I'm somewhat late with my planned Ultimate ADOM update... here we go with bits and pieces.
But first the reason for being late:
Actually we are getting prepared for Roguelike Celebration 2018 in San Francisco. There we will show a first live demo of Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos, our upcoming attempt at building the ultimate roguelike dungeon crawler in a world with details never seen before. (well, maybe in Dwarven Fortress... in some respects... but we are working on building an easily accessible game with tons of depth and surprises ;-) ).
While preparations are underway we decided that we will start seriously speaking about Ultimate ADOM beginning with the presentations at Roguelike Celebration 2018. One part of this is that we currently are preparing a separate new website for Ultimate ADOM that also will contain a blog so that we have a focussed communcation channel for all news regarding Ultimate ADOM.
We have spent the past 8+ months building the underlying game engine for Ultimate ADOM (called AGE for ADOM Game Engine) which in turn is using Unity as a technical platform so that we can more easily ship Ultimate ADOM on many platforms.
AGE is a platform agnostic game engine controlling the game flow and everything that exists in the worlds of Ultimate ADOM. It's Unity-inpendent (although we have no plans to use something other than Unity) and uses an Entity Component System architecture for modeling everything - with refinements to the basic architectural approach to allow us to be even more flexible and build worlds of incredible depth.
The past months have been spent on building many of the basic features needed for a deep game (and there are still quite a few months ahead of us for building more of that).
While I now could start talking about our detailed skeleton infrastructure modeling the shape of bodies (and allowing for amuptations and grafting), our breath-taking new magic system (in which I just added spells for animating inanimate objects), our system for possessing/controlling arbitrary monsters, our growing in-game physics simulation allowing more and more complex interactions with the environment (from freezing water over boiling it to steam clouds, push mechanics and more) I'll defer doing so until we start presenting stuff at the beginning of October.
Additionally we are heavily working on our graphics and sounds for the game as well as lots of concept art (some of which I already posted).
Please follow my Twitter account where I occasionally tease things if you feel you need infos now... everything else will have to wait a little more. Next week we will be finalizing our communcation plans for the weeks and months to come and then we'll see!
Kind regards
Thomas Biskup
P.S.: Here's a brief summary of things I posted on Twitter that you might have missed:
A short video demo of bits and pieces of the new ASCII animation system:
Just finished the basic #ASCII #animation #framework for Ultimate #ADOM. The video is not perfect but should give a basic idea of what it can do. Will next be used when targetting spells (and more stuff in the future). #indiedev #roguelike #gamedev pic.twitter.com/vMZC7FsTsK— Thomas Biskup (@adom_dev) 8. August 2018
Genders, genders, genders:
Modeling bodyparts:
Our beautiful ASCII tooltips:
Example from a recent internal test/bugfix session:
ReplyDeleteHigh Elf Wizard casts Animate Object on an arrow on the ground.
Then swaps minds with the arrow, so we're now in control of an animated item.
Now we're screwed because an arrow has no hands = can't 'h'andle things (like open doors). So stuck in a room with a body posessed by an animated arrow.
That's when the animated-arrow-turned-high-elf-wizard realized he (it?) can cast fireball spells...
It's going to be great =)
Is that graphic from the game so far? Those spiders look awesome! I like that look so far. I’m a fan of oldish school looking stuff.
DeleteIt looks really good, btw. I was wondering if those pics from your twitter were for the game Raven.
Thanks! :) Yes, that's the current look. Screenshots don't do it justice, we really harnessed the power of Spine and Unity to make UADOM better than ever. Dynamic lights, monsters casting shadows, cool particle effects, the whole lot :)
DeleteTwitter thing is something entirely separate, but there will be more UADOM stuff on my social channels after the Roguelike Celebration (likely a bit sooner).
Oh man I love what I’ve seen so far. The body part stuff looks great, and the spells and stuff so far look awesome!
ReplyDeleteOne thing I hope to hear about is what you plan on in terms of the open world in the main game. I love what caves of qud has done for its world building in terms of randomized areas, histories, and such along with the main story areas. There’s so much to explore, and I’m hoping that U Adom has something like that. Do you think we will hear about that at the celebration?
Not yet sure as we currently are focussing on making Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos the ultimate roguelike dungeon crawler. So the first setting still is limited to a mega-dungeon, not the full world (in order for us to be able to finish something worthwhile in the near future ;-) ).
DeleteWill it be possible to run the game from an actual text terminal? Say, gnome-terminal for example?
ReplyDelete