The state of ADOM (rank #11 on Steam Greenlight)

Today I'd like to summarize the state of ADOM in a somewhat more encompassing manner. Steam Greenlight is progressing exceedingly well (right now we are ranked at #11 out of 1665 titles (!!!) on Steam Greenlight and the trend is pointing upwards) so that I have changed my planning (once again) in order to prepare for Greenlighting in the (hopefully) near future - maybe in the next batch.

Steam rank report of the day: ADOM now at rank #18

Now I'm breaking with a tradition of the past few days: Instead of waiting for the morning I wanted to mention that ADOM now has rank #18 out of 1661 titles on Steam Greenlight. Just awesome. Keep it coming and surprise me by tomorrow morning ;-)

Version numbering revisited -or- The pains of growing up?

Currently I'm spending quite a bit of time doing public relations stuff. Or in other words: Trying to spread the message about ADOM, ADOM's resurrection and create more visibility for our Steam launch. In days past ADOM had a huge following but the years of inactivity obviously and understandably weakened the community. The flood of new games didn't help either - so we are but a shadow (if a strong one) of our former self :-)

But we'll get this changed. While trying to get into contact with hundreds of people from the gaming scenes, building new connections and more I learned something, that the geek in my had totally failed to comprehend:

ADOM's version numbering scheme is a problem.

ADOM now available on the LGDB

Just wanted to let everyone know that ADOM now is also available on the LGDB. Reviews, ratings & other stuff welcome :-) Keep spreading the word!

ADOM now ranks #27 on Steam Greenlight (out of 1657 titles)

It's been another amazing night (well, over here in Germany it was a night) for ADOM on Steam Greenlight. While I yesterday was wowed by ADOM scoring rank #50 on Steam Greenlight, today we have climbed to rank #27. What can I say. I guess we here at Team ADOM now are uber-wowed by this amazing climb towards the top. Still just 14 days on Steam Greenlight (soon 15) and we have grown by ears and bounds. Still 26 places to go and I have some doubts that we'll be able to do that once again overnight but it's a very nice feeling dreaming about such things ;-)

Here's the latest chart from Steam (of 'yes' votes). Light green as usual is ADOM, easily recognizable by the steep curve :-D

The other lines as usual are the titles ranking #5, #10, #15, #20 and #100. Obviously all of them are much longer on Steam Greenlight as we currently (for the time we are there) probably would rank #5 or higher (the latter being hard to judge as Steam Greenlight doesn't provide any comparison to ranks 1 to 4).

The slight flattening of our curve indicates that I need to think of something new to reach even more roguelike fans and old time ADOM gamers (because everyday we are rediscovering more of them).

So keep it up and make ADOM the most blazingly successful roguelike game ever on Steam ;-) In return we'll really try hard to innovate roguelike gaming on Steam. You should see our internal discussions at Team ADOM - cool ideas flying around. Now we just need to find the time and budget to implement them. But it surely looks as if ADOM is heading into a bright future.

P.S.: One comment on Steam Greenlight asked why we would want to charge money for a decade old game. A very sensible question that made me smile: Because ADOM is like a good wine and gets better with every year! But you never need to stop sipping it as you can't run out of supply :-)

ADOM now rank #50 on Steam Greenlight

After ADOM on Steam Greenlight finally entered the top 100 of current at rank #60 yesterday I was welcomed this morning with rank #50. Awesome. Keep it coming folks, we'd love to be greenlighted ASAP and hopefully someone at Valve is listening ;-) (there must be ADOM fans over there, correct?)

So here's the latest chart of 'yes' votes (again ADOM is light green and the others are ranks #5, #10, #15, #20 and #100):

Looks kinda awesome (although I have to admit that the difference to yesterday is in the details - at least as far as the chart goes ;-) ).

So keep the votes coming and also keep believing in us - this should help to move ADOM to new heights. I'm especially excited as Steam will allow us to introduce actual new game modes and features that so far would not have been possible (hint, hint).

Slowly redesigning the blog

I have started to slowly alter the blog layout. A long while ago we had an ADOM II design competition and for more than two years Kalle Kolaris header served us well (thanks once more). But now we are slowly creating a unified ADOM brand and Krys' ADOM designs (derived from the awesome tiled graphics we now have) will become a prominent feature of the new design.

If you don't see any changes please shift-reload this web page. Their should be a new awesome logo and header at the top of this page. And for the sake of completeness, here it is, too:

More changes to come over the next couple of weeks. And www.adom.de also will receive a revision soon. Obviously ADOM is currently in focus and ADOM II rests on the back burner...

ADOM ranks #60 on Steam Greenlight (of 1639 titles)

I just looked at the current statistics on Steam Greenlight... and boy... (and girls)... are we pushing!!! ADOM right now ranks at position #60 of 1639 titles in Steam Greenlight. Please keep the votes coming :-)

And here's the chart of yes votes - the light green line is ADOM, the others are competitors #5, #10, #15, #20 and #100:

Keep the votes coming - I have mailed more than 40 reviews and indie gaming sites today in order to create more buzz around ADOM - hopefully this will work. Seeing this chart I guess we (Team ADOM and the awesome ADOM community) really deserve a prominent place on Steam!

But continuing votes are very important as the competition doesn't sleep. And obviously the competitors have been collecting votes much long - so the long tail seems to be important, too!

ADOM on IndieDB

I finally found a moment to add ADOM to IndieDB. Please vote for it, rate it, review it, comment it, etc. and increase its visibility as this also will be beneficial for Steam Greenlight and everything else we do in order to secure the extended life of ADOM. Thanks!

ADOM in the urban dictionary...

I just by chance noted that ADOM even made it into the urban dictionary. Awesome :-)

ADOM 1.2.0p23 released to the general public!

Update (25th of May, 2014): Please vote for us on Steam. Currently we do have about 90% of the votes required to get into the top 100 - but as only the top 75 probably are going to be green lighted we still have way to go. Thus every vote counts!)

As ADOM 1.2.0p23 seems to be pretty stable and as we want to give people interested in the Steam Greenlight campaign an impression of the current state of ADOM we have decided to release p23 to the general public.

Starting now (actually already an hour ago) everyone can download ADOM 1.2.0p23 for free. As usual followup releases will be limited to the circle of prerelease testers which you still can enter according to the linked conditions.

Steam Greenlight is running well - we now have 79% of the votes required to get into the top 100 Steam titles. Hopefully the general release of p23 will give us another push - if you like ADOM and you are on Steam we'd be very grateful for your vote.

Here you can find our original release notes for p23 and the change log. And now enjoy the game and provide us with your feedback!

ADOM scores rank #61 on the RPG Codex Top 70 PC RPGs

A small distraction while waiting to be green lighted on Steam: ADOM scores rank 61 on the RPG Codex Top 70 PC RPG list. Note that bad considering that ADOM was ranked higher than

• System Shock
• Wizardry & Wizardry IV and
• Champions of Krynn (which I liked in its time).

Next time we want to rank higher ;-)

The state of ADOM @ Steam

The state of ADOM @ Steam in once sentence: We are progressing pretty well. ADOM is campaigning in Steam Greenlight since May, 16th, 00:00. So far we have collected (as of the point of this writing) 51% of the votes needed to hit the average number of yes-votes for a top 100 Steam title (2880 yes-votes, if you are curious). This is good but not yet good enough so I just have to ask you to continue spreading the word!

The biggest surprise for me is that - when reading both the comments section and the Steam forum - there are so many old time ADOM players who had forgotten about the game and not even heard about its resurrection, the latest feature and the upcoming plans. Tells you what a tiny niche we are when probably 99% of the Internet doesn't even know about us ;-) On the other hand we hopefully can activate that potential (given the fact that ADOM generated hundreds of thousands of downloads with each new version just from the official site in its prime days at the end of the 90s, there seems to be a huge untapped potential).

ADOM now on Steam Greenlight

Hi everyone!

Tonight at around midnight German time, ADOM has entered the Steam Greenlight process. If you ever enjoyed ADOM, please vote for ADOM on Steam Greenlight. We'd like to make ADOM the most awesome roguelike to ever grace Steam and your help and support are dearly needed for that.
Here's the link to the Steam Greenlight page and here's the Steam group for ADOM.

Thanks!
Thomas & Team ADOM

Official Steam ADOM group

As part of the preparations for Steam Greenlight I have created an official ADOM group on Steam. If you are a Steam user and ADOM fan please join it to show your support!

Preparing ADOM for Steam Greenlight

We now are finalizing the preparations to get ADOM to Steam Greenlight. While the first video probably is the hardest thing to get right I'm currently also looking for submissions of screenshots that you find particularly compelling to advertise ADOM on Steam Greenlight. If you'd like to submit something

• make a screenshot of 800x522 pixels size (preferred; for me the default size on Mac),
• save it as PNG (preferred) or JPG and
• send it to creator(at)ancientdomainsofmystery.com (acknowledging by doing so that I may freely use the screenshot for the Steam Greenlight campaign).

Thanks for your support!

Announcing ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 23!

And there we go again with yet another prerelease of ADOM. After about two weeks of more hard work tempering the code, removing bugs (especially some nasty crash bugs) and working on the rebalanced late game Team ADOM is happy to announce the (closed) prerelease of ADOM 1.2.0p23.