Ultima 6 Project Developer Diary #1

Ultima 6 Project contributor Nicodemus has penned an initial developer diary for the ambitious remake, offering a quick explanation of what it takes to construct Britannia's cities and landscapes.
I QA'd for a while and slowly began to take on other projects.a little at a time.most of them in the Worldbuilding function, but I dabbled in Content as well. AS WyrdWeb says in her u6project.com profile...I was donning different "hats". My first big worldbuilding assignment was Paws.Frilly Wumpus gave me a worldbuilding tutorial off of the old Siege Network. After I read that I checked out some concept art that Zephyr had and I also looked into some resources on the internet for the original Ultima 6 game. I also went bumping around in Lazarus a bit as well just to see how they had pieced things together. After I did this research I then got a scratch sheet of paper and drew an outline of the region I was working in and then placed the buildings as best I could taking into consideration the original game and our new concept of the town.

Now I'm sure most of you know that Lazarus and the U6P project work off of the same map.. utilizing the Project Britannia map. Most cases, we are working off of just an empty landscaped area with only trees, hills, rivers and the like to start off with.in order to fit all of our buildings and whatnot in, typically quite a bit of terraforming is in order. Some examples of this is if you look closely and compare Project Britannia, or even Lazarus' version of Paws area you will see in our game the Sea is pushed back a little bit and some hills had to be what I have just taken to calling (Terra-formed). I've had to use this process quite a bit..Buc's Den had to be slightly terraformed, the Skara Brae islands actually had to be merged together in one case.Project Britannia's Skara Brae has 3 islands.I condensed it down to 2 and removed the river that ran through the bigger island.(this made our version more in line with how the original game layout looked.) Whenever feasible I like to keep with the original game layout as much as possible.this also comes into play with some of the décor which I am sure I will cover with my subsequent Dev Diaries.

Thanks, RPGWatch.