Let the regular blog updates commence!

Sprite update preview to catch your attention ;)

Greetings ADOM fans! Krys here, also known as Ravenmore. I'm Lead Artist on Team ADOM, which means I direct a talented team of artists consisting of myself....yeah. I know.

I'd like to take a minute to explain our new blog schedule planned for 2017.

So what's going on? 

TL;DR: More developers on the blog. Weekly posts. First status update at the bottom. 
Read on to check out what's in store for this blog in 2017 :)

As Thomas mentioned last week, Jochen and I have been invited to co-author the ADOM development blog. The goal is to break Team ADOM's bad habit of long silences between updates and maintain a more consistent link between the Team and ADOM fans (yes, if you're reading this, that likely includes you! :))

Cool! So what's going to change?

What you're all waiting for are still Thomas' posts of course. He'll be the one anouncing major new releases, future plans and posting thoughts and musings about ADOM's design. So nothing's changed in this regard. Indiegogo backers will also be notified about these important posts via the backer email list - again, no change here. 

However, we'd like to keep you guys in the loop in a more regular fashion, so inbetween these important annoucements you'll now see more behind-the-scenes development posts written by Jochen and myself.

Uh, okay, so what can we expect in these new updates?

For the programmers, engineers and  technically-minded science affictionados among you Jochen will be posting about what he's been working on lately. This often involves (but is not limited to) our backend, build system, task organization, team communication and other critical, if not very glorious, parts of every day life of an ADOM developer. These might not necessarily follow a very regular schedule - Jochen is a busy guy and will offer a short writeup of his recent exploits whenever time permits (and whenever there's something cool to write about!).

Now, if both Thomas and Jochen don't have a fresh post up their sleeves, you'll get a Saturday update from none other than my humble self. By nature my posts will be about the graphical side of things, because that's the part that, well, you know... I actually know about. I'll do my best to explain what's going on in other departments, but I don't always have the whole picture so bear with me :)

After a while this might give the impression that we're focusing on graphics somehow, so to be clear: Team ADOM is still focused around the core game content (and remaining crowdfunding stuff!). I just have some extra time to write an update and I happen to know mostly about sprites/tiles, so that's all :)

Alright, so give us an update already!
Sure thing! Current team status hasn't changed much from Thomas' last update:

- TB    : Wounded.     Task: Recovery and Healing Spells.
- Jochen: 100% Health  Task: Backend magic. Build system*.
- Krys  : 100% Health  Task: Sprites for animation**.
- Zeno  : 100% Health  Task: Animation engine.

- Lucas : 100% Health  Task: Music. More music.

* You've probably heard earlier about our new version control and build scheme. It took a while to set up, but hopefully we can offer more frequent updates. In practice we can publish an ADOM version with just one separate complete feature, instead of having to wait for a full set of features to be ready when we work on them simultaneously.

** I'm also overhauling our sprite set for better overall quality and consistency as well as fixing sprites that are not true to their description. See issue #4646 for details on tile-description mismatches. Hopefully I can do a writeup on this, it's a really neat process =) And I'm really happy with the way ADOMs dungeons look when monsters are mingling about, blinking and generally being 1000% less static.

End result for a single sprite is a somewhat smoother version of this early prototype:

Early animated orc pitch :) 

So that's it from me for this week. I'll see you guys next time :)