Due to a server problem, www.artsoft.org (including the web forum) was not available for about 10 hours last night. The problem was fixed today late in the morning. (“night” and “morning” as in “Central European Time”. ;-) ) Everything’s now fine again. As far as I can see, there was no loss of data.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
As one of the absolute highlights of this year’s level contributions to R’n’D (and on time for Christmas :-) ), Jürgen Bonhagen has just finished his new level package!
It contains as many as six great level sets, some of them brand-new:
Puzzle Mix, the biggest set of Jürgen’s new package, contains the following three sub-sets: “Boulder Dash Only” with 30 classic, Boulder Dash style levels, “Boulder Dash Soko” with 10 levels combining features known from Boulder Dash and Sokoban, and finally “BD - JUE”, which contains 20 levels featuring various CE (custom element) techniques to introduce new game concepts like elevators.
R&D Puzznic offers 30 new (CE based) levels that use the game concept of the game “Puzznic”: Elements of the same kind disappear if they touch each other. The obvious target is to clear away all Puzznic elements. Once you got the idea, you will quickly be addicted to this simplistic and beautiful puzzle game!
R&D West was once planned as part of a larger project by Alan Bond and Jürgen Bonhagen that never came to life. Nevertheless, the 10 levels of this great set with lots of custom elements and custom artwork are playable very well! The hero appears with a time machine in the Wild West, has to fight against evil cowboys and has to collect gold nuggets to solve the level. Even without any player action, there is a lot of action like battles between the cowboys and the indians (but it seems that also the cowboys among themselves have a lot of fun killing each other ;-) ).
Although this set has been developed in summer 2004, it contains many things that never happened before in R’n’D level design! The graphics of the hero, the indians and the cowboys are based on beautiful 3D models, which were designed, animated and rendered by Alan Bond.
A full description of all level sets, a lot of screenshots and of course the download itself are available now from Jürgen’s R’n’D site! (Also available from the “Levels & Artwork” section.)
And not to forget: Merry Christmas to all fans of Rocks’n’Diamonds! :-)
Martijn Mooij, the author of the BD fan site www.bd-fans.com, who already contributed a level set for the “Contributions 2004” level package, has created a new level set: “BD Dream”!
This new set contains 102 new BD style levels with a nostalgic atmosphere around a story that is introduced in the first level, accompanied by custom graphics and music. It also contains solution tapes for all levels. As this level set is quite large (around 11 MB) due to its custom artwork and MP3 music files, it is released as a separate package.
Download it here or from the “Levels & Artwork” page!
The new “Contributions” level package with all new level sets from the years 2004 and 2005 is now available! Special thanks to bojster for providing solution tapes for quite a lot of the older level sets!
The following players contributed new level sets in 2004:
The following players contributed new level sets in 2005:
This great new package is available now at the “Levels & Artwork” section!
As an absolute highlight of the upcoming “Contributions” level package, here comes “Snake Bite” as a separate release – a double feature level set presented by Alan Bond (“BD2K3”) and Jürgen Bonhagen (“The Bug Machine”, “Game Inside”).
“Snake Bite” contains two awesome level sets with both action and puzzle style levels, great new artwork and a whole new game concept! See screenshots of the level sets on the “Screenshots” page for a first impression!
Important note: You need Rocks’n’Diamonds 3.1.1 to play “Snake Bite”!
See the full documentation of all new “Snake Bite” elements and download the game right now! (Also available from the “Levels & Artwork” section.)