Brad Hannah dropped an update regarding Ultima V Redux, his attempt to remake Ultima 5 with a bit more polish, in the Ultima Dragons Facebook group earlier this month. For those of you — like myself — who were quite taken with the project’s artful 3D interpolation of Ultima 5’s map data, it may come as a bit of a letdown…but given the complexities of implementing a game in 3D, it’s also an understandable shift:

Alright, I am trying something… I mentioned I am going to streamline and maybe go back to basics with Ultima V Redux. I am test driving a reimplementation in a simpler game engine (Ebiten) in GoLang.

I am trying to think through how we can keep the charm of the original, with more up to date UI and graphics. Here are some early shots.

The idea is to port over what I have so far (which is easier than I thought so far) and then layer on the improvements.

You can see an example of the reworked title screen above; it looks almost like the original, but with cleaner lines that obviously scale to a variety of different screen resolutions. An example of how the UI looks in-game can be seen below.

If you want to learn more about the Ebiten engine — the 2D, Go-based engine that Brad is using for this version of Ultima V Redux — you can find out about it right here. And if you want to poke around with the latest 3D, Unity-based build of Ultima V Redux, you can find it at the project’s entry here at the Codex.