The Plan

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