Alternate Reality X - New Version in March

A new version of Alternate Reality X will be released at the end of March. The remake of Philip Price's Alternate Reality: The City & The Dungeon is in development for several years now:

Alternate Reality X – New release in March 2017

I’m making good progress with the next release of Alternate Reality X and hope to have this out for public release before the end of March. It doesn’t contain all the features I had planned but nevertheless contains some important changes and additions.

The changes to the internal structure of the player’s inventory and what I call the “item buffer” took a long time. Once these had been completed I then had to make changes to a number of existing sections of the game such as the City Smithies and the Damon & Pythias Shop as they no longer worked correctly. These changes did allow me to use the authentic weapon and armour data though which is an improvement over the previous versions. Perhaps the most requested feature I’ve had is to implement selling old weapons to the Dwarven Smithy. I’ve pleased to say that this is now in the game and seems to work well.

At the time of writing the Dwarven Smithies’ custom weapons are not yet in the game. I feel I really need to implement the Dungeon bank vaults as well to make this feature worthwhile so that players can find enough gems and jewels to pay for custom weapons. Rather than delay this release further I’m probably going to leave these for the next release.

I’m currently testing the gameplay to check that what is there seems to be working ok.

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Changes and additions include:

• Modified the internal structure for items and inventory
• Increased internal size of inventory / item buffer from 100 to 250 items
• Now using authentic City Smithy, Dwarven Smithy and D&P item data
• Pick up weapons left by opponents
• Buy weapons and armour from the Dwarven Smithy
• Sell old weapons and armour to the Dwarven Smithy
• Implemented player weapon descriptions (e.g. slash, whomp)
• Implemented crossbow & reloading of ammo
• Modified automap to show walls and doors by default
• Re-enabled the “Wait for Encounter” option
• Fixed Phoenix encounter crash bug
• Fixed “Quit” crash bug

More information.

I wish the various descriptions could have been more verbose.

This was certainly a blast from the past. I played them on the Atari 800 three decades ago. From that I remember there were supposed to be several more in the series and they would all interconnect with each other, but only AR: The City and AR: The Dungeon ever saw the light of day.

They WERE special back in the day. Not so much anymore.

Played The City on my Atari ST. My favorite game at that time! Loved the music.

This release is for those of you who dreamed what this game could of been. Will be interesting to see how he wrapped things up. Now someone needs to finish up the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon which was cruelly cut mid season.