The Plan

Acrin1 Uncategorised

Thanks to those of you who have posted your suggestions, thoughts and observations about Alternate Reality X in response to my concerns and worries. These gave me a lot to think about and I now see a much clearer plan forming.

I agree it
seems a shame to not finish the City and Dungeon – my original goal was very
clearly to ONLY build these two existing scenarios and stop there. Looking back
this seemed to be a very sensible approach given how much I underestimated the
work that was involved in just the 2 original scenarios.

Based on suggestions and comments I’ve received I think I might have a better
solution in mind and now understand the real areas which concern me and how to
avoid them. I think when I stood back and looked at what I was trying to complete I felt the overall package just wasn’t achieveable. I was considering all the remaining work for the City and
Dungeon PLUS new brand new scenarios PLUS moving everything over to Unity 3D. Add that to my
concerns about putting my own original content and ideas into something which I
have no ownership of and you can see why I was concerned.

My plans probably won’t keep
everybody happy but I’ve outlined below what I have in mind.
  • Finish ARX as a combined City and Dungeon game using my existing code and software set up (e.g. C++, SFML, OpenGL). I will keep all the original place names, maps and content. This will give me the satisfaction of completing what I originally set out to do, bringing proper closure to ARX (for me) and hopefully giving most ARX followers and supporters the core 2 games in one nice integrated game that they can still enjoy. The experience would still be unique as you have the opporutnities and dynamics of being able to move backwards and forwards between both scenarios.
  • I would not develop the other scenarios within ARX but the option would be there for others to possibly take on further scenario or ARX development once the core City and Dungeon were completed. A number of people have expressed an interest in getting involved in coding for ARX and I think would be particularly interested in taking a completed City and Dungeon and expanding them.
  • I will develop my new game using Unity 3D as I planned. It’s fairly clear in my mind how this will shape up and what sort of CRPG it will and won’t be but I’ll save the details for a future post. A lot of my experiences working on ARX will be a big help with setting up what I believe will be some of the more difficult parts of the game. Comments I received on games in general were a great reminder or pointer of what I want to achieve in my own game. I want to capture some of those feelings I had playing Ultima, the Bards Tale and of course Alternate Reality and the spirit of these pioneering games.
Whilst there will be quite a lot of
common RPG style code and functionality between the projects I think it’s
unlikely at this point that I will move ARX to Unity. It really depends how
confident and quickly my development in Unity comes along in the next few
months.
 
By keeping ARX focused on the City and the Dungeon as I originally planed and focusing my new work and ideas on my Unity based project, I think I’ll avoid a lot of the problems that I was worried about. I’ll be taking things steady, take my time and whilst I will be providing a “roadmap” of sorts for ARX don’t be surprised if it doesn’t contain any dates, just be confident that work will continue.
 
Best wishes,
Acrin1

4 thoughts to “The Plan”

  1. sorry i have been out of touch for so long. school, work, family, etc. i am still interested in providing sound stage for ARX as well as other projects if you want the help. my schedule gets alot lighter in june. shoot me an email with the core needs for sound and music at the moment and i will designate some time to get working on it. bruce

  2. Hi there-

    I've been following your progress for somewhere around a year.

    I was a HUGE fan of the AR series as a boy (9-10 years old; I had a C64 and played "The Dungeon" for many hundreds of hours), and have (fairly recently) started school as a CompSci & Engineering major.

    I'm still primitive at coding (81 credit hours to get the core classes out of the way, and I've only had an introductory programming (in C/C++) course, as well as an OOP (in Java) course. Data Structures in the Fall). I'd love to get my hands dirty with the ARX project, though, and I have an entire Summer off to do whatever I want.

    If you can think of some small role for me- and I'm not averse to doing some homework/reading if needs be- shoot me a line. It's a noble cause and one I'd be happy to join. I genuinely love coding and can be pretty resourceful.

    1. Thanks for the offer. I have a couple of specific things which it would be really helpful if you could take a look at. Drop me an email at "acrin1 @ gmail . com" (without spaces) and I'll send you the details. You can then have a think about if they are things you would like to help with.

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