, allowed for irregularly-shaped rooms. Version 1.37 followed soon thereafter, and Slashing Dragon reactivated his Slashware Interactive development label to coincide with its release.

In late October, the version 1.38 update introduced the Sher’tul race and added an in-game event concerning their invasion of the dungeon. Slash managed to release one more update, version 1.39, by the end of the month.

Version 1.40 of Ananias was released in early November, with version 1.41 following a couple of weeks later. (This release added a new character class to the game.)

By mid-December, Ananias had been iterated to version 1.44, which update saw players gain the ability to use items on pets. Version 1.45 was released a few days later. The just-prior-to-New-Year’s-Eve version 1.46 update expanded the Alchemy and Magic skills to be accessible by all character classes.

The World of Sosaria

In about mid-April, an Ultima 1 remake headed up by someone going by the handle lordofsosaria appeared online. A screenshot released soon after its discovery demonstrated that it was making use of graphical tiles from both Ultima 1 and Ultima 5.

Of course, as is the wont of many fan projects, lordofsosaria felt that a few changes to Ultima 1 were in order.

In early September, a few more screenshots of the project were released. Little has been heard from the project since then, although it should be noted that this project’s updates tend to come sporadically, and several months apart.

EUO

Max Breedon’s free, tile-based MMORPG demonstrated in late May that it hadn’t forgotten its Ultima-inspired roots; a new patch added some very familiar-looking equipment runes to the game.

Xenerkes Dragon’s Ultimate Ultima Savegame Editor

At least, I think that’s what Xenerkes calls it. Be that as it may, the venerable developer of Ultima utilities reappeared in the fandom in early June, bringing a much-needed update to his well-known savegame editor.

The Ultima Underworld Demo in Unreal Engine 4

This project, which appeared in early July, was ostensibly an attempt to remake the demo of Ultima Underworld using Unreal Engine 4. With VR support, mind you.

Sadly, the project has made little progress since then…at least, not that the developer has told us about.

The Ultima 6 Italian Translation

In about the second week of July, an attempt to produce an Italian translation of Ultima 6 came to light. Work evidently continued on the translation effort through to September, although whether it is still underway, I cannot be sure at this time.

The Exodus Project

Voyager Dragon released an update for his well-known Ultima 3 Upgrade in late July, fixing a number of issues with its previous iteration that had been brought to his attention over the years since its release.

The Ultima 6 Remake

This Exult-based re-creation of Ultima 6 sat dormant for a goodly while; it was not until August that we heard some news from its development team. Fortunately, they had a fair bit of progress to report, including new shapes, ongoing work on the hot air balloon, and the addition of a new subplot to the game.

In early December, a Facebook page for the project was created, whereat the team felt they would be able to release smaller bits of news on a more frequent basis.

Britannian Underworld

In mid-August, Slashing Dragon announced a new project that he would be helping out with. Britannian Underworld would, according to Slash, be a re-creation of the main dungeons of Ultima 4, but using a raycasting engine similar to Ultima Underworld’s. The project team almost immediately put out a call for artists, and then set about creating a unique UI for the game.

In late September, the engine was modified to use WebGL, although the need for artists — especially pixel artists — remained. And at the end of October, the team showed off the first level of Dungeon Deceit.

And in November, dungeon crafting using SketchUp and Tiled, two freely available tools, was demonstrated.

There was a lot of good development that went on in many of these projects over the last year. I look forward to being able to try out a few more of them in 2015, and I hope you all feel likewise.