I’m making good progress with the next release of Alternate Reality X and hope to have this out for public release before the end of March. It doesn’t contain all the features I had planned but nevertheless contains some important changes and additions.
The changes to the internal structure of the player’s inventory and what I call the “item buffer” took a long time. Once these had been completed I then had to make changes to a number of existing sections of the game such as the City Smithies and the Damon & Pythias Shop as they no longer worked correctly. These changes did allow me to use the authentic weapon and armour data though which is an improvement over the previous versions. Perhaps the most requested feature I’ve had is to implement selling old weapons to the Dwarven Smithy. I’ve pleased to say that this is now in the game and seems to work well.
At the time of writing the Dwarven Smithies’ custom weapons are not yet in the game. I feel I really need to implement the Dungeon bank vaults as well to make this feature worthwhile so that players can find enough gems and jewels to pay for custom weapons. Rather than delay this release further I’m probably going to leave these for the next release.
I’m currently testing the gameplay to check that what is there seems to be working ok.
Changes and additions include:
- Modified the internal structure for items and inventory
- Increased internal size of inventory / item buffer from 100 to 250 items
- Now using authentic City Smithy, Dwarven Smithy and D&P item data
- Pick up weapons left by opponents
- Buy weapons and armour from the Dwarven Smithy
- Sell old weapons and armour to the Dwarven Smithy
- Implemented player weapon descriptions (e.g. slash, whomp)
- Implemented crossbow & reloading of ammo
- Modified automap to show walls and doors by default
- Re-enabled the “Wait for Encounter” option
- Fixed Phoenix encounter crash bug
- Fixed “Quit” crash bug
Alternate Reality; The City, and especially, The Dungeon, were some of my favorite games. I don’t remember if I played them more on the C64 or the Amiga, but they were amazing. I am glad you are doing a remake.
I grew up playing The Dungeon on the C64. It was many years later before I played The City. The Dungeon never made it to the Amiga, cancelled at about 70% complete. I’ve included some of the artwork from the unreleased Amiga Dungeon in my remake though.
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!
Thanks MZ! Hope you’re well. I’m planning to post a lot here now I have the website and blog integrated.
This is really cool. I always wanted to play the dungeon of AR. My only regret in seeing this being made is that no Amiga graphics. Too bad they never released the 2nd part on Amiga and Atari ST. I look forward to trying this out, and thanks for making it.
It does have some Amiga graphics in it – in the current releases the option is disabled but there is (normally) an option for alternative graphics which include Amiga City and Dungeon (unreleased) interiors. I hope to add this option back in to a future release. I am considering adding the Amiga City wall and encounter graphics as well though. I would have loved to have played that unreleased Amiga Dungeon – it sounds like it expanded a lot of the original Dungeon features and content.
My cup runneth over.