Asylumsoft, the development studio owned and operated by former Ultima 8 developer Jason Ely, recently launched a Patreon page to finance further development of Elderlands, which is a 2D tile-based MMORPG that draws heavily on the earlier Ultima games (among other sources) for inspiration.

One of their recent posts — now public, though these may have been “backer only” at first — showcases some new screenshots of in-game areas (things like dungeons, ancient ruins, lost temples, and the like). Another discusses a concept for an in-game map:

Currently in the running version of Elderlands, the Minimap displays a tile to pixel resolution of the game map. It shows you exactly to the coordinate where you are. The downside to this is it makes it near impossible for us to have hidden rooms in towns or subtle points of interest in the deep forests. Players expose these secrets just by walking around and exposing 32×32 areas at a time.

I’m a huge lover of exploration and secret/hidden content in the world. So I’ve decided to remove the current minimap and replace it with a cartography map which is hand pieced together and only shows general areas rather than exposing the exact content of any area.

Currently, Asylumsoft has only a handful of patrons. They don’t have any patronage tiers defined, but obviously there has been some content released to their Patreon page which showcases continued development on the game. If you’ve enjoyed playing Elderlands in the past and/or are a current follower of said game, continue chipping in a few dollars per month to help the good Mr. Ely out.