I grew up playing the classic Computer Role Playing Games (CRPGs) of the 1980s on a Commodore 64. Many hours were spent exploring the lands of Ultima IV, The Bard’s Tale and Alternate Reality:The Dungeon. Eventually I moved onto a Commodore Amiga 500, followed by an Amiga 1200 and eventually a Windows PC about 1998 after a few years break from home computers.
I had always wanted to create my own CRPGs and adventure games but despite many ambitious ideas and attempts I never got very far past the design and initial programming stage. With the development of the internet and the wealth of free tools and information for aspiring developers that became available I started to pick up programming again around 2001.
After some time spent using the Text Adventure Development System (TADS) I started playing around with some of the data files from Alternate Reality: The Dungeon.
This is turn led to me starting to create a modern remake called Alternate Reality X (ARX) using C and SFML. I worked on this for many years bringing together the City and Dungeon maps and content into a single game. I’m no longer developing this but an AR fan is creating a Java based version of Alternate Reality.
I’ve since decided to focus on creating games of my own in the CRPG and Adventure genres, possibly to run on classic platforms such as the Commodore 64, Atari 8bit or Commodore Amiga computers. Any serious projects would also likely have a modern PC version as well.