Hello there, world!

As I’m sure most of you have noticed, the old U7:TFL site had gone unmaintained for a long, long time. I’m sure many of you have assume the project got sidelined or shelved. The former is true – work’s kept me busy and offline – but not the latter, as I’ve been working at it in what spare time I have.

Having gotten myself a few odd short days this week I’ve taken the time to completely overhaul and update the TFL site – and the results are right here before you. I hope you all like it, and comments are welcome. I plan to get a little more fancy with the graphic design at some point, but for now this will suffice.

On Friday I plan to release a bit of a teaser with recent changes – and since the wordpress install is much easier for me to update news on, you can expect that at the very least I’ll be throwing out what I’m working on and what progress I’ve made in some hopefully fairly frequent news posts.

So what’s on the plate right now for TFL development?

The past few months I’ve more or less spent myself working on three things, so let me address them in turn:

1) Developing the map. I’ve always liked mapping, for various games and such. For some odd reason, the world-building aspect of those tools has always intrigued me since I was a kid, and I was always a fan of the SimCity games for such a reason. So it’s been something I’ve been doing a lot of in my free time. I’ve completed two entire cities for the Feudal Lands, and though I plan on tweaking some fine details for them, that’s already two great, huge areas for players to explore in the Feudal Lands.

2) Planning and designing the new game functionality. I plan on adding a handful of new features to Exult/Ultima with the Feudal Lands. The most notable of these is I want to add a way for players to contribute to the various organizations in the world – that is after all the crux of the game world, these feuding factions. So I’ve been designing a system on paper of quests – some random, others not – that these organizations will offer, rewards, advancement in the organizations, and so forth. I also have some ideas for contributing to different townes and the Fellowship, Lord British, etc, in Black Gate proper as well. I’ll reveal a little more once I’m a little more solid in what I want to do.

3) Writing the Feudal Lands story. The difference between Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands, and most other Ultima fan projects, is that these projects are either fan fiction, or completely new, mostly off-canon projects. I’m not knocking either, incidentally- I enjoy both (Dark Core is my favourite, personal, as well as the Ultima 5 remake Lazarus) – but the difficulty with U7:TFL specifically is because it integrates so closely with Ultima 7, it has to adhere and flow with the existing canon. Whilst we can’t be entirely perfect, and I’m not going to try to be, I do want to try to be as much so as we can. And so I’ve been taking great pains to work towards such a thing in my story-writing.

That’s all for now, but you’ll hear from me soon.

For now, verbatim from my Exult forum post …