A late Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah or just plain wonderful days!

Hi community!

I'm shamefully late this year but Christmas was quicker here than expected. So I hope that you all already had a couple of wonderful days with friends and family and maybe are enjoying a couple more!

Sadly we didn't manage to get ADOM to Steam but our initial beta version yielded so much awesome feedback that we decide to take the time and fix things that needed fixing. Thus I currently would expect a mid-January release for ADOM on Steam. At least others seem to be late, too - I haven't seen any results from the IndieDB Indie of the Year contest so far (or I am too tired to find it).

I'm consoled by the fact that various postings seem to indicate that it is better to release a game during non-hot-spot times (like Christmas, contrary to my line of thinking).

That's enough babbling from me - I'm back to work on ADOM and hope that you enjoy the final days of the year!

Thomas

ADOM R53 now available... for Steam beta testers

Hi everyone!

This is new: The first ADOM release (R53, version 1.11.0) available on Steam first. Mostly this happens for two reasons:

• We want to get to Steam ASAP and thus need to receive as much feedback as soon as possible for that version.
• The build process is getting more and more involved and thus it takes more time to build all variants. Prerelease testers will be next, promise!

Regarding the Steam version:

• It's a closed beta available to everyone who donated $40 or more (in whatever partitioning) during our crowdfunding campaign.
• All such donors have received a Steam key that is available through the ADOM self service portal. Follow the instructions there to log in.
• I have created a new discussion group too discuss peculiarities regarding the Steam version.
• We would like to get as much feedback as possible - please use our ticket system for any bugs you find and for any improvements peculiar to Steam you might want to see.

This very first Steam version definitely has beta character:

• There probably will be many bugs as we changed tons of stuff in the past couple of weeks to improve the UI. Please report them as you find them!
• There probably are many things we could improve, especially for the general Steam populace and for an improved UI. Let us know about those, too.
• Here is the usual list of changes.

The real Steam release is going to happen when we feel that we have a very good first stable release. Lots of features didn't make it into the first Steam release (because that would delay it for even more weeks if not months) - see our advanced roadmap for those.

What we need: We are looking for all feedback we can get but some areas are of particular interest to us:

• We want to get as many suggestions as possible on what to improve to make the Steam launch a huge success (naturally).
• We would love to hear feedback on mouse-based play. What needs to be improved to make pure mouse-based play a better experience (we probably won't be able to all of that right away but we would like to cover the most important areas).
• Please try the new message buffer modes (adjustable by Ctrl-nm), the various display modes (Ctrl-nd), the tutorial mode, the various other game modes, ghosts, achievements, etc. We want to hear your experiences with that, too!
• And everything else you deem important.

We are on the verge of a new ADOM age and it's now or never... greatness or oblivion ;-)

Oh, and please do not forget to vote for ADOM as the game of the year at IndieDB!!!

And now get your Steam codes and start playing!

Now it's all or nothing: Vote for ADOM as roguelike of the year 2014!

We have made it into the final 100 at IndieDB - out of thousands of games. But now it's all or nothing: Please vote once more for ADOM so that we can take the title of roguelike of the year 2014:

http://www.indiedb.com/events/2014-indie-of-the-year-awards/top100

And please share the news and get everyone you know to vote!

Thanks so much. I'm now back to preparing R53...

The new ADOM title score

Don't miss out on the most awesome new title score of ADOM, devised by our sound wizard Lucas Dieguez.

And here are the lyrics by Lucas. Thanks so much to Robert Estep for helping to refine them!

Ancient valleys sorrounded by mountain sides

Trying hard to break free from eternal dark

Elder demons have risen to conquer us

Driving us off our lands 

Heroes, warriors and mages united fall

In the purple of chaos they meet their doom

Born to die in a battle to save us all

From the end of times

Yet the prophecies tell of a savior of sword, spell and might

From the Drakalor chain he would rise to free the land

Thus the world shall survive to the whim of 

The one to rule all...

Vote for ADOM as Indie Game of the Year at IndieDB

Hi everyone!

Please support ADOM by voting for it as Indie Game of the Year 2014 at IndieDB (just press the red button on the voting banner).

Initial ADOM achievement implementation finished

Before going to bed I just wanted to let you know that I finished the initial ADOM achievement implementation a couple of minutes ago. There is some more fine-tuning to be done. Nonetheless we are going to start with 77 achievements to be unlocked on Steam.

And here's a sample screenshot of the second achievement I unlocked:

And as I write this I suddenly remember another batch of (not very complex) achievements I wanted to add and had forgotten about (gaining level 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50). I still need titles for that (something like "Wanderer", "Veteran", "Champion", "Hero", "Legend" and "Demiurge" maybe).

But now I need to sleep and will add these ones tomorrow ;-)

Achievement design in ADOM

The next big topic with ADOM is the design of an achievement system that not just feels tacked onto the game but actually adds to the overall experience and helps new players getting into the game and attached to it. Overall I plan to have a limited number of highly interesting, guiding and helpful achievements that are "not just there". I have read quite a few articles on achievement design (especially from Gamasutra, thanks to Sascha Schnitzer for the initial pointer) and below I first will try to define the guidelines for feature design in ADOM and then apply them to all the suggestions that were provided by fans as well as the ideas that have gathered by now on my hard drive.

Latest ASCII enhancements: New message statistic modes and Team ADOM page

As the title says we are ramping up for the first Steam release and doing so includes finishing some more UI enhancements. First of all ADOM has two new configurations for displaying statistics and messages:

The first new mode groups all data at the top:

The idea is to need to look into but one place for everything. I'm not yet 100% happy with it. I guess I will color the statistics bar in dark gray to have a better contrast to the messages. I have not yet grown accustomed to this mode but I can see the benefits.

The second new mode abbreviates statistics at the top and introduces and endless scrolling message queue at the bottom:

This mode will be truly relevant in tiled display mode (with graphics) and exists in ASCII mostly to keep things similar. In finished tiled mode you will have a modern graphical display for all statistics at the top and the messages will be overlaid with the game graphics at the bottom scrolling upwards (with more than just four lines - probably in a smaller font and with more like 8-10 lines... but we are still working on that).

Sadly there still are some kinks with that mode as the old message code was very hard to configure for these new settings. I'm working on the remaining bugs and hope that this will not steal away too much valuable time from the work for the Steam release.

Finally we have a new "Team ADOM screen" accessible from the main screen that credits all my amazing compatriots:

The graphical version should be a lot more awesome but it just seemed appropriate to also have an ASCII version :-) (the ordering BTW is semi-random and changes with every display in order to give almost everyone a different spotlight each time).

This week I'm on vacation. Work vacation that is. My wife is on a conference and the whole week has been reserved to work on ADOM from he early morning up late into the night to get as much work done as possible. Wish me luck and few bugs ;-)

ADOM Release 52 now available for download

We are happy to announce ADOM Release 52. Mostly it's a bugfix release with some pretty important fixes:

• Challenge games now should work correctly and are better explained in the game.
• Saving in story mode now works correctly (e.g. you can save in a game and restore the game even after dying; results will be logged in a separate highscore list).
• We have adjusted the save file format but your old save files should be compatible (make a backup copy nonetheless just to be sure). This should be the first time we successfully use the new "upwards compatible save file functionality introduced in R52).

Additionally release 52 contains another couple of tuned features and fixed bugs, see the change log for the complete details.

Finally release 52 finishes another discussion: The internal version number is 1.10.0. Thus it now is clear that after 9 comes 10 and we no longer will restart ADOM 0.9.9 Gamma 6 prerelease 3 trends or whatever. The current plan is that the first Steam release will be ADOM 2.0.0. Hopefully before Christmas.

If you are not yet a prerelease tester use the chance to become one. For all prerelease testers the latest version can be downloaded in the usual place.

ADOM Release 51 now available for download

After a very long period of silence (due to complicated internal work that needed to be done for Steam, one vacation, a short period of work overload and many other factors) things now are moving much faster again.

We are proud to announce ADOM Release 51 (version 1.9.0). Here's the change log. This release still is work in progress as we are trying very hard to get ADOM ready for Steam (it would be a shame to miss Christmas time on Steam). Sadly there is still a ton of stuff to be done (and tax questions regarding the crowd funding campaign from the German tax offices don't really simplify my life...).

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!

Why do *you* love ADOM?

Yesterday I had an intense design and architecture meeting with Jochen to prepare ourselves for the final push towards Steam (which is the single most important thing we need to do next to hopefully ensure the continued and long-lasting resurrection of ADOM). One of the many topics we addressed in our milestone plan was the question of redesigning www.adom.de (which now has a totally antiquated look and definitely needs to transport a different message).

As I envision www.adom.de to be te future central portal hook to move from their into the Steam shop (with GOG and Desura to follow), to Facebook, Youtube and Twitter it also needs to answer one important question: Why would people newly pointed towards ADOM want to buy and play it. And thus I find it appropriate to ask the most important question of them all to you:

Why do *you* love ADOM?

Answers in the comments are very welcome and if you can, then try to focus on the top three most important aspects for you, straight from your heart.

Thanks for providing your opinions!

P.S.: If we receive awesome quotes we might consider using them for the website. If you don't want that to happen please add a small note. We have not yet finalized the plans for that but we have been talking about it.

More feedback to animated spell effects, please!

Hi everyone!

Below you find a small demo video prepared by Krys in order to illustrate some of the new animated ADOM spell effects. We are looking for feedback, especially also from the folks who do not have access to the prereleases.

   

 So, what do you think?

ADOM Release 49 (version 1.8.1) is out!

After ADOM release 48 proved to be pretty buggy and unstable we are proud to present ADOM release 49 which now is available for download for all prerelease testers. Besides a load of bug fixes the latest release now also includes awesome animations for mind craft powers (in NotEye). And now go playing!

P.S.: We were a bit disappointed to not receive more feedback about the new spell animations as we think that they are pretty awesome ;-)

Spell animations

Right now Team ADOM is heavily working on adding animations for spell casting. Krys had this awesome idea of adding spell sigils to the animation effects and while I do not want to share the animated glory yet, here's a preview of the sigils to be used:

Looking for more feedback on (more) handling

Obviously my attempt to handle many messages in ADOM R48 has not been that good as an idea. See this bug report. Please comment on the questions I raise. Other approaches (except for a much larger message buffer which is difficult outside of NotEye) are welcome.

ADOM Release 48 is now available (WTF?!?)

Greetings everyone!

After weeks of happiness and grief I am proud to announce ADOM Release 48 - already a big step forward in a quite obvious way as we have renamed the version numbering.

Slow return

Just a short notice... after the deep grief of the past weeks (which still is far from overcome) I nonetheless will try my best to return to normality. As a first sign he blog colors are back to normal.

My worst day in the 21st century

Today at 1:37pm my mother left this planet. She died peacefully in sleep and I was with her till the end for which I am very grateful. Right now the pain is unbelievable and as there was so much ADOM communication in the past of couple of weeks I felt it necessary to blog about this for two reasons:

1. I'll be gone for a moment while I come to terms with the unspeakable grief I feel right now. As I promised updates about our Steam roadmap, the state of the ADOM Lite RPG I'm sorry to say that right now other things are more important and I'll return to these topics later on (in a week or two).
2. My mother actually is part of ADOM history in a special way: While she didn't care at all about computers, computer games and probably only has a very abstract idea what all the fuzz was about she for many years was the primary recipient of all the hundred and hundreds and hundreds of postcards I received from the ADOM postcard quest. While she probably wondered more than once about those crazy things we received, I believe she was quite proud about her son having created something that meant enough to so many people to make them send postcards from all over the world (including Antarctica). While the mailing address already had changed for a while I still regularly showed her the latest cards and she always smiled.

With that I'm going to black out for now. 

Fare thee well, Mama - I'll build a monument in ADOM to immortalize your role in the postcard quest, too.

Thanks for listening.

PC Gamer reports ADOM Greenlighting

PC Gamer has a short story about ADOM (and other games) being greenlit. Personally I'm not that opposed to Greenlight so far as many of the commenters seem to be as I believe that many of the alternatives could be far worse. But it will be interested to see how things will proceed.

Nice review by FreeIndieGames.org

Today we received a very nice review from FreeIndieGames.org. I'm particularly in love with their selection for the screenshot :-) It seems so awesomely appropriate :-D

Centralized PC data management for the upcoming ADOM release

Below you find a demo of the upcoming centralized data management for all the important data screens for the player character:


The basic idea is to give new players an easy way to access all the data without having to learn 10-12 commands. I'm still pondering whether to remove the top line (with the player name, level and stuff) in order to save one line but on the other hand we might also consider increasing the standard number of lines on the screen. We'll see. Comments and feedback as usual is very welcome!

ADOM has been greenlit on Steam!!! (hooray and thanks!!!)

On the 11th of June, 2014, we made the next big step: ADOM has been among the 75 titles to be green lit today!

Our campaign ran for a total of 27 days before being greenlit.

In the name of Team ADOM I just can say: Thank you all so much for the incredible amount of support and feedback we have received over the past couple of weeks. Once again it has been an amazing journey and now we are at a very important and interesting point: The jump to Steam.

I yet have to validate this but I believe that we scored a number of records for the roguelike genre on Steam (as far as I know - confirmation coming later - so much to do now ;-) ):

1. ADOM is the oldest roguelike game to ever make it to Steam (one of the foundational four or five roguelike games, depending on how you count).
2. ADOM is the first ASCII game ever to make it to Steam (although we mostly push the graphical mode for obvious reasons).
3. ADOM probably is the roguelike game which needed the shortest time to be greenlit on Steam (this I still need to check - sorry if I am wrong on this one ;-), comments welcome).
4. ADOM probably is the oldest computer game still in development to ever make it to Steam (20 years as of today).

We are awed and we promise that we will do everything we can to make the first Steam release the most awesome ADOM release ever. Currently we are putting a very strong focus on modernizing the UI and making ADOM an awesome gaming experience for a much wider audience (without watering down the strengths of ADOM or its depth of play). As ADOM development (also on Steam) will continue for a very long time to come improvements will be incremental (as usual) but we are fully aware of the importance of a gleaming, shining, nay, radiating first release on Steam. So I guess sleep will have to wait for a couple of months ;-)

Thanks again to all of you - you are the most awesome community ever!!! Thanks also to Team ADOM from me personally once more, specifically to Jochen, Krys, Lucas and Zeno - it has been an inspiring and great journey so far and I am very much looking forward to the exciting ride ahead of us!!!

Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM

Demo: Showing some of the new movement commands

One of the biggest advantages of our Steam Greenlight campaign so far has been the tremendous motivation from non-roguelike-players to increase usability. And yes, I know, many fans from the community pushed us into that direction, too (yeah, Darren, I'm e.g. looking at you ;-) ).

I already blogged about the new movement commands I am working on right now and today I'd like to show a little demo:


IMHO they are awesome and I can't remember playing without them (being a lazy guy - if you want to optimize your movements there probably can be more optimized movements occasionally - although e.g. exploration mode is trying very hard to be very efficient).

Just saying...

Nice coverage from Kotaku (Australia) for ADOM

And another nice article about ADOM from Kotaku (Australia) - thanks to Logan for standing up for roguelikes :-) ! Go read it!

Nice coverage from TIGSource for ADOM

We now also have been covered on TIGSource - thanks to Derek for picking up on our move towards Steam and all the stuff we are trying to achieve with ADOM! Go read the article. Now! And vote for us on Steam Greenlight if you still haven't done so!

http://www.tigsource.com/2014/06/09/resurrected-adom/

And BTW: ADOM can also use more votes from you on TIGdb - thanks ;-)

Awesome new movement commands coming up (and more)

At least I think so. I shouldn't be talking about features that are not yet fully implemented but as I'm going to bed soon and things look as if they will work out in a most awesome way by tomorrow I just had to talk about it :-)

More version numbering thoughts...

After my initial post about revising the ADOM version numbering scheme I have taken quite a bit of time contemplating all the feedback. This morning I tried to revise the version numbering scheme for ADOM and came up with the following (probably as a compromise of the various options given as feedback):

• The official title for my current build is "Ancient Domains Of Mystery (release 48)". Displayed on the title screen and in the windows title. Derived from a total of 48 releases (including the next one).
• The internal version number displayed after pressing 'V' is "Ancient Domains Of Mystery (release 48, build 48a, version 1.8.0)".

The following underlying rules have been used to get to this complicated level:

• Release is just a runnnig number that does nothing but count the number of released versions (hence 48, hopefully I didn't miscount).
• Version is the version number adjusted for the new rules which state that MAJOR (1) will always remain fixed for ADOM, minor (currently 8) will be advanced with each public release that creates incompatibilities (and we could discuss if it then should be 5 or 6 or 7) and MINOR (currently once more 0) is only adjusted for changes that are very minor and do not invalidate save files.
• The numerical part is advanced to the release number, if MINOR or MAJOR changes. The character part is advanced if PATCH changes (and then only the character part).

Jochens first feedback was "Too complicated. I don't like it.".

Which brought me back full circle to the arguments exchanged in the original post:

• I want to reflect the advances state of ADOM (hence release 48).
• Some people prefer MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH schemes (thus the internal version number 1.8.0).
• Some people just want to have a little more information but are happy with not being flooded with meaningless information - hence "build 48a".

Now I just could go with the build number - but wouldn't that be kind of equal to dropping the "1." from the version number and just going with the second and third number? So 8.0? (or 7.0 or 6.0 - the numbers right now are not yet important)

I guess I shouldn't try to decide this in a democratic way ;-)

Adding even more context to mouse commands

In a recent post I already blogged about the upcoming context menus for ADOM. Right now I am busy upgrading the context intelligence so that commands really are only offered if they can be executed. This might sound simpler than it actually is because some commands in ADOM check a dozen of preconditions and all that needs to be re-used in the context command selection algorithm. Which again sounds simpler than it is as ADOMs ancient codebase never was prepared for such things. But by the end of today it would be there for all commands. And there will be other side effects (that gamers probably expect but that cause headaches for programmers working on an ancient code base - like me ;-)...

It's been a good day: Covered by Rock, Paper, Shotgun :-)

Finally we also have been covered by Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Thanks, Adam! Hopefully this will give our Steam Greenlight campaign another much needed push! And I promise to everyone commenting on that thread that we right now are trying really hard to make the new ADOM UI an awesome experience for old timers and new players alike! The recent comments from new players have been very inspiring! (and yeah, old guard, thou hast been heard, too - wait for the things to come - it will be awesome!)

New context menus in ADOM

Currently improving usability for new ADOM players is our top focus. One of the improvements will be context menus (right click on a position and you will get a list of prioritized commands possible for said location). There is still a lot we need to do (the command execution is not yet very intelligent but I'm right now discussing a very powerful approach for that with Jochen which probably could easily be added for all commands) but here's a first screenshot of what will be in the first Steam version (and intermediate test versions - just not yet fully implemented... so much to do;-) ):

Currently context menus also are limited to the graphical version. ASCII seems to be more for the hardcore fans and my current impression is that for now we should focus more on the graphical versions. Naturally at some point such features will be pulled over to ASCII, too. But for now the focus is on creating the most awesome graphical roguelike out there (as far as usability goes).

New ADOM @ Steam Greenlight logo

I just would like to point you to Krys' new "ADOM @ Steam Greenlight" logo. Again I totally love his awesome ASCII magic :-)

Vote for us - ADOM needs every vote it can get!

New video review of ADOM by James Allen

James Allen kindly did a video review of ADOM on his Youtube channel. I'm very happy about him as a non-power-roguelike-gamer taking the time getting into ADOM. I really love various aspects about his video as I learned quite a bit about the problems a game like ADOM poses to new people we might try to attract.

Several of these problems are well-known but others only now really left an impression upon me. So, thanks James, for a having a deeper look at ADOM!

Player ghosts

I would like to introduce the latest new feature in ADOM: Player ghosts. This is the first big feature for the planned Steam release (and also the fist big Deluxe only feature). More than 2,000 lines of new code hopefully will make player ghosts a memorable and fun feature.

Minor setback: ADOM @ Steam Greenlight (fallen from 9 to 10)

Short update: ADOM has fallen from rank 9 to rank 10 on Steam Greenlight. As competition is pretty fierce at the top this was to be expected, especially given the fact that it's quite hard to raise more awareness for roguelikes (after a good start).

So what can be done? Probably not much right now if the press doesn't pick up some cool ADOM story. What can you do? My impression is that the number of favorites and followers also factors into the Steam ranking - so if you already voted for ADOM you might consider also marking it as a favorite and following it ;-) Maybe this gives us another nice push.

Thanks!

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.

Announcing ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 22...

Hi everyone!

I'm happy to announce the release of ADOM 1.2.0p22. A mere eight days after the (sadly quite unstable) release of ADOM 1.2.0p21 this prerelease hopefully will prove to be a lot more stable and enjoyable.