Afterlife 3: Legends of Rickard Bronson (freeware roguelike platformer) v1.12.2

[Ryan]

-Time bonus seems to vary a lot. Is it based on the estimated difficulty or level size? I completed a level in under 45 seconds and the bonus was only 30, while I often get 90-120 for taking 2-2.5 minutes.

The time bonus is calculated as a percentage of the basic reward for the level (so that harder levels - which should generally have higher rewards - will also have a proportionally greater reward for fast work.

-I don't think I mentioned this before, but the particles being drawn to the portal is just perfect. No explanation needed, no blinking arrow on the HUD.

Thanks.

-Finally, I encountered a strange bug, or pair of bugs. I found a chest generated directly above a pipe, so I couldn't use that entrance at all. I wanted to look for another entrance and see what would happen if I exited from that pipe. I found another pipe. (It had 3 skulls on it, if that matters.)  I went down the pipe and the screen started scrolling, all the way to the bottom of the screen. When I reached the bottom of the level, I died.

Ah, now this is definitely some kind of bug!

If you could provide me with the Story Code for the level in question, that would be helpful (the game stores logs of all your adventures in the "Adventure Logs" folder, which list the Story Codes for all of the levels you've played - good for replaying levels, but also quite handy for me in tracking down these kinds of undesirable features in the generation algorithms!)

-I unlocked the target tower and finally got to one of the world leaderboards. (5th place!)  The music is great.

Thanks again - and well done!

Ryan

[dscreamer]

-Finally, I encountered a strange bug, or pair of bugs. I found a chest generated directly above a pipe, so I couldn't use that entrance at all. I wanted to look for another entrance and see what would happen if I exited from that pipe. I found another pipe. (It had 3 skulls on it, if that matters.)  I went down the pipe and the screen started scrolling, all the way to the bottom of the screen. When I reached the bottom of the level, I died.

Ah, now this is definitely some kind of bug!

If you could provide me with the Story Code for the level in question, that would be helpful (the game stores logs of all your adventures in the "Adventure Logs" folder, which list the Story Codes for all of the levels you've played - good for replaying levels, but also quite handy for me in tracking down these kinds of undesirable features in the generation algorithms!)

No story codes, because the game installs to Program Files and I don't run it as administrator, so there's no write access there.

(Is a story code a savefile? When I first saw the "Choose stage" stuff, I expected it would let me start on a stage that appears after one I had "mastered", probably with no items like the normal start.)

[Ryan]

Ah, if you're using a newer version of Windows (Vista or later), you might find that Windows creates an artificial copy of the "Adventure Logs" directory in your user data folder and saves your logs there instead (as with a lot of MS things, it's not a bad idea in principle, but implemented in a really annoying way) - the path in that case is probably something like: C:\Users\[YOUR USERNAME]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Afterlife 3\Adventure Logs

(I use XP myself, so it's largely managed to escape by attention, but I should probably think about adding some sort of detection for this in future so as to force the logs to be saved somewhere more intuitive for people using later versions...)

Oh, and as for unlocking Zones in-game, yep, there are lots of things to unlock in that regard - keep an eye on the "Progress" screen.

Ryan

[dscreamer]

BEKEKBKBKCKAKBKCIFDGLBHHHDEDHF  is the code. (I didn't know that Win7 would actually save files that couldn't be written this way)

What I didn't understand is why Choose Act requires a story code if it's just starting you off on a more advanced stage. (But, if Choose Act is really more like Load Game, then it all makes sense.)

[Ryan]

BEKEKBKBKCKAKBKCIFDGLBHHHDEDHF  is the code. (I didn't know that Win7 would actually save files that couldn't be written this way)

Ah, that's great - thanks. I'll look into it.

What I didn't understand is why Choose Act requires a story code if it's just starting you off on a more advanced stage. (But, if Choose Act is really more like Load Game, then it all makes sense.)

The Choose Act feature is to enable replaying previously generated Acts, in case you come across an especially cool or enjoyable level (or maybe want to compete with someone for highest score or fastest time for a particular level...?) - and it's also quite handy for retrying tough levels that you encountered in the main game (or practising bosses...)

Ryan

[dscreamer]

Back with more:

-You can abuse The Last Stand mode to get a top score: You can hover over fire, put something heavy on the umbrella key, and wait for the score you want. I didn't submit my score after trying this, of course. Minus the fire, this mode is pretty cool, though.

-Found a silver whistle. Didn't do anything. If there was a wiki, this is when I'd be looking for spoilers. (I had some sort of ice shield aura too, but didn't try running into fire or anything.)

-Stan idol levels sometimes take a much longer time to generate than others. After noticing that it seemed to always be the idols, I had a level that took about 20 seconds to generate. I thought "this must be the idols." It was.

I think that's all for now.

[Ryan]

-You can abuse The Last Stand mode to get a top score: You can hover over fire, put something heavy on the umbrella key, and wait for the score you want.

Ah, that's something I didn't consider with the new physics! Thanks for letting me know. (I'll have to fix that pretty soon, I guess. )

-Found a silver whistle. Didn't do anything. If there was a wiki, this is when I'd be looking for spoilers. (I had some sort of ice shield aura too, but didn't try running into fire or anything.)

It does something.

There's no wiki, I'm afraid, but there is a (currently fairly underused!) forum for the game here which would be just as good a place to find/post hints/tips/item notes etc.

-Stan idol levels sometimes take a much longer time to generate than others. After noticing that it seemed to always be the idols, I had a level that took about 20 seconds to generate. I thought "this must be the idols." It was.

That's certainly possible - as some missions place more requirements on the design of a level than others, you may find that certain missions can take longer to generate.

BEKEKBKBKCKAKBKCIFDGLBHHHDEDHF  is the code. (I didn't know that Win7 would actually save files that couldn't be written this way)

Ah, that's great - thanks. I'll look into it.

I did find and fix this, by the way - thanks for reporting.

(In case you're curious, it was actually caused because that level had so many things in it that the variable holding the details for some effects had run out of space and left some things - such as pipes - not functioning at all!)

Ryan

[Ryan]

Update: as promised, I've just released a small-ish bug-fix roundup, fixing most of the issues reported since the last update, including those discussed above.

As always:

Download: www.rjbsoftware.co.uk/afterlife3/download
Changelog: www.rjbsoftware.co.uk/afterlife3/history

Have fun!

Ryan

[Ryan]

Further update: um, so it seems a silly bug managed to sneak into yesterday's compile. I've just uploaded a fix, so please do grab that if you've already downloaded the previous update. Sorry about that!

Ryan

[Ryan]

Just released: version 1.9!

This update adds a new weapon and several revisions to item behaviour (including the ability to use fuel barrels as a crude form of improvised bomb!)

As always:

Download: www.rjbsoftware.co.uk/afterlife3/download
Changelog: www.rjbsoftware.co.uk/afterlife3/history

...And of course, please do post below with any further comments, questions or suggestions.

Ryan

[Ryan]

So! I've just released a small update with some further gameplay balancing and bugfixes. Of particular note is that Rickard's balloon and umbrella are now automatically recovered at the end of a completed stage if they were left behind, and I've also now added the option to save adventure logs to the Documents folder rather than to the game directory, as discussed earlier in this thread.

As always, the game can be downloaded here: www.rjbsoftware.co.uk/afterlife3/download

And a full changelog is available here: www.rjbsoftware.co.uk/afterlife3/history

And of course, all further comments, questions or suggestions are welcome.

Ryan

[Ryan]

Update 1.11:

I've just released a small update to this game, fixing a couple of bugs, and also adding some new features:

• The game should now respond a little more correctly to being tabbed out to Windows, without using the (now removed) "Minimise" option from the game menu.
• Just in case someone finds it desirable, I've added mouse button support, so the left and right mouse buttons can now be used as game controls. This probably won't be very useful for most players, but I thought I'd include it anyway as I recently added it as an option to the first game in the series (where it works quite well!)

As always, the full changelog is available here, and the latest version can be downloaded here.

Enjoy!

Ryan

[Ryan]

Just a quick update to announce version 1.11.1, released last week. This update fixes a few bugs, including one serious issue which could cause a game crash when a (very!) high score was achieved.

Download/changelog links are in the usual places.

Ryan

PS: the top place on the scoreboards for Adventure mode (playing as Rickard) was recently taken by a player with a score of over 100,000 Gold Marks. Any takers?

[jim]

[Ryan]

Hello all!

Just making a quick post to mention that I've released a few extra updates to this game over the last couple of weeks, fixing and polishing some things, including some important bugs (one of which could cause a potential crash when playing the Target Tower or Endless Tower minigames), and also making some efficiency updates to help the game run smoothly on lower-spec systems. The current version is now 1.11.5.


There's a full changelog here, as always, covering everything in the last few updates: www.rjbsoftware.uk/afterlife3/history

And of course, the latest update can be downloaded here: www.rjbsoftware.uk/afterlife3/download

Do note the slight change of address since the last version, in dropping the ".co" from the domain!

As always, please do feel welcome to post with any further thoughts/comments/questions/suggestions.

Ryan

PS: I see there's a "Jim" currently in 6th place on the Adventure mode scoreboard - is that you, jim?