The Savage Empire Remake for Exult: Even Worse News

by WtF Dragon · Published August 24, 2018 · Updated August 24, 2018

Scythifuge has, after quite the period of dormancy, posted a comment to the Facebook page for The Savage Empire Remake, his Exult-based attempt to remake Savage Empire, one of two spinoff games from the mainline Ultima series created with the Ultima 6 engine. This came in reply to a question from Sergorn Dragon as to whether the project was still…a thing.

Sadly, it isn’t the best news:

It has been on hiatus. I had a motorcycle accident in 2016 and then almost died from sepsis, had to dissolve my pizza shop business, and am going through a nasty divorce and custody battle; fighting for equal time with our son who was born at 24 weeks in 2015. The situation at present is dire.

I had a very difficult time finding anyone who wanted to dedicate any time to the project, so I was mostly drawing sprites and experimenting with tricks in Exult.

I would like to revisit the project someday, as well as exploring pixel art for other projects, though I need to focus on resolving the divorce and custody dispute, and focus on my family.

It’s good that Scythifuge still has some desire to pick up work on the project, but obviously he has been through the ringer over the last year or two, and this in addition to lacking some much-needed resources for the project. So that ongoing hiatus is quite understandable!

The First Age of Update: Some changes were made to the body of this article, after it was pointed out that I had quoted the text of a post from 2014, rather than a comment made in 2018.