Further rebranding, new DevState

I'm slowly changing more parts of the website to account for ADOM II: Legends of Ancardia as the new title of the game. This evening I changed all the headlines, modified the subpages and specifically posted a new (still pretty basic) model for ADOM II Deluxe (formerly known as JADE: The Ultimate). Let me know what you think...

Oh, and have a look at the revised DevState. I have decided to do an ADOM II 0.2.9 release instead of directly proceeding with ADOM II 0.3.0 - in order to get my act together a bit faster. Some features have moved a bit down the line and I really urge myself to get into a more effective "release early, release often" mode - but I still need to work on myself ;-)

The websites are paying for themselves... for the first time in 10+ years!

It seems that it was the correct decision to add advertising to this blog. For the first time in ten years the website plus the hosting of www.adom.de are paid for by advertising - which is incredibly cool. Thanks for the huge number of visitors and thanks for occasionally clicking on an interesting ad! Spread the word, help ADOM II to surpass ADOM!

Scrolls ported from ADOM to ADOM II... finally

It took much longer than expected and the past couple of days have been filled with work but finally I'm done porting almost all the scrolls from ADOM to ADOM II. The missing ones are either story related or only work for items that do not yet exist in the game. Some testing still needs to be done but that hopefully will be finished a lot faster.

One more feature crossed out from the DevState :-)

The hand of Fate in ADOM II

Going back to a suggestion by Glen Oberman a couple of days ago (which again went back to a comment by Jacob..., probably in a discussion on Facebook - I couldn't find it here) I changed the whole way good and back luck work in ADOM II. And I'm happy about the new way.

The ADOM II design competition deadline is over!

Ok, it's the 25th of January, the ADOM II design competition is over. The number of suggestions is quite limited (less than 6) so we won't have to discuss much. Thanks to all submitters for your work - it is highly appreciated. I will post the results for discussion and voting over the next couple of days (today and probably also tomorrow I sadly am to busy to do them justice) so stay tuned.

BTW does anyone know about a good voting tool (preferably integrated into blogger) that could be used to vote for the best submission by category (e.g. logo, blog header, ...)? Please post suggestions here.

Final day of the ADOM II design competition

Go folks, go :-) !!!

This is your last chance for months to come to help shape the face of ADOM II - send in your submissions in abundance - even if you only have suggestions for one or some of the categories. Great ideas are always welcome!

Oh, yes: Suggestions (see the links above) should be send to creator(at)ancientdomainsofmystery.com.

Updates concerning the ADOM II design competition

Folks, it's still time to get your ideas in and become a part of the legend ;-) The 24th of January is the deadline so you still can do it and become a submitter for the contest - even if you submit only a partial proposal!

One submitter (thanks a lot!) actually notified me of something stupid I did. The original call for designs included the following statement:

Include a note stating that you grant all rights to me to use parts or the whole of the submission for whatever use I decide upon (see above). This point is important and submissions missing that will be ignored.

Naturally I only meant that for the selected submission. I do not intend to "rob" anyone of their creations and even if for some reason I'd like to use more than one submission I'll talk to you beforehand to discuss that. You do not need to give me a free permission independent of the final outcome of the contest.

And now keep more submissions coming - we could need a bit more input (although I already got cool stuff). But considering the amount of people implying support for a graphical version I would have expected a bit more input :-) !

Concerning the ADOM II design competition...

Just a quick update: As the end date of the ADOM II design competition is coming closer (the 24th of January) I'd once more like to call for submissions. So far the response has been... moderate. But maybe you all are perfecting your submissions till the very end of the deadline... I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

If you feel you can't submit something in all requested categories... just submit something in the category or categories you feel comfortable with. Anything probably is better than what my highly limited artistic abilities could produce ;-)

As mentioned proposals or links should be mailed to creator(at)ancientdomainsofmystery.com.

Lecture about ADOM II at the Advanced Technical College of Südwestfalen

Today is a kind of special day for me. While I'm talking quite often at conferences and workshops about varies topics (usually about OpenSAGA or the OpenGovernment Suite both created by QuinScape as well as about various software technology related topics) today I'm holding a lecture at the Advanced Technical College of Südwestfalen in a course given by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Klug. The course is about software technology and my lecture will be about

Why computer (roleplaying) games and design patterns for enterprise software 

have a lot in common

The example naturally will be ADOM II and I will both show the game and illustrate how various concepts map to one other. Should be fun, the talk starts today at 2pm. Wish me luck ;-)

Upcoming: Scrolls in ADOM II

While rebranding JADE as ADOM II I noticed that the ensuing major version number jump (to 0.3.0) also requires me to add at least a few scrolls (e.g. the famous and direly needed scroll of identify). This creates another small sidetrack now also recorded in the current DevState.

The ADOM II Design Competition end date

Please note that I made a stupid mistake regarding the ADOM II design competition in the sidebar to the right - the design competition ends on January, 24th. No other date. Originally there was a wrong date. Thanks to Silfir for noticing!

The ADOM II Design Competition

As many of you by now probably might have heard, JADE is going to be rebranded and in the future will be called

ADOM II: Legends of Ancardia

This entails a lot of changes and I need some help in the graphical and design areas as my artistic skills are somewhat limited (what do you think why I'm doing ASCII roguelikes ;-) )?

Thus I hereby open the ADOM II Design Competition.

JADE scores #4 in the Roguelike of the Year 2011 poll

Many thanks to everyone for voting. Here are the original results and here's the top 20 at Temple of the Roguelike. The goal for 2012 obviously is clear... I will do everything in my power to get ADOM II: Legends of Ancardia (ALOA for short ;-) ) to score as #1 :-)

Thanks again to everyone and here's a toast to a great year of roguelike gaming looming ahead!

Message types in roguelike games

Today I'd like to address an issue that has been bothering me since ADOM types and that also is not yet handled correctly in JADE: There are different types of messages in the game and some of them - obviously for better legibility - might need different coloring. Additionally it might be worthwhile to add message filters to get rid of less interesting messages. That's where I need your help.

Quick update: More mouse support for ADOM II (formerly known as JADE)

Just added two mouse support features to the next release ADOM II / JADE:

• During movement mode you can click on some known position and the PC will move there.
• During look mode (new for the next release) you can hover over a visible position and it will be described in more detail (including known statistics for NPCs). 

At some point (but not for the next release) right-clicking during movement mode probably also will provide extended descriptions but that will have to be considered in more detail. All changes have been documented on the new DevState page.

New page: DevState

In the navigation to the top of this page you will now find a new page called "DevState". The idea here is to give you a running tally of the open issues that I need to finish before releasing the next version. I will try to keep this up to date in order to give you a better picture of things to come.

Ads on the blog

You might have noticed that ads have started to appear on this blog. Actually I'm pretty unsure whether I really like this and I might decide to remove them again pretty soon as I usually am not fond of ads on blogs. Nonetheless this is a test to see if any worthwhile sums of money aggregate with those ads as that would help to cover the costs for server and blog hosting (something like 75 EUR per month for all the infrastructure combined - not much but I still need to find time to use a much leaner and cheaper infrastructure.

So if you do want to do me a favor - click on a couple of ads and visit the offerings every time you visit this site. It generates income to support ADOM and JADE ;-)

Should JADE: The Ultimate Edition (or as it probably soon will be called: ADOM II Deluxe) generate enough income the ads in any case will be the first thing to be removed once more.

The power of names: "JADE" versus "ADOM II"

Today I would like to address an issue that has been bothering since the release of JADE in July: Is JADE the best name for the game?

Music for JADE

Recently I totally fell in love with the Skyrim cover songs done by Malukah. I just wish someone would be doing such cool music for JADE. I'd love to add such music to the game. Since there are some offers from musically talented people on Facebook (but I'm happily welcoming more - who knows what comes out of it) there are now is a problem of lyrics...