ADOM II 0.3.1 released!

I'm happy to announce the release of ADOM II 0.3.1. As a Christmas gift to myself I decided to work on ADOM II for a couple of days and it has been a nice change of pace compared to ADOM Classic. ADOM Classic is a mountain of detail and content with a somewhat arcane, baroque copy&paste C-based API. ADOM II is a youthful and brash re-imagination of the game, still with a serious lack as far as content goes but with an incredible promise for the future (as far as I am concerned). And a wonderful architecture and API that I'm so much looking forward to to toy with extensively.

ADOM 1.2.0p5 released (Ho Ho Ho Ho!)

We are happy to announce the public release of ADOM 1.2.0p5 - one of the slightly older closed prereleases of the ongoing ADOM development due to the success of our crowd funding campaign.

ADOM II 0.3.0 released! (Merry Christmas!)

I'm proud to announce the release of ADOM II 0.3.0. While this new version is not as complete as I wanted it to be (missing a general compiler, extensive testing and many details for new players) I didn't want to let it sit on my hard drive after neglecting it for almost three months (the ADOM crowd funding campaign cost more time than I expected ;-) ). So here we go with new stuff and changes...

ADOM: The Resurrection among top 12 Indiegogo gaming campaigns of 2012

Hi everyone!

I just got notified that ADOM (not surprisingly - given the blazing success you made possible) is ranked among the top 12 Indiegogo gaming campaigns of 2012! Place #2 as far as I can see as Starforge managed to surpass the success of ADOM: The Resurrection by about 50% - phantastic, it has been an amazing year so far and I expect 2013 to become a truly awesome year for ADOM with at least two major public releases (1.2.0 and 2.0.0) as well as ADOM Deluxe with Steam integration and more.

IMPORTANT: For now you still can vote for ADOM to become #1 as Roguelike Game of the Year 2012 - please do so if you haven't voted yet ;-)

Ok, I'm now back to work...

Cheers
Thomas

Vote for ADOM (or ADOM II) as Roguelike of the Year 2012

The new poll is up and you can further the development, visibility and future of ADOM by voting for it as the Roguelike of the Year 2012 (at least we made the best resurrection in my book ;-) ). Use the sidebar on the right of the linked website to vote and thus help preparing ADOM to get onto Steam and other platforms - we need as much publicity as possible to turn the resurrection into a perpetual event ;-)

Thanks a lot!
Thomas Biskup
ADOM & ADOM II Maintainer

ADOM: The True Resurrection - Prerelease 7 now available

Greetings everyone! Last night we released ADOM 1.2.0p7 (prerelease 7) and I am very excited about this release for several reasons:

• It's the biggest prerelease so far. 114 (!) issues have been tackled for it, many stopping loopholes and varous scumming tactics. The game probably will be quite a bit harder (especially at later levels) and I am pretty sure that we will need to do a couple of more prereleases to rebalance the game but IMHO it's worth it.
• It's probably a highly experimental release: Concerning the sweeping amount of changes I'm almost 100% certain that quite a number of ugly new bugs will pop up. But that's the nature of prerelease: test early, suffer early ;-) Please play the prerelease, try out things and post bug reports and RFE whenever you stumble upon a problem. The next thing on my list is a bug killing spree for p8 (plus probably the integration of a couple of the virtual donor rewards - we'll have to see about that ;-) ).
• The initial implementation for Mist Elves and Ratlings is in. There surely is a lot to finetune and I'm looking forward to feedback in that respect, too!

As usual the prerelease is available to all donors of Adventurer level and up (Seeker donors excluded) through the ADOM self service portal. And here's the impressive changelog for ADOM 1.2.0 p7...

ADOM: The True Resurrection - Summary of days 5 and 6

In one sentence: I fixed a ton of bugs and implemented another ton of RFEs. Which has both satiated my initial appetite for that and helped a lot getting back into intricate ADOM code details. Man, you really notice that ADOM was initially written in a time period when refactoring was not yet well known. OTOH things are improving and I'll for now switch to adding new stuff once more - ratlings and mist elves, here we come! Follow me on Facebook and Twitter if you want the detailed updates.

ADOM: The True Resurrection - Summary of day #4

Unexpectedly today was an amazingly productive day given the fact that I did not have that much time to work on ADOM. Too many things happened to summarize all stuff in detail but the short form is: I started to work on all open bugs and requests for enhancement in the official ADOM issue management system and I tackled quite a few today. Lots of balancing stuff, etc.

ADOM: The True Resurrection - Summary of Day #3

Hi everyone!

Just a quick summary:

• Chaos knights have been fully implemented. 
• Two new endings have been added. 
• More tax and billing stuff has been tackled.
• And last but not least: ADOM 1.2.0p6 has been released! Go to the ADOM Self Service Portal, log in and follow the usual link to download and play it!

Sadly tomorrow is a normal workday, so I'll not have any more updates...

ADOM: The True Resurrection - Summary of day #2

Ok, yesterdays day #2 did not quite end in success. I failed to finish chaos knights (to hope for that was a bit optimistic in any case) but I got a lot done. I also progressed in tax and billing issues. Today chaos knights definitely will be finished and we'll try to do a new prerelease tonight so that you can wet your fingers on the new stuff.

Oh yes... and I released another five versions of the ADOM self service portals as minor wrinkles, bugs and difficulties keep popping up. By now more than 80% of the donors have provided feedback regarding their virtual rewards... so hurry onwards to avoid belonging to the 20% who don't get their deserved rewards - less than four days left!

Cheers
Thomas

If you want to follow ADOM development closely...

...you should either befriend my on Facebook (you are welcome!) or follow me on Twitter! As major parts of December are reserved for ADOM development I'm posting there with high frequency!

Urgent update regarding ADOM:The Resurrection donor feedback!

Proceed to http://www.indiegogo.com/resurrect-adom-development/x/784375?c=activity and read todays' updates (both of them). NOW! THANKS!

The challenges for the true resurrection, day 2

Ok, folks, today I'll be going to tackle

• more tax and billing issues (hopefully less than 30 minutes)
• chaos knights (I hope to complete them today since I already started on them a couple of weeks ago)
• maybe a little work on mist elves if I'm fast with chaos knights

Should be more than enough for one day. Wish me luck ;-) !

Regarding Mist Elves

Since yesterday I have given Mist Elves (one of the new races to show up in ADOM) quite some more thought. Up to now I just had some basic ideas... things now are getting more specific. Here's what I got so far...

ADOM: The True Resurrection - Summary of day #1

A long day slowly ends... here's what I have achieved in day #1:

• I have caught up with all mail based support requests and answered something like 60 mails.
• I have released at least six new versions of the ADOM self service portal, adding lots of explanations and - most importantly - fixing the character encoding problem.
• I have added two minor but neat new tweaks to the self service portal: It displays both how statues and boss monsters would show up in the game allowing you to check your input.
• I have manually processed a lot of password requests with the self service portal (so much for self service - it seems that most of the problems happen with eastern european mail addresses, russian ones in particular).
• Contractual details for the ADOM GPL licensing exception for NotEye have been specified and requested from my lawyer.
• Handled some tiring billing and taxation stuff (more to come).
• Caught up with many interesting threads in the forums. As a side note I rediscovered a neat "work in progress" picture by Krys showing off some more of the new monsters - personally I'm totally in love how all this works out. But if you want something different you will be able to do that, too. The way NotEye integrates into ADOM will allow both to exchange individual tiles as well as how rendering works in general by changing the underlying algorithm with a little LUA programming. This really is going to be neat. Jochen, Zeno and Lucas are working on the sound system right now, too, and I really like how things are shaping up. Here's the picture:

That's it for today. For me a great first day of ADOM! As tomorrow is one of two work days I'll spend at the company and giving a lecture about project managament at the Fachhochschule Südwestfalen you most likely won't see much action tomorrow. Wednesday will be the first programming day and I hope to get large parts of Chaos Knights done. But we'll see... there are some nitpicky details that could turn out to take a lot more effort than I right now hope for ;-)

If you are a donor - please head immediately to the self service portal to pick up your virtual rewards... less than seven days remaining!

Just to mention it...

...as I missed out on the regular monthly summaries for the past couple of months: Content and advertising income are coupled (which is not surprising). Right now advertising income for this blog is down the drain (which is not really a problem after the success of the crowd funding campaign). Nonetheless it will be interesting to see how much it can rise in a month of hectic activity and hopefully lots of content... which I want December to be.

Just thought I'd mention it...

Updates to the ADOM self service portal

In order to answer a few more questions and help those people who seem to have problems with their passwords I have added a couple of things to the ADOM self service portal:

1. There are more explanations on the login screen. Read them carefully if you are confused.
2. When you request a password the on-screen response will be more detailed in order to tackle a few special cases that I so far had to process manually.
3. Anyone who is allowed to specify a magical statue now can see how his text and description will appear in the game (when logged in). Please check your descriptions as there were some questions about the correct format. The portal now displays how your input will appear in the game. If it doesn't seem to be correct please adjust the text.

And some repeated clarifications:

1. If you are a 'Questor' level donor (or above): Address verification will be handled separately. Don't care about that detail right now.
2. If you are a 'Seeker'-only level donor: You are not expected to do anything right now.
3. If you receive some virtual rewards be sure to pick them up at the ADOM self service portal as soon as possible. Time for that runs out on the 10th of December.

Thanks a lot for your patience. I'm now off to answer the remaining mail requests for help... and then I hopefully finally will be able to work on the other administrative stuff to be then hopefully finally able to program... so much for the rock star life of a solo game designer ;-)

And so it truly begins...

As announced elsewhere I have managed to free most of December by taking a month of unpaid holiday (sabbatical, whatever you like to call it)... mostly. Here's what I plan to do.

Donors: Act NOW!

Dear ADOM: The Resurrection crowd funding campaign donors!

December has come and most of December I will spend on adding as much stuff as possible to get all the crowd funding rewards handled. Except for the Fridays and two other days I'm completely freed from work (having taken an unpaid holiday). But to be able to successfully implement the stuff promised in the campaign I need your help: Please specify your rewards on the ADOM: The Resurrection self service portal.

In order to allow me to implement all the stuff promised in time I need your feedback before the 10th of December, midnight (German time). I will not accept any later submissions thus resulting into the forfeiture of the rewards (and no payback). While this might sound hard I - to be honest - was shocked to discover that but 22.39% of the donors so far have provided feedback (at the time of this writing)!!! Have a look for yourself - I added a new statistics display to the self service portal (at the bottom of the login page).

So please specify your rewards before the 10th of December!

Thanks a lot :-)