Level advancement and racial abilities in the upcoming ADOM RPG

Here's a link to an interesting blog post about how we try to make level advancement and racial choices extremely meaningful in the ADOM RPG.

Merry Christmas!

Hi everyone!

Team ADOM sends our kindest Christmas greetings to everyone out there (wether you are celebrating Christmas, something else or nothing at all): Enjoy love, peace and happiness and play your part in bringing more of these qualities into the world! Have a great time with your beloved ones, remember those that can't be with us anymore and live your life to the fullest!

Updated: Because I was in typical Christmas hurry I totally forgot to link the awesome Christmas Jam audio soundtrack Lucas composed specifically for Christmas 2018! Enjoy! (and bonus points if you recognize the theme ;-) )

Will the ADOM RPG just be yet another D&D clone?

Read the answers to this import question here.

Announcing the full-featured ADOM RPG

It's shortly before Christmas and sometimes wishes are fulfilled earlier than expected: We are going to release the ADOM Roleplaying Game starting next year.

To my own surprise the most requested "ADOM feature" in a long while has been access to the ADOM (Lite) RPG. The ADOM Lite RPG is a pen & paper version allowing you to relive the adventures of ADOM in a classical pen & paper experience. It was initially created during the "Resurrect ADOM" crowdfunding campaign as a highly limited edition never to be reprinted after the campaign. A promise we kept. Which caused a lot of grief to many people who missed the campaign and would love to play the pen & paper game.

We are keeping the original promise - but now are going to release a new pen & paper roleplaying game based on the Open Game License (OGL). Rewritten and redesigned from scratch,  the OGL ensures ADOM RPG's compatibility with a plethora of old school renaissance (OSR) games out there. At the same time we improve upon the standards of most OSR games by wrapping the rules in a beautifully laid out set of two rulebooks with immensely readable typography and tons of amazing artwork.

The ADOM RPG will be kickstarted in January 2019 (yes, we are going to do two Kickstarters, the first one for the pen & paper ADOM RPG, the second one a little later for Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos).

Starting today the initial version of the ADOM RPG website is up now at https://www.adom-rpg.com - a lot more content will be added over the coming weeks (and we will improve on the website

layout). The roleplaying game will be published as two manuals - the Player's Handbook (PHB) and the Gamemaster's Guide (GMG). Both will be available in full color printings and bound in hardcover. We probably also will make available budget B/W softcover versions. The Kickstarter (which will start in January 2019) will offer the cheapest access possible to both manuals (print at cost basically). Stretch goals hopefully will add a lot more content (and might yield adventure modules and more).

See the samples section of our new website (and the single image below) for impressions on how the ADOM RPG is going to look like.

Thanks for listening - we are looking forward to your feedback!

Celebrating the 100th ADOM release ever!

Hi everyone!

We are proud to announce the release of ADOM 3.3.2 as a general release on Steam and GOG (currently we have a 10% sale on GOG)! This release marks a numerical milestone - it is the 100th release of ADOM since its inception.

ADOM 3.3.2 is a bugfix release increasing stability and providing a number of bug fixes to annoying bugs.  You can find the changelog in the usual location.

We soon hope to release ADOM 3.3.2 as a general public release on IndieDB, too.

In the meantime you can vote for ADOM on IndieDB - ADOM has entered the top 100 of the games at IndieDB and we'd love to win in the roguelike category - so please vote for us!

It's voting time (IndieDB)

Hi everyone!

It's this special time of the year... were you can vote for your favorite game on IndieDB!

We'd love you to vote for ADOM in order to help it endure and thrive. So if you enjoy ADOM and want to see more of it, it would be great if you could cast your ballot in our favor!

Click here and cast your vote!

Thanks!
Thomas & Team ADOM

Modding

There have been a number of moddability requests for ADOM over the years. For Ultimate ADOM we have specific plans. Learn about the modding side of Ultimate ADOM in this post.

Factions in Ultimate ADOM

Hi everyone!

Update 10/12/2018: Link fixed!

Quick cross-post pointing to the latest information about factions in Ultimate ADOM.

Factions in Ultimate ADOM: Andor Drakon

Hi everyone!

Crosspost to our new blog here: Be introduced to factions in Ultimate ADOM with Andor Drakon himself and hear the Chaos God speak to you!

Happy reading!

Moving forward: ADOM @ GOG & New UA website & Roguelike Celebration 2018

Hi everyone!

As we are getting very close to Roguelike Celebration 2018 things are moving forward. Today I'm very proud to announce two things (and mention a third):

ADOM Deluxe finally arrives on GOG

ADOM 3.3.1 now turned into a public release on Steam

ADOM 3.3.1 proved stable enough to be turned into a public release on Steam. If you tried 3.3.1 as a Steam beta, remember switching back to the public release branch.

Enjoy!

Announcing ADOM 3.3.1 as a Steam beta

Hi everyone!

Today we are proud to announce ADOM 3.3.1 as a Steam beta release. As usual you can find the instructions for activating the beta version here.

ADOM 3.3.1 is a bugfix release for our 3.3.0 release. It fixes some annoying crash bugs as well as resurrection powers that failed to work with multi-turn actions. You can find the changelog here.

Additionally a word of warning for MacOS Mojave users: On some configurations ADOM seems to start with a black window frame - moving the window once seems to fix this in all cases. We suspect a bug in the underlying SDL library we use. From what we can see there is a bugfix for that in the SDL repository but no official SDL release yet. We apologize and will try to provide a new release as soon as possible.

And now happy hacking!

Thomas & Team ADOM

Announcing ADOM 3.3.0 as a Steam Beta

Hi everyone!

After a long pause we are proud to announce ADOM 3.3.0 as a Steam Beta version (initially). To activate the beta (and switch back later to the stable branch read these instructions).

The biggest change in ADOM 3.3.0 is a major addition to the play comfort:

The graphical version now sports floating texts that indicating important events in the game. There's a multitude of things getting reported:

• damage suffered
• hitpoints recovered
• critical hits
• state changes (e.g. becoming poisoned, stunned, hungry, confused, Strength of Atlas waning and so on)
• indicators for items on the ground
• and more.

IMHO this is a huge UI improvement because in the graphical version the texts in the message buffer become less and less important and you can focus on the PC and the immediate environment. To me this single change completely alters the way I interact with ADOM in the graphical mode and I fell in love with it from the very first moment. In retrospective I feel sorry for not having added this much sooner.

Another (far minor) change is another round of buffing the boss monsters. We still are trying to find the right middle ground for them. Let us know what you think about the latest change.

Additionally ADOM 3.3.0 features dozens of bug fixes and minor improvements and enhancements. You can find the full changelog here. There are some important bugfixes related to multi-turn actions and finally the Volcano quest / interaction with Rolf always should work as intended (sadly that bug corrupted older save files and you only will be able to fully enjoy the quest with new games).

Please try out the Steam beta and test it intensely as we'd love to do a full Steam release very soon as well as a general public release. And then there is something called GOG that is looming on the horizont ;-)

Axes high!
Thomas & Team ADOM

Ultimate ADOM @ Roguelike Celebration

Hi everyone!

We are proud to announce that we are sponsoring the Roguelike Celebration 2018 (October 6-7 2018 in San Francisco). Without Roguelike Celebration there would be no Ultimate ADOM so we thought this would be a good way of saying thanks to the awesome organizers of Roguelike Celebration as well as the roguelike community. Thus we decided to sponsor the arcade party on Saturday night where there will be tons of roguelike to play, talk to the developers and generally have an amazing time.

Tickets are still available and the list of speakers already is totally mind-blowing! IMHO Roguelike Celebration is the one event to be if you enjoy roguelike games. Come and let's talk!

I've been there since its inception and met nothing but wonderful funny & brilliant people. And San Francisco also always is worth a trip ;-)

We are going to do two things at Roguelike Celebration:

Presentation about Entity Component Systems

Entity component system architectures are very interesting if you are going to create highly flexible game designs. I will give a 30 minute presentation about how ECS is being used in games and how we use it to make Ultimate ADOM ultra-flexible.

Live demo of Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos

At the arcade party we will do the very first live demo of the then-current state of Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos. While it will not yet be a functioning game at that point we will be able to showcase lots of exciting features already implemented during our mission to create the most flexible and mind-blowing roguelike dungeoncrawler ever. Stay tuned and enjoy our new logo:

Ultimate ADOM Update

Hi everyone!

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:

ADOM update: Merchandising shop, next new features & upcoming GOG release

Hi everyone!

Sorry for having fallen silent for so long - we have been awfully busy working on Ultimate ADOM, especially now that Roguelike Celebration has been moved forward by one month in the calender (6/7th of October in San Francisco - come and join us for a weekend of roguelike fun!).

This post only is concerned with an update regarding ADOM - more details about Ultimate ADOM to follow by the end of week (and regular once more from now on).

ADOM Online Store

First thing: We have opened up an online merchandising store for ADOM goodies because we had been asked about that quite often in the past 24 months. So here we go. If there are things you would like to see there we don't yet have let us know - either in the comments below or via our ticket system.

At a later point we also will be adding Ultimate ADOM stuff.

For ADOM itself we currently are working on two features:

ADOM @ GOG

We finally port ADOM to GOG (and GOG Galaxy). We are not yet sure when the port if finished but target end of August / September (there are some C++ things in the API that we still need to work out).

Then ADOM finally can be puchased DRM free at GOG.

Floating Status Messages

Another older ticket will be one of the main features of the next content release - floating status information (damage numbers, special effects like poison, sickness, starvation, etc.). While this might seem rather minor it will be a huge UI improvement as our tests have shown that many people nowadays don't read the status messages at all (and many more just skim them occasionally). Thus important information easily can get lost. Now seeing a message floating up over the head of the PC will alleviate this.

This major addition will be combined with many minor bug fixes and game balance adjustments for the next ADOM release (which hopefully will be on Steam by the end of August).

That's it for today... stay tuned for tons of Ultimate ADOM updates (working on which takes up about 95% of our time right now).

Thomas & Team ADOM

ADOM video competition winners announced!

We asked for participation in an ADOM video competition. And you competed!

Now we have a winner!

Watching a ton of extremely good videos was quite an extraordinary experience, and a humbling one - so many of you are better at playing ADOM than we are.

Over 20 hours of viewing material made it into the preliminary selection, so it took a bit longer than anticipated to select our winners.

We have them now, though, and will happily present these to you.

While we struggled with everything else, the first place goes to 'Mercury Jack' for his exceptional explanation video showing what ADOM is and giving valuable advice for both fresh heroes and experienced adventurers. Well done!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI01T8_Gr80

The second place goes to the tale of Ork the Ratling Duelist by FritzCouchPlays. It is a tale full of wonder, twists and an interestingly named Ratling who grows beyond her small frame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYG6n7mtBo8

And finally, though Not Really Safe For Work due to sweary words, we agreed on Blind Ryan's hilarious streak of bad luck for Ryan the dwarven mindcrafterto be followed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP0DwURyj6k

All winners will be contacted over the weekend, and prizes will be sent out as soon as we have all addresses.

Honourable mentions need to go to Denox and Yana who made us wish we speak Russian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKWPKVFYqXc

And to the wonderful Adam Grzyb who basically sent us billions of hours of highly enjoyable viewing stuff.

Thank you all! We'll keep the prizes a surprise until they get to our winners, but then we'll share the absolute stunning and amazing thing we've created here.

Thank you all for participating! We were blown away by the quality of items you sent us.

ADOM 3.2.2 released to Steam to satisfy GDPR...

Hi everyone!

We just released ADOM 3.2.2 to Steam in order to satisfy the requirements of GDPR. Enjoy the non-existent new content and feel safer about your data... although nothing really has changed except for lots of legalize and documentation as we already very much cared about your data.

We'll now return to actually creating value.

Kind regards
Thomas & Team ADOM

If you wonder what we are doing... (GDPR)

...besides developing Ultimate ADOM (more on that later - so much is happening): currently we spend most of our time and being fully GDPR compliant:

http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread.php/15354-Changes-to-www-adom-de-and-rogueleague-org-in-the-light-of-GDPR

We are close but the amount of energy and work required to not make the world any better for the ADOM game community (because we always have been very careful about data, don't share it with others if we can avoid this and only use it to enhance the game and its community) is mind-numbing.

As you might guess I'm no fan of GDPR.

ADOM 3.2.0 released as a Steam beta!

Hi everyone!

We are proud to finally announce the release of ADOM 3.2.0 as a Steam beta version (follow this link to read how to activate a Steam beta).

The central new feature of ADOM 3.2.0 is a high personalization and customization level of the PC sprite. Hair color, armor, weapon type, etc. now will show. There are still tons of detail we have to add but the amount of variety already now has been mind-staggering.

So enjoy the first release of this feature, let us know what you think and we will work on improving it. The brief changelog can be found in the usual place.

Axes high!
Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM

A call to arms: Videos wanted!

Heroes of Ancardia!

Whether you regularly perish in the attempts of saving a cute puppy, accidentally bump into shop keepers in a menacing way, get eaten by kobolds or challenge Andor Drakon himself in all your glory, we want the world to see your exploits. Record your playthroughs for us! Ancardia has a dire need for Youtube heroes showing the world the glory of ADOM, because to be honest, there's not much out there yet, and we think it's a shame.

We're looking for true heroes and fallen ones, devious tricksters and brave knights. Record some of your playing and share it with the world. Half an hour to an hour of playtime, if your character survives that long, of course. Show us anything! From creating a new character from scratch and braving your first few encounters, clearing out the bug temple, raiding the thieves' guild, destroying Terinyo in the name of Chaos or robbing a Casino, all is fair game.

Feel free to explain what you're doing, but this is not mandatory.

Both ASCII and Tilemode are perfectly acceptable.

If you submit your uploaded playthrough (Youtube, Vimeo or whatever other platform you can think of) with a link to marketing@adom.de before the first day of June, you'll even be eligible to win something really amazing to put on your wall or dazzle your friends with. We'll be having a look at all the submissions and pick the best three videos.

When submitting your links, please let us know if you're happy with us using your material for trailers and other promotions of ADOM.

In brief:
What: Record yourself playing ADOM for up to an hour, upload it somewhere accessible and send it to marketing@adom.de
When: Before the 1st of June 2018, whatever timezone you are.
Why: Fame, glory, our eternal gratitude and the chance to win something really cool and unique.

We are looking forward to your submissions!

ADOM 3.1.3 available as a public Steam release

Hi everyone!

We are happy to announce ADOM 3.1.3 as a public (not beta!) release on Steam. ADOM 3.1.3 contains another big package of bug fixes and minor improvements and concludes the "ADOM 3.1.x talents & traps" release (unless we somehow managed to introduce new serious bugs). The changelog as usual contains all the details. If you did not try any of the betas you should browse all the changes starting with version 3.1.0 - quite a lot has happened!

We already are working on ADOM 3.2.0 which will contain the personalized PC sprites as its major feature (e.g. correct hair and eye colors as well as much closer matching equipment). We expect a mid-April release for that.

So for now enjoy the latest version on Steam - it should update automatically (but remember to deactivate your beta mode if you participated in that).

Happy Easter and Happy Hacking!
Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM

P.S.: Work on Ultimate #ADOM also is progressing. We just spent roughly 27 hours on two workshop days with the European part of Team Ultimate ADOM to finalize our PoC phase and make many decisions (as well as raise new questions regarding optimizations to game play). I'm by now hopefully settled enough with out daughter so that I can resume regular blogging :-) Despite the social silence on this front we are progressing well with the plans for our first games under the "Ultimate ADOM" brand - more to come soon!

Here's a picture of our team meeting (although our marketing guy is missing on it):

(from left to right: The Creator, Jochen [master architect], Krys [Lead artist], Bastian [our recently added support & concept artist])

ADOM 3.1.2 available as Steam beta

Hi everyone!

Directly on the heels of yesterdays ADOM 3.1.1 release follows today ADOM 3.1.2 with yet another bunch of bug fixes, some of them sadly introduced by yesterdays release (two crash bugs among them).

The quick next release is a testament of how well releasing works on Steam (it's a breeze compared to  what we need to do to publish a more general public release - so the latter in the future will be less common than Steam releases). The quick next release also is a testament of how my new-born daughters causes me to botch my concentration skill checks... some of the bugs are a bit shameful ;-)

Give me some more time to get accomodated to our new life - while it's fun, it's quite challenging, too.

Without further ado here we go with the latest ADOM release on Steam:

• Here's the ADOM Steam page.
• Here are the instructions for activating the beta release.
• And here's the changelog.

Happy hacking!

Thomas & Team ADOM

ADOM 3.1.1 available as Steam beta

Hi everyone!

We just released ADOM 3.1.1 (release 90 - #100, we are coming!). ADOM 3.1.1 is a bug fix release for our "Talent & Traps" 3.1.0 release featuring the revised talent system and a revised trap damage system (that now should work much better than in the previous version).

You can find the full release notes in the usual place.

This page contains the instructions for activating ADOM 3.1.1 as a beta version on Steam.

Happy hacking!
Thomas & Team ADOM

ADOM 3.1.0 available as Steam Beta and for prerelease testers

Hi everyone!

We are proud to announce the availability of ADOM 3.1.0 ("the T&T release" - talents & traps) on Steam as a beta version. You can find the instructions on how to activate the Steam beta here. Additionally ADOM 3.1.0 is available to all prerelease testers from the crowdfunding campaign in the usual place.

ADOM 3.1.0 offers the following improvements:

• We have put quite a bit of thought into improving the talent system used by ADOM. Currently many people do not overly like it, talents have been somewhat unbalanced and only very few were deemed worthwhile the effort of taking them. I went through the many comments in our issue database and touched many talents in order to make them more interesting. This ticket contains a summary of all the changes implemented. The manual and online help obviously have been updated.
• The way traps work has been revised. There were lots of complaints about sudden death situations, etc. and the revised mechanics of traps try to take the recklessness of the player into account (e.g. if you storm through a dungeon with 1% of your hitpoints, death shouldn't be too surprising... if you are at full strength, there should not be any insta-death situations... and this with a sliding scale).
• Additionally there is the usual long list of bug fixes and minor enhancements summarized in the changelog.

Please test the beta version intensely and provide feedback via our issue tracker as we'd like to release  ADOM 3.1.x as soon as possible to all available channels.

And now have fun hacking!

Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM

P.S.: The next major milestone for ADOM 3.2.0 hopefully be the fully visualized PC equipment on the PC sprite. Our internal version already has made great progress but there are still kinks to be worked out before we can release it. Stay tuned!

Four weeks of Ultimate ADOM development (UADOM Update #2)

Hi everyone!

Another two weeks passed at lightning speed... I barely can believe it. We have been very hard working on Ultimate ADOM (and Jochen managed to squeeze in some ADOM bug fixing but we yet need to get into shape for the next release). So what has been done over the past two weeks:

• I finally finished my prototype: The PC can move, blocking features etc. work and I can fight and kill a fully armed orc. In theory the orc also can fight back but the code for that still is a bit primitive. While this might sound trivial (and I know I can implement that with a simple setup in an afternoon) I'm still very happy with that progress because the underlying AGE (ADOM Game Engine) architecture that was built for that simple purpose can do so much more and the above scenario is the smallest proof of concept I could think about. Much of what already has been created will only show its true power later one once we work on the real game content.
• The prototype includes mechanisms for dying and resurrection, multiple damage types caused by singular attacks (e.g. a holy mace of fire & brimstone causing 2d4 crushing damage, 3d6 fire damage and +9 holy damage against undead) as well as combat mechanisms for arbitrary body shapes (e.g. detailed attacks with claws, teeth and the tail for a great winged poison drake or 2-4 melee attacks with different weapons for a four-armed ettin, etc.).
• The ASCII engine I'm using for my prototype has seem some optimization (although I still is woefully incomplete and ugly - Jochen now will start to elaborate it).
• The underlying entity component system has been greatly elaborated (there are many more very convenient JSON based means of configuration now), tested (many ugly bugs squished) and refined (it's becoming more straightforward and I'm working hard on refactoring special cases as soon as possible to make the underlying engine as stable as possible). All that right now is not very meaningful to you as a player but in the end it will allow us to produce more amazing content at much greater speed than ever before ;-)
• We have mostly concluded our 2D tests with Unity and now evaluate whether a 3D version might be the way to go. Additionally we are still very busy discussing the general feel of the art. We definitely want it to be darker and more gritty than in ADOM Classic but there are so many options we so far failed to finalize our ideas.
• We learned a lot about performance in Unity. AGE (ADOM Game Engine) is heavily optimized to be able to utilize hundreds of thousands of entities with many complex components and while we haven't stress-tested that we already learned a lot about what not to do (including such curiosities like "comparing two colors is much more costly than rendering a 30x30 pixel area" - I'm still from an age when graphics where not that fast :-D )
• Our new artist - Bastian von Gostomski - just today was onboarded to Team ADOM and for the time being he will work on concept art and help us to evolve the graphical style of Ultimate ADOM. Here are two pieces he already produced:

Image #1: Into the Eye of Darkness

A picture from the final battle between Andor Drakon and some unnamed champion. From that final battle that ushered in the Ultimate Age of ADOM:

Image #2: A Portrait of Andor Drakon, supreme Lord of Chaos

And he produced several refined versions of the Andor Drakon sketch I already posted this afternoon - let us know in the comments which one you prefer and why:

Version #1 (very dark and and kindof younger than in the later ones):

Version #2 (hair is more visible, they eyes are slightly differently filled with corruption):

Version #3 (hair still more visible than in #1, less corruption again in the eyes):

By the end of the week I'll take a brief break (and keep you updated on that - yet another surprise) to be back in full strength very soon.

Axes High!

Ultimate ADOM Concept Art Teaser: Andor Drakon

Hi everyone!

While the next bi-weekly Ultimate ADOM update is due very soon I couldn't wait to share this with you all: We are very proud to welcome a new member to Team ADOM. Bastian von Gostomski is going to extend our art department and will start with some concept art.

For his first day he surprised us with a wonderful (IMHO) teaser sketch for Andor Drakon. I personally like it so much that we are considering to be doing a series of portraits of iconic ADOM characters (which might be back on one role or another in Ultimate ADOM) - let us hear your suggestions about which characters you would like to see :-)

Please post concept art ideas & wishes in the comments below :-)

Two weeks of Ultimate ADOM development (UADOM Update #1)

Hi everyone!

The past two weeks I have been mostly active on Twitter while actually working on our Ultimate ADOM game engine. It will be foundation for our next generation series of roguelike games (yep, plural) and thus the foundational work is extremely important (and fun - as I love building frameworks and complex architectures).

What has been achieved so far?

• I'm getting somewhat accustomed to Unity as that is the platform we will be using to deploy Ultimate ADOM games on many channels (desktop, mobile, console, etc.). So far - once you get the hang of it - it works nicely.
• I have started using JetBrains Rider which IMHO is a brilliant piece of software (as usual from JetBrains). It's a blazingly fast and pretty smart integrated development environment, works nicely in conjunction with Unity and provides excellent C# support. There are still a few rough edges (especially when used on MacOS) but general the support by JetBrains is very active and helpful and despite those rough edges Rider already now is leagues above any other IDE I tried for C#. Highly recommended!
• Ultimate ADOM is using an entity component system (ECS). My ECS is based on JSON configurations that are backed by C# classes to add complex behavior. It uses entity templates (basically classes) to describe entities (class instances, objects) and has been designed with the idea of supporting hundreds of thousands of entities at runtime because I envision a truly complex world with almost infinite means for interaction. All the infrastructure for the basic ECS architecture is in place, parsing is basically finished (I'm still optimizing my JSON-object mapper on a use case basis for special cases to make modding even more trivial).
• In order to be able to prototype features quickly I needed an ASCII based interface even in Unity. The basics for this also have been implemented and now are working.
• The ECS architecture uses an underlying event architecture to implement communication between disjointed components. This architecture also is implemented in its basics and already went through a turn of optimizations to make it scale for later more complex situations.
• The game engine is configured through the same JSON based setup used for all other content. The basic infrastructure to set up game variants also is in place (although a lot of work still needs to be done here).
• Movement for the player has been implemented as an example to prove that everything works as required.
• Jochen and Krys are familiarizing themselves with Unity, toying around with graphical concepts to elaborate our future graphical approach with Ultimate ADOM and have been testing particle systems, lighting and animation as we want to lift current ADOM graphics to a completely new level.

Next up on the roadmap are

• implementing basic combat (another interesting challenge as many already existing subsystems for containers etc. then will need to flex their muscles),
• resuming work on ADOM bug fixes (remember: we will continue to work on ADOM). Jochen and I already have discussed the next new features which probably will center on our Rogueleague portal and challenge games.

Finally we are talking to various people on order to extend Team ADOM somewhat. If all works out well, we soon will have a second graphical artist joining the team to supplement Krys' amazing skills and provide us with more concept and marketing artwork (at least initially).

Here are some more impressions from the past two weeks:

Body configurations can become complex in Ultimate ADOM (although we still have way to go before we rival Dwarven Fortress ;-) although that's not the goal):

Predefined maps are already very easy to create (great for modding, too):

The ASCII interface still is rudimentary but I'm nonetheless proud about having gotten there in the past couple of days because there are more than 10.000 lines of code of basic architecture running behind it (not for the ASCII stuff, mind you, but for the actual game content - and all that will shine later on):

This screenshot from a point in development time when I still had to add lots of architecture hints at the detail and complexity of what is going on behind the scenes:

And while this is not our 3D attempt it was fun to create it nonetheless ;-)

In summary about 15.000 lines of C# code plus another 870+ lines of JSON configuration were created in these two weeks and we are now moving forward to turning this into a game :-)

Talk to ya soon!

Thomas

MerkenMerken

ADOM 3.0.6 released to the general public!

Hi everyone!

We start the new year with getting things out of the way: ADOM 3.0.6 now is available as a free download to the general public:

• You can download the major versions (Windows, OSX and Linux) from IndieDB.
• You can download all the other minor versions from our download server.
• The changelog contains extensive notes on everything that has changed since the last public release - you need to check all the entries from 3.0.0 upwards! This is MAJOR.

With this release our crowdfunding campaign comes full circle: We are officially done!

From now on we will focus our development effort on Ultimate ADOM and run ADOM in a kind of support mode (which means: it gets about 20% of our time for attention to fix bugs and add new features and content). Releases of ADOM will happen on Steam first (because it's technically much easier to do so) and then after a while also on IndieDB (but probably not every release but just the major ones).

If you would like to enjoy all the features of the Deluxe version of ADOM (the one on Steam) you still have a couple of ours left to get the best entry price in our Steam sale (which soon will be over). Utilize it right away!

And now have fun playing!

Thomas & Team ADOM

Happy New Year and ADOM 3.0.6 on Steam

Hi everyone!

We wish you all a Happy New Year! May 2018 be your best year yet full of health, love, happiness and success!

We will be focussing our main efforts on creating Ultimate ADOM and if you are interested in my musings while building a new and much improved game engine from the ground up please follow my Twitter account as I enjoy posting random coding tidbits there and it will be a lot more interesting (to some of you ;-) ) than just the ADOM issue updates of the past!

We also just released ADOM 3.0.6 on Steam fixing a minor but important issue with challenge mode (neutral genders could be generated). Your Steam installation will be automatically updated. Enjoy (and see the changelog for its little release details)!

And thus it seems that we are the very first roguelike at Roguebasin releasing a new version in 2018 :-)

Thomas & Team ADOM

P.S.: And the next public release will be happening very soon, too ;-)

P.P.S: Special thanks to Brian Bucklew, one of the developers of the most amazing Caves of Qud roguelike, who gratuiously allowed me to inspect his CoQ architecture (in source code!) and is a great discussion partner. Pondering his architecture so far has been an awesome boon in sorting my ideas for Ultimate ADOM. Looking forward to many beers and stuff at next Roguelike Celebration :-)
MerkenMerken