Francois Poisson has been making significant strides in building the world of Sosaria, circa Ultima 3, in RPG Maker MZ as part of his attempt to remake the game under the title Ultima: Exodus. In late October, he had the town of Fawn more or less complete:

This week I was working on the town of FAWN. A nice island town. I did a bit of cannon fixes to take into account a bit of Serpent Isle. Basically all thought the game you get hints that Fawn is THE naval power-house of Sosaria… Well the original town didn’t offer much in this regard. So I added a bit of sailors, a few captains, 2 large docks on the east sea-side of town, spiced-up the music and it now feels much better. Obviously I added the original Ultima3 things in there, which is the place you learn how to <PRAY> and at the same time get a hint of where to pray and where to go after doing so.

Also added a quest NPC (again in relation with 2 Ambrosia NPCs), but didn’t code the quest yet, I’ll do another pass later when all the maps are completed. To be honest I might have forgotten a few “cheaty” NPCs or barrels that should NOT be in the final version anyways, so I’ll have some cleaning up to do.

And by the end of the month, the town of Devil Guard was also implemented:

This week I was working on the town of DEATH GULCH. A hive of corruption and villainy, where guards take bribes or tell you to eff off. Charming town !

This was a bit more challenging than usual due to this town have “mountains” blocking the players’ path. With the way RPG Maker MZ works, it meant a lot more tiles on the X-axis. So I needed to get creative a bit for it to still look good (funny what you can do with vegetation for that). Plus some decoration does not work on top of those plateau, while others still do. The end result looks pretty good, but it took a while. Thankfully, this town was low effort by Richard. Almost NO text whatsoever, ans only ONE clue as far as I could see. Which meant not a lot of time spent crafting dialogues for me this week. I still made a few, keeping in touch with my U4/U5 goal, so even “dumb” NPCs at least have a one liner or a small paragraph of flavor text. I did have some fun with the two Daemons tho… Ironically they might be the friendlier of the bunch. So the lone clue was planted, added the usual music, sound effect, town specialties (local food/drink and somethings being cheaper/more expensive). Oh yeah, lots of lava… Better have a way to get past that !

And this week, Francois announced that the mysterious town of Dawn was also — after significant effort — done:

The entrance was programmed LOOOONG ago when I first laid down the Sosarian continent last June. And obviously it was bugged. Oh it appeared at the right moment on the world map, but for some reason you could not enter the tiles. It was quickly fixed, but I had a good laugh.

Then moved onto the inside, it was pretty straight forward… Or so I thought… How do I differentiate this town from all the other? So I put in extra efforts in trying to design it. End result is not bad. I mean there’s only so many flowerbeds ferns and forest that I could use, but it turned out very good. The design is reminiscent of old saloon towns of Midwest USA circa 1800’s. A main street with shops that are all strung onto each other. I used some limestone walls to make it stand out and varied floors to give each shop a bit of personality and not just a carbon copy of each other. Also used that new NPC pack to pump the town full of new faces, including a wizard researchist trying to incorporate plants to reduce the toll of casting spells… You know how that turns out in Ultima4, where spells cost a fraction of what they did un Ultima3, but need reagents . Love doing these extra quests when I can.

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With Dawn completed, that leaves only Exodus’ Castle to create. Dunno if that’s going to be ready next week, I won’t have as much free time as I did, but I’ll slowly be working on it. Then I will revisit all of the older town as I have a lot of old stuff to overhaul from what I have learned doing everything else so far. Further down the line will be the optional quests that I want to wrap up properly and finally the last thing will be the dungeons. We’ve come a long way, but not out of the woods just yet !

Along the way, he has identified a few issues, squashed a few bugs, and had a bit of an adventure with finding content packages for RPG Maker MZ that would give him a larger library of pixel art assets and NPC portraits.