Afterlife

Developer's Notes On The Origins Of Afterlife

Afterlife Screenshot: Flooded Ruins Zone Afterlife Screenshot: Ice Caverns Zone

Despite what you may think, Afterlife was not, in fact, the product of an evening or two spent under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. Actually, the idea to make the game came about while in a coach (or possibly a train) somewhere near a small town in the Australian outback. The concept, however, had been around for some time before this...

Long ago, before RjB Software existed, I wrote several games which were released by Psyworks Interactive, a QB programming site which no longer exists. One of these games was an early experiment in platforming called Stick You.

In this game, you played the part of a young stick (yes, as in a bit of wood) called Twig, whose mission was to descend into the stick-underworld known as Firewood in order to defeat the evil megalomaniac Bark, who had kidnapped the beautiful stick princess called Woodia. The motivation behind this near-suicidal act of bravery was that Twig desperately wanted to get his leaf over with the aforementioned princess, but the outcome was a slightly bizarre game in which you were pitted against fiendishly designed levels with the sole mission being to reach the blue exit-portal without dying. There were no enemies; just fire, slime, buzz-saws, and other nasty traps to turn an unwary and sexually frustrated young stick to sawdust before his time.

Although the game had many flaws (not least of which that you played as a stick, a conceit which came about purely because a small brown line is about the least graphically challenging thing a programmer can attempt to represent on the screen), it was actually rather good fun, and I often considered rewriting it in later years.

Some time after the demise of Psyworks Interactive, I decided, more for a laugh than anything else, to try making a game using one of the "game creation kits" which had suddenly appeared on the market at about that time. As it was just an experiment, I couldn't be bothered to put any effort into making graphics for it (see a pattern here?), and so I used the somewhat random assortment of sprites provided with the package, which included a small, but (as it would turn out) significant set of icons: a hot-air balloon, a Pac-Man style ghost, and a small yellow umbrella...

The game I managed to put together with these rather incongruous items was, to my surprise, really rather good fun, and I soon passed it round to a few friends, who also enjoyed it. And then I got carried away with another big project, in the shape of the first version of Evowok Breeder, and forgot all about it.

Which brings us back to that train (yes, I'm pretty sure it was a train, actually) in Australia. Sitting down and trying not to think about the length of the journey ahead of me, I jotted down some notes about ideas for my next game. And one of these was to rewrite The Balloon Game (as it had been imaginatively called), and throw in the level-design style from Stick You, thereby updating both titles in one fell swoop... Or at least, a year or so of hard coding. And so, with this plan in mind, and a liberal dose of thematic influence from the classic Sonic The Hedgehog games thrown in for good measure, Afterlife was born...

Afterlife Version History

v1.7.2
2007-07-05

v1.7.1
2007-06-29

v1.7.0
2007-06-14

v1.6.1
2007-03-01

v1.6.0
2006-10-22

v1.5.1
2006-02-04

v1.5.0
2005-11-24

v1.4.6
2005-11-22

v1.4.5
2005-11-21

v1.4.4
2005-11-16

v1.4.3
2005-11-15

v1.4.2
2005-11-11

v1.4.1
2005-11-03

v1.4.0
2005-10-31

v1.3.0
2005-07-11

v1.2.0
2005-06-17

v1.1.0
2005-03-18

v1.0.2
2005-02-24

v1.0.1
2005-02-22

v1.0.0
2004-10-21