I’ve been working away on adding the Dungeon Oracle to ARX so that we can sign up for all those Dungeon quests but while I was sifting through a capture of the binary for this part of the game I noticed something that interested me as someone with a long time interest in game design. Whilst many games of the era (and most recent games too!) are happy to have a single response or set of outcomes from the gameplay The Dungeon designers always added two, three or more varied responses to each of the modules. It’s a simple thing to do but so few designers or programmers bother to do it. I think this shows attention to detail that is so often overlooked or not considered. They didn’t take the easy route or quickest options to finish things but added extras to the game which is probably why we still play these two games.

Did you know that if you upset the Oracle repeatedly he will tell you not to come back for a month? I never knew that and if you return before the month is up then be prepared for trouble.

One of the other things I’ve been looking at is the design of the City shops. Where most games would provide you with a stock selection of clothing, in the City we have four values for each possible item – value, material, colour and type – giving us literally hundreds of possible clothing items some of which we will never see within a game. We have a similar feature in the shape of the Weapons Enchantress who can modify numerous attributes of your weapons (based on your choice) allowing us to potentially create some very interesting custom weapons of our own if we have sufficient patience (and precious stones).

For me this means I need to alter my object code for ARX as it currently doesn’t allow for the flexibility and custom nature of items such as procedurally generated clothing from the City (the D & P apparel items are static) or the custom weapons of the Dungeon. I overlooked the complexity of attention to detail in The City and The Dungeon when I first set up the object code and took a simpler route like most games do. Once I’ve done this and I want to do it soon then I’ll be able to add City shops, the Dwarven Smithy and the Weapon Enchantress to ARX.

Despite playing this game on and off for over 25 years I never realised those features and details were in there. This is one of the key things I love about Alternate Reality – I’m still discovering things about it 25 years after it was created – how many other games – past or present could we say that about.

Firstly thanks for the messages of support for the project following my previous blog post. It’s good to know that people are still interested in ARX. I think the post possibly sounded more negative than I intended but I felt an update on progress (or lack of over recent weeks) was required.

One of the causes of my frustration…

Anyway I have made some progress in recent weeks. I’m now using the latest version of SFML 2.0 which is the multimedia library used for ARX. SFML 2.0 is supposed to fix some of the display bugs that some people were experiencing but only time will tell. I also switched over to Visual Studio 2010 Express for development. Unfortunately Visual Studio 2010 seems significantly slower that 2008 which came as  a big surprise and annoyance to me. The web is littered with tales of frustration. It seems to have settled down a bit now though generating new executables still seems slow.

A few weeks back I thought I would add “barred doors” to the Dungeon. If you’re familiar with the Dungeon you might remember that you come across some doors which require some effort on your part in order to pass (screenshot above). Now I thought this would probably take me a couple of hours to implement. How wrong I was. I should know better that the things that look really simple will always take me much longer than expected. I’ve just finished coding up these doors this morning and I’m pleased to say it now seems to be working properly for both forward and backward movement through the doors. ARX will also remember the most recent couple of dozen doors you “opened” for a while. Don’t be surprised if you start to find some of these doors added to future versions of the City map.

Dalimar has also kindly tweaked the City map and zone data so that all the enclosed areas on the map show up correctly (e.g. they have roofs and can have other behaviour added such as no rain). He’s also modified the 2 Deathtraps so they are no longer traps which result in the loss of your character. Now I need to add something interesting into those 2 areas… If you have any ideas you’d like me to consider then drop me an email – encounters, special treasures or maybe a special passage or teleport to some previously unexplored area of Alternate Reality…

I’ve been struggling a bit over the last few weeks to get enthusiastic about my next update for Alternate Reality X and found myself thinking about other game designs for my own original games. I pulled out some old design documents for my space exploration and trading game for example – some of the oldest designs dating back to when I was a teenager (which was a long time ago).

The Palace Entrance – Still some way from going through those doors

After following a link from the Rampant Coyote and reading Chris Kaitila’s blog about his 12 Games in 12 Months challenge (create 12 games in a year) one bit in particular caught my eye. The bit that interested me most is where he writes about “hitting the wall” where a project is no longer fun, is very complicated or the finish line is much further away than you originally thought.

I think this is the point I’m currently at with ARX. I’ve been there before of course where I’ve felt really burnt out and the thought of working on the project seems like work without any fun or achivement. It’s only a temporary state but when a project which I’m supposed to be doing for fun feels like work and the prospect of firing up my programming environment fills me with dread then it’s time to take a break. I’ve totally failed to keep on schedule with my ARX development roadmap but it was useful in that I can easily pin point where the time went (adding other features to ARX not on the original roadmap). I’ve even considered starting an AR project from scratch so I can fix all the issues I know about which I feel are bad design decisions I made in earlier times.

So don’t panic if you don’t see any updates for a little while and don’t be surprised if you see an update on some new project. These other projects allow me to keep my outlook for ARX fresh and come back with renewed enthusiasm and energy. I really want to see the project through to completion but there is still a lot of work to do and I don’t want to get burnt out along the way so that I get to the point where I want to abandon the project altogether.

All the best,
Acrin1