"critical" to the game's being released on schedule. As a result of the art team's distance from Looking Glass, Church had to phone "nine different area codes every couple days to check up on things". He recalled the challenge of describing the enemy designs by phone. Dan Schmidt and the recently hired Seamus Blackley composed the game's score in Blackley's apartment over one week. They attempted to give each world a unique sound, while hiding variations of the main theme in each track. The music system from the original Ultima Underworld was retained with only minor alterations, but the team included digitized sound effects instead of the synthesized audio used in the first game. Ultima Underworld II was developed in nine months. It was originally slated for a February 1993 release, but the date was later moved up to December 1992. The game underwent two and a half months of playtesting by Origin and Looking Glass employees, and by remote testing firms. According to Church, the testing phase took more time than expected because of complaints from playtesters and the presence of numerous bugs. Church went to Origin's headquarters in Texas during the final stages of development. The team "tried desperately to make Christmas", and the game was completed around December 18. Church compiled the final version on his laptop in Spector's office. However, the game was held back for further playtesting even though it could have shipped on schedule. Church later commented, "[T]here was one bug we couldn't reproduce, and everyone really wanted to go home for Christmas. We ended up taking a few days off, checking it a few more days and using that version anyway." The delay caused the game to miss the holiday season. It was shipped in January 1993. Technology Ultima Underworld II was built with an improved version of the game engine used for its predecessor. The team enhanced its visual capabilities: they broadened the first-person view by 30%, expanded the color palette, added more 3D objects, increased the size and animation of character sprites and wrote a new texture mapping algorithm. Director Paul Neurath commented that Ultima Underworlds texture mapping had failed to "look quite as good as we had hoped", and that the new system realized their vision. The game's code is roughly 30% larger than that of Ultima Underworld—bloat that Church attributed to "second project syndrome". Reception According to Paul Neurath,