Happy Second Resurrection Day!

To me it's unbelievable but we already have the second anniversary of the ADOM Resurrection day. Today two years ago the unbelievable, incredible, breath-taking determination of the ADOM community allowed us to start an exciting journey that yet has to come to a conclusion: The complete resurrection of ADOM.

About the current ADOM development progress...

As many people have asked over the previous weeks I'd like to give a short summary regarding the progress of the promises given in the crowd funding campaign and what we actually are working on right now:

Currently we exclusively focus on getting ADOM to Steam. This task for us has highest priority for several reasons:

1. We have been greenlit and as long as the green lighting process still exists it is a very useful barrier against a threatening myriad of mediocre games. Or in other words: If we get ADOM to Steam before this barrier falls exposure will be much more effective and we have a much better chance to be noticed by tons of potential new players. 
2. Being very successful on Steam might mean immortality for ADOM as the possible funding gained might help us to continue developing ADOM for a very long time (far beyond what was achieved in the crowd funding campaign).
3. Tuning ADOM for Steam makes it a much more modern and accessible game and this is good to entice a much larger community. Which in turn is good for ADOM.

Thus all our current work focusses on the milestones laid out for the Steam release.

Specifically

• I am currently working on the new game options settings and next will be tacking lots of internal additions in order to allow for a graphical inventory (and much more - what we call 'the tome of knowledge').
• Jochen is transforming our save file structures. In the future we will be able to have compatible save files, even if this will slow development somewhat. But very important for Steam.
• Zeno and Krys are refining the interface and adding tons of graphical bells and whistles.
• Lucas is churning out scores of sound effects to enriched the game experience tremendously.

Many of the things we right now are doing are far beyond the scope of what was promised in the crowd funding campaign. And this comes at a temporary price: The other important activities (like finally finishing the RPG) currently rest. Not indefinitely but they rest. I have to ask and hope for your continuing patience. You all will receive the physical rewards and I want to have them out before Christmas but as long as we are not yet on Steam we'll focus all energy on that endeavor. Even at the price of delaying other promises more.

As explained above we do this in the hope of being able to work on ADOM far beyond the budget of the crowd funding campaign which should be beneficial and fun for all of us.

Comments welcome, but that's how it is right now.

(BTW, if you are one of the donors receiving physical goods - fear not. I will ask for a confirmation of your current shipping address well in advance of beginning the shipping process, so you are safe, even if you have moved in the meantime).

Below you find a quick teaser to the new ASCII game options menu for ADOM Deluxe to your enjoyment (hopefully ;-) ):

The joys of Steam, part I

Now that we are getting into the details of moving ADOM to Steam we suddenly stumble upon all kinds of weird challenges. I'm amazed about ho simplistic todays gaming seems to be :-) Or maybe we are just too stupid to understand the Steam API.

Just as an example:
The modern world no longer seems to have interesting highscores, just "leaderboards". Meaning: I can store the ID of a player and his score in such a leaderboard. The score is a 32 bit signed integer...and then you store another 32 such integers. But not text. None at all. Such much for making the "leaderboards" interesting to read... we could attach "user generated content" to a leaderboard entry - but you have to load each such piece of content separately so making the leaderboard more interesting by adding user generated content is not even meaningful possible as that content is not meant to be displayed. So we have pretty boring leaderboards with just a username and a score.

I mean, a simple text addition of up to 200 characters or so would have been nice to actually turn leaderboards into something truly interesting to behold. But roguelike games really seem to be incredibly different from the rest of the world. It never would have occurred to me that this even could be a topic...

How will you like that?

The new challenge mode for ADOM Deluxe

Right now I'm working on the new challenge mode for ADOM Deluxe. It's progressing quite nicely and all suggestions from the linked ticket already have been included. I still need to implement the actual in game effects and we yet have to link this up with shared highscores on Steam and so some work on blocking all but the first game result (you will be able to play a challenge more than once but my current idea is to only accept the first game result in the shared highscore; locally you will have a highscore of your own). Here are two screenshots illustrating the progress and hinting at some of the features of the mode...

Fiddling with the ADOM Deluxe menu screens

Right now I am toying with the new design and interaction workflow for the ADOM Deluxe menu screens - in ASCII mode. Once the dust settles and I am happy with the design (and Team ADOM agrees ;-) ) Krys & Co. will turn the ASCII design into a beautiful graphical layout.

Announcing the release of ADOM R50!

Hi everyone!

We are proud to announce ADOM Release 50 - the 50th time a new ADOM version has seen the light of the day since its inception in 1994. While the release is only a rather minor bug fix release it represents an important milestone for one other reason: After a short pause in development activity we now will be moving forward with full force in order to get to Steam as soon as possible.

The roadmap for the ADOM Steam release has been laid out (although some more minor points probably will be added) and there is some pretty extensive work ahead of us. ADOM Deluxe on Steam really will be the best ADOM ever. And we wanted to start working on some of the more extensive changes with a stable version out there.

ADOM R50 is yet another closed prerelease but you can join the circle of prerelease testers if you want - Enjoy!