Alternate Reality X – The Final Stretch

Following my announcement that I’m planning to complete release 1.0 of Alternate Reality X (ARX) for Monday 5th December 2016, the final stretch of development work has begun! It’s great to have that clear goal in sight. I’m pleased with progress since the announcement but there is still a lot to complete before December to get all the features added so I’ll need to push myself hard and stay focused. I’ll be devoting the majority of my free time to making sure I meet my target, chipping away at small issues when I have a bit of free time and maximising the time I spend on development. I want everyone to be able to play a complete, fully integrated City and Dungeon for Christmas 2016! Visualising that goal tells me it will be a great personal achievement for me – and hopefully players will enjoy the results too!

As I go into this final stretch any assistance people can provide through donations to the project, however small would be particularly helpful. This support helps in a few different ways – it allows me to better justify the (very considerable) time that I spend on coding ARX to my family, helps cover some of my small development costs such as webspace and small hardware/software purchases and permits me to spend more time focused on development. The PayPal and Patreon details can be found at the support page here.

If you’ve donated in the past either through PayPal or Patreon then you have my sincerest thanks – it makes a big difference to me and has really helped me to keep developing ARX – probably more so than people realise. Alternate Reality X would not have been possible for me without your support. I’ve been thinking about ways to better convey my thanks once the project is completed and I have a few ideas which I think players would like.

My main focus for development is ensuring that 100% of the original City / Dungeon content and features are implemented for the 1.0 release in December. I’ve temporarily disabled some of the alternative graphics and music options to allow me to focus solely on ensuring the original games are completely re-implemented. Hopefully everyone is ok with that as a temporary measure – for me it makes managing the project easier and allows me to focus better on the key features which aren’t in place or fully completed yet.

I’ve worked exclusively on encounters and combat recently. I’ve rewritten the main loop that deals with combat so that ARX now has a sensible turn structure with the player and opponents taking turns as well as adding in options for surprising characters, deciding whose “turn” it is first. One of the main reasons for rewriting this was so that animation effects for encounters as well as backgrounds (rain and other weather effects) could be added. I’ve added the encounter animations now which I think makes a big difference to making the game feel more complete. I’m now working on adding more encounter features. Release 0.75 will focus solely on encounters as there has been a lot more work involved in rewriting this part of ARX than I anticipated. I’ll also be adding all the additional encounter weapons that opponents can carry such as Unholy swords, flaming pitchforks and diamond daggers among many others.

Release 0.76 will focus on all the other items and treasures that you can find in Alternate Reality (horns, eyes, tarot cards). I’ll have more updates and possibly a video shortly once I sort out my screen capture software. It’s going to be a bit longer before I have the next release out as I’d like to add more new encounter features first. Thanks for your support and interest in ARX.