Adding an event driven architecture to ADOM...

Over Christmas (Merry Christmas to you all - hopefully you had one... I was too busy to post anything ;-) )... ok, I am starting again: Over Christmas I finally had a vision for a complex architectural question that bothered me with ADOM for a very long time. A question so important to me that it originally caused me to start writing ADOM II (JADE). Read on to hear a bit about fascinating new venues that are opening... and have been revitalized by my thoughts about what we are going to do with ADOM in 2016 - team play being one very important thing very dear to me right now... but I'm digressing again ;-)

ADOM Deluxe R64 (version 2.0.3) released on Steam

Greetings everyone!

We just released ADOM Deluxe R64 (version 2.0.3) on Steam a couple of moments ago.

This release contains a couple of long awaited and important enhancements as well as continuing our quest in refining the UI. The most important new features are:

• ADOM now can be played in offline mode. Sorry for that annoyance, but you now can play at any time and anywhere.
• ADOM now contains the option to freely select star signs. This provides even more enjoyment by allowing you to truly play the character combination you want.

Additionally we have focussed on enhancing the user interface, in this release solely by fine-tuning the keyboards commands required to play the game:

• You now can press ENTER to open a list of important context-sensitive commands. You then can select your preferred command from a list instead of having to memorize all key bindings.

• The explore command (activated by pressing minus '-') has been made smarter in that it no longer runs into loops, moves towards unvisited item stacks and generally has more optimized path finding options.
• The use command has become more powerful so that you basically can use all items by just memorizing the 'u' key (although other ways might be faster).
• We have greatly streamlined the online help. New players now need to learn so much less than the version implied in former versions so that they hopefully won't be scared anymore :-)

Finally we have squished more annoying bus so that we hopefully are back to a totally stable version and have defeated the last few remaining steam launch problems (especially under Linux).

As usual the complete changelog is available here.

If you want you now probably just need to memorize three keys (ENTER, minus '-' and '?') plus the cursor/numpad keys for movement and you will be able to play the complete game with that. There are faster and more elegant ways if you step by step learn more keys, but basic gameplay with the keyboard now is extremely simple.

While we know that many of you also are waiting for a better mouse-based user-interface this is our agenda for the next series of releases (which will prepare controller-based console play, an exciting team-based game feature setting I currently like to call 'Rogueleague' (TM) as well as tons of new story elememts).

And now enjoy playing the game - a subsequent post in the next couple of days will summarize our strategy for the next months to come. Expect many exciting new features and releases!

Vote for ADOM to be in the top 10 at IndieDB!

We made the first step - ADOM has entered the top 100 list of games at IndieDB thanks due to your votes. Now your help is needed a second time (I think) - please vote for ADOM to enter the top 10 (or even be #1) at Indie DB:




This is the easiest way to help us getting more visibility which is very important to continue riding the Steam train successfully which in turn allows to add more features for years to come!

So please vote for us while we are preparing the next ADOM Deluxe release - which is going to include the long-awaited star sign selection feature among other awesomeness :-)

Vote for ADOM as the Indie Game of the Year at IndieDB!

Dear community!

After a blazing start for ADOM @ Steam we now are fighting for visibility and recognition remain visible. Please vote for ADOM to become the Indie Game of the Year at IndieDB:

Thanks for your love and trust!
(and thanks to Krys for the awesome image ;-) )

ADOM Beta @ Steam

From now on we will provide beta access to ADOM @ Steam. We have added an explanation on how to this to this blog. Click on the "ADOM Beta @ Steam" in the menu at the top and read the instructions there. And now go playing ;-) !

Simplifying the keyboard layout for casting / zapping

Hi everyone!

Usually I'm wary wary to alter the established ADOM keybindings but one of the good things of our Steam launch is that ADOM gets challenged in regards to usability from new players with a fresh eye on things. I personally enjoy this a lot as I really perceive a big difference in how "the old guard" (the experienced and established ADOM community) and "the fresh blood" (mostly new Steam customers) tackle ADOM and I strongly believe that this is good for the game.

Tonight I noticed a suggestion I never had thought about but that struck me as extremely valid: A new player suggested to swap z (zapping a wand) and Z (casting a spell) as you usually cast a lot more spells than you zap wands. Thus it would make sense to reduce the number of keypresses from two to one for spellcasting by mapping it to z instead of Z.

Although this is one of the "big changes" (in my book) I'm usually hesitant to do, this particular idea strikes me as an excellent and very valid point.

Please give me some opinions :-)

P.S.: The suggestion was accompanied by the idea of allowing letters (a-zA-Z) for quick marking spells (and IMHO then also skills) which I also like greatly.

ADOM R63 (version 2.0.2) released on Steam

Already yesterday we released ADOM R63 (version 2.0.2) on Steam. It was yet another minor bugfix release (which nonetheless fixes one important crash bug). Get the latest update and enjoy the game.

ADOM R62 (version 2.0.1) released on Steam

It's still true...

Sadly our very first release was plagued with some crash bugs and hangers due to some unwise last minute decisions. We believe that we have identified and fixed all these problems and thus are happy to announce ADOM R62 (version 2.0.1) as a Steam release.

ADOM is live on Steam!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/333300

Thanks to the ADOM community for supporting us along this long road, remaining patient and believing in us. We are eternally grateful for the many friends, wonderful discussions and inspiring ideas we met along the way. Now go playing ADOM on Steam and spread the news everywhere!

Final update before the ADOM Steam launch

ADOM is going to launch tomorrow (16th of November 2015) on Steam. 8pm GMT +1 or 11am US pacific time. It will launch at a price point of $14.99, 12.99 EUR and similar regional prices. Today accordingly was yet another day with lots of marketing activities.

No ADOM update today: Pray for Paris

There will be no ADOM news today in this place. Evil exists and once more has reared its ugly face when yesterday a totally evil and damnable force of raving lunatics attacked the poor and peaceful people in the beautiful city of Paris. These forces of Chaos deserve to be erased from the memory of mankind (as well as from the face of our wonderful Earth). We all should stand together today and pray for the poor people of Paris, for the many refugees and victims of these evil cretins all over the world and speak up against those mindless acts of brutality. They will never win. But instead motivate us to fight them even harder and more persistently until there is nothing left of them.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternity. 

Forever.

Countdown to the Steam launch... results of the day

4

Help launching ADOM on Steam (release date announced, too)

The wheels are turning faster: After we yesterday submitted ADOM to Valve for review for the upcoming Steam release, we today got the official "go". That was way faster than we had expected and now we are hurrying to catch up. And we need your help to make this a big success. Which in turn would allow us to continue to work on ADOM for a long time to come (at least we hope so). Here's what you can do...

@ awesomeness

While we are fiddling with the ADOM release date on Steam (more later on) I'd like to post a big thank you for an awesome gift that was sent to me by Chris Williams, a long-time ADOM fan and alls-round-awesome-guy (as far as I know ;-)  ). We chatted on Facebook and he sent me a picture of an awesome metallic @ that he had seen in a local store.

Alea Iacta Est: Steam build finished and submitted for review

Finally. After too many months... we tonight finished the final ADOM build for the Steam release of ADOM (release 61, version 2.0.0). So ADOM now very soon really should pop up on Steam.

ADOM R60 released to the general public: Final release before Steam?

Hi everyone!

Team ADOM is happy to announce the public release of ADOM R60. It is available from the usual download sites, all summarized on our beautiful new download page.

ADOM R60 again is a major bugfix release and we by now hope to have closed all issues that prevented us from going to Steam. All changes and adjustments are listed on our also beautiful new change log page.

Personally I was someone shocked that two days ago we discovered that spell animations for ball spells had not been working for weeks. Neither we nor anybody out there seems to have noticed o_O

So our intention is to do one final (?) round of feedback. If no more major problems are discovered we intend to release R61 to Steam and finally pick up steam (pardon the pun) after that by returning to adding new features instead of just focussing on bug fixing and stabilization. Sadly one bug already has been found during the 9-hour-long deployment process for all 59 (!) versions of ADOM we (meaning Jochen) have to deploy for a public release: the (more) hint in tutorial mode is not working in the way intended.

So we have to ask everyone out there: Test R60 as intensely as possible and try out everything. And then please provide feedback in our issue manager regarding any problems that you might encounter. We really want the Steam version to be the most stable release possible and need your help in this! And we finally want to have it out in the open to restart adding tons of awesome features (which we currently dare not do out of fear of wrecking the initial Steam release).

And now go playing :-) !

Closing in to the Steam release: Indie Game PR agencies?

Hi everyone!

Things have been pretty silent in the past couple of months (except for two releases ;-) ) and we still are not on Steam. The reasons as usual are varied but we now finally are very close to the release as can be seen by the issues to be fixed that still are on our list. We expect one more public release for stability testing and barring any more important problems then should be ready to go.

One of the issues concerns press related stuff (press kit, etc.). I recently was wondering if any of you out there have had experiences with Indie PR agencies (or heard about such experiences). There seem to be a couple of companies out there that specialize on handling public relations for Indie Games and I'm pondering whether this might help the Steam release given our limited time in 2015. Visibility always is good and I might be tempted to invest some bucks in such an agency... does anybody have knowledge about costs, effectiveness, etc?

Thanks for any pointers!
Thomas

ADOM R59 available as a public release

Directly on the heels of ADOM R58 (version 1.15.0) follows ADOM R59 (version 1.15.1).

We messed up the public release by introducing a bug due to an incomplete deactivation of the achievements system. This bug has been fixed and you now are free to go and play ADOM R59 with its awesome slew of new features!

For prerelease testers and Steam beta users nothing has been changed as the bug only applied to the public version (so you can and will continue to play R58 for the time being).

Find all the details in yesterdays post and enjoy the game. IndieDB has been updated first and all the other sources will be up to date within 24 hours (so many binaries to upload - we need to rethink our strategy there ;-) ). And here's the shortest change log ever ;-) Let us know what you think!

ADOM R58 is available now... for everyone!

Team ADOM is very happy to announce the release of ADOM R58 (version 1.15.0). This release is a very peculiar release in many respects:

• On one hand it's not that big as far as changes go. We are still fine-tuning some annoying issues we want to get rid off before the Steam release and which are very hard to fix.
• On the other hand it's our biggest release ever: Jochen built 59 (!!!) different binary versions for both Steam and the public. This probably makes ADOM the most flexible roguelike game ever as far as platform support goes!
• Additionally it's our first public release since ADOM 1.2.0p23 (released on the 10th of May 2014 - more than a year ago). The amount of changes since then is mind-blowing - expect a very different and quite advanced game if you remember that old version: We have fixed hundreds of bugs and added at least as many exciting new details and feature - too many to recount here.
• It's ask the first release with two versions: the Deluxe version for prerelease testers and Steam beta program members on one hand and the Non-Deluxe public version. We are very curious for the reactions to the public version as source code management has become quite difficult and we hopefully didn't introduce any major problems here.
• Oh, and if you wonder about the difference between Deluxe and Non-Deluxe: Visit the new (well, kind of) of ADOM home page. It explains the differences and at some point we will do a version comparison chart.

ADOM is available from several sources:

• Prerelease testers can download it from the usual location.
• If you have a Steam access key the latest version will be updated automatically.
• We have provided download torrents for the various public versions.
• Very soon it will also be available from IndieDB (uploads running right now; they should be available in a couple of hours at most).

While we for the moment have lost some speed due town extremely busy real life (I never worked as much as this year), yet another tragedy on team ADOM and high quality ambitions we still are on track. I've also been wrestling with the final editing of ADOM RPG (finally, it's long overdue).

More updates to come... now play the game and provide feedback :-) !

Thomas & Team ADOM

ADOM R57 has been released

Hi everyone!

We are proud to announce ADOM R57 - yet another closed prerelease test version. It's available from the usual download site for anyone in the closed prerelease tester circle. You can find the change log here.

This release is another bug fix release while we are preparing for the Steam release. Our current plan is to:

• have maybe one other closed bug fix release (if any serious problems are found in R57)
• have a public ADOM release (ADOM 1.2.0p23 is more than a year old and there is so much new stuff that we want to have some public feedback on all the new features before going to Steam).
• then have the Steam release.

Realistically we are half a year behind our time plan and the Steam release probably will be happening mid-June.

In the meantime we are fine tuning the current version and I'm finally back to work on the ADOM RPG release to finally get this shipped. Other commitments of Team ADOM probably will prevent an earlier Steam release (as sad as that is).

Once the initial Steam version is out feature development will pick up speed greatly once again - right now we just are hesitant to introduce major new feature to prevent any new game breaking problems.

Another big change will be that I will end access to the prerelease tester circle at the end of April. All people who have bought access will naturally continue to have access to prerelease versions but we won't allow any new entries. This step will streamline the commercial future of ADOM (commercial via Steam, Gog and others, free for the rest). Prerelease versions will remain limited to the then current circle of testers.

Now go and play R57 - as always we are looking for feedback on its stability and any remaining major issues that might be a problem when releasing to Steam.

Announcing the redesigned ADOM homepage!

Hi folks!

Yet another puzzle piece towards the Steam release finally is live. Krys has redesigned the ADOM homepage and given it a modern and fresh look which I've totally fallen in love with.

There are probably quite a few kinks left to be worked out and we plan to expand it greatly in the future but for now it should be sufficient to present ADOM in a modern, fresh and vivid manner.

In the future the following additions are planned:

• As soon as we have a new video up for the Steam release it also will be embedded with the play button on the front page.
• We might decide to randomize the player quotes on the website if we receive more good quotes that we can use.
• The new home page will be the foundation for the extended website and the community site we are going to develop after the Steam release. Major features of the community website will include:
• an event Stream displaying events from games played while online (e.g. character creation, deaths, achievements, unlocked, special levels discovered, ...
• shared global high scores
• community statistics (e.g. races & classes played, levels achieved, ...)

Let us know what you think - all feedback is welcome as usual!

Thomas & Team ADOM

Announcing ADOM R56...

Hi everyone! We are approaching the ADOM Steam release... R56 hopefully will be one of the very last releases before Steam (I still expect one or two more but right now we focus only on fixing serious technical issues and stabilizing features for Steam - sadly the devil remains in the details).

Announcing ADOM R55...

...for both Steam beta-testers and prerelease testers. There it is. Quite unexpected. I'll make no further estimates about how many more versions there will be before the public Steam release ;-). We broke memory management internally in R54 in certain situations which might have been responsible for all kinds of crashes. And it broke skill usage under certain circumstances. As usual the change log is here, you can get the non-Steam version via prerelease access and you already have a code if you are an eligible member of the original crowdfunding campaign.

Axes High!

ADOM R54 released to both Steam Beta testers and prerelease testers!

Team ADOM is very proud to announce ADOM R54 - our next step towards the public Steam release! We have put tons of work into fine-tuning various things, among them...

ADOM EULA for Steam (Draft)

One of the many rather annoying things to handle when becoming more professional is to tackle the various legal and tax issues involved with selling software. In a rather regulated state like Germany these things (to me) sometimes seem to be more difficult than in other countries (or maybe other people just care less about repercussions ;-) ).

Here's on such bit... the proposed EULA (End User License Agreement) for ADOM on Steam. Feedback of any kind is very welcome as this is just a draft:

Happy New Year (& short review of 2014)

A Happy New Year to everyone!

2015 is upon us and I am very determined to make this the best ADOM year ever (together with my compatriots in Team ADOM).