Project Yuhalak

“Yuhalak” (temporary project codename) is a project I’ve been working on along old friend Jucarave. It’s going to be a first person dungeon crawler taking place on an original setting that is being designed by SlashwareKnight Stoltverd, and will feature art by an upcoming artist from a faraway land.

The plan for Yuhalak is to take the core gameplay of Stygian Abyss, implement a new theme over it (so it is no longer an Ultima fangame), and add many more gameplay elements to make it a worthwhile dungeon crawler. We hope to retain a retro style, in the vein of Ultima Underworld.

We have done a lot of narrative and design work, and even did some improvements in the Stygian Abyss engine (which were what actually prompted the release of the latest versions of it on February), and its procedural generator; however, after some weeks of work, we decided to instead port the current codebase of Stygian Abyss to Unity, in order to be able to extend it to what we want it to be and being able to reach multiple platforms more easily.

There has been great progress in this port up to today; the procedural generator is completely ported, and you can roam the dungeon and attack enemies; we are already improving over the original, by supporting directional sprites for the enemies so they aren’t always looking at the player (we did this because they are going to have more complex behavior than they did in Stygian Abyss including fleeing, and maneuvering around the battlefield).

Yuhalak is the latest of a noble line of dungeon crawlers made by both myself and jucarave. Stoltverd has come up with something very interesting for its universe. Stay tuned for more info.