Some months ago, I resumed working in OpenArthurianX6. That was before the devlogging revival so I guess a short summary is due.
What was OpenArthurian again?
OpenArthurianX6 is an open-source game engine built specifically for creating classic, systemic RPGs in the spirit of Ultima VI. Instead of being a general-purpose tool, it focuses on the kinds of features that defined those games: living worlds where NPCs follow daily routines, a full day–night cycle, interactive environments, and party-based exploration. The goal is to give developers a ready-made foundation for crafting rich, simulation-driven RPGs without having to build those core systems from scratch.
Rather than a finished game, OpenArthurianX6 is a framework for experimentation and creation. It provides the building blocks for dialogue-heavy storytelling, emergent gameplay, and highly interactive worlds, making it especially suited for developers interested in reviving or evolving the design philosophies of early immersive RPGs.
Um… where were we?
Since end of 2021, when the last real developments took place, there had been long periods of silence in the discord, interrupted only by promises of resuming development that never came to realization.
February 28, 2026 – Briar Dragon has had enough, he announces he’ll drop from the server. I make one last promise I’ll get back to the project after the 7DRL week.
March 9, 2026 – Day 1 of the New Age of Arthurian
This time, it was a reality, on March 9 I resumed development.
The first thing to do, of course, was to survey where the heck we were after over 4 years. I chatted briefly with friend kram- we had a LOT working already in the engine, but that amounts to nothing if nobody can use it. The priority is to work in Arthurian Studio, a tool that will allow all that work we did to be actually used by creators.
But before jumping into that, the codebase required a small hint of modernization; if we were to continue developing this, it would be better to do it on solid grounds, especially since Arthurian Studio would be much more solid since the beginning, so we’d have to match.
I jumped the gun and did what we should have done ages ago: Migrate the project to TypeScript, and replace the shell script we had in place with a gulpfile.
March 10 and 11 2026 – Days 2 and 3: The first big push
The first part is the most painful: doing the necessary steps to restructure the project around reading the data from external files which we were close but not completely there; we were using javascript modules exporting list of objects; all of that had to be migrated to use json files instead as the first step. This included externalizing some data that was one step behind in that regard.
The plan was to create a tool that would just work with these JSON files. After considering different options I set to create the infrastructure of Arthurian Studio: It was going to be an Electron project using vite. Development is powered by gemini and progress is quick once the design is clearly specified.
A short hiatus: Thinking of the map
With most of the editable data covered, next up was figuring out the best way to go regarding map data. So far we’ve leaned on Tiled, and custom tiles and markers, but I considered we will need to break away from it, maybe using our own format.
Tiled’s format advantage is solely the mature editor itself, but it’s disjointed from the engine; at some point I considered extending it to build the editor around it since it’s open source, but now that we have so much in Arthurian Studio, looks like having everything integrated in a single place would be better.
May 3, Day 4 of the new age
It’s been about a couple of months now, so I decided to resume work in Open Arthurian Studio if only to actually release what I have before digging into the question of the Map Editor transition.
The next step was allowing to edit the “interactable object types” (like levers and signs) as well as the main scenario data.
scenario.json is currently actually holding a lot of info for different entities- it keeps growing. Following my own design criteria I decided NOT to introduce any changes in the JSON files structure for now, so even if the data is on the same file, it’s organized in different sections in the Studio.
In this case, these correspond to the Cutscenes and the World (Chunks) tab.
The World tab now includes a bit of the foundation of the world editor; for now it’s just the chunks, each one of these currently maps to a Tiled map. Going beyond that will require some work.
And so, the day finished – Next day I’ll be releasing the tool as it is!
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 