Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Strategy, Turn-based strategy (TBS), Adventure, IndieADOM: Ancient Domains of Mystery
Another week of UI work
After being a bit spammy last week I'm trying to keep it to weekly updates here. The past week again saw a lot of work on improving the UI and starting two days ago I'm now playing my own game mouse-only (although I love the keyboard controls) in order to learn more about what actually is missing for a great mouse-based UI.
Soon we'll also run more supervised test games with ADOM newbies to learn more about what works and what doesn't in the UI.
This blog post summarizes the latest advances: http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/07/a-week-of-work-on-adom-ui.html
If you have more wishes or ideas regarding improvements for the UI/UX please submit them _now_ at http://www.adom.de/bugs - it's the perfect time as we really want to improve on this for the next release.
Thanks & stay tuned for the next update!
Thomas & Team ADOM
Communication bubbles in ADOM
I hope this series of announcements doesn't feel like spamming but I am very proud of the progress that we right now make and as long as every day brings an (IMHO) major new enhancements I'd like to keep you all informed (as a compensation for too much silence in the past).
One complaint with ADOM currently (and rightfully) is that talking to monsters and NPCs is not much fun as you easily can miss the texts uttered by them.
Thus I proudly present "communication bubbles" that were implemented today to display utterances by monsters and NPCs in a beautiful way. Being an ASCII artist I for now only can show the ASCII version but here we go:
http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/06/communication-bubbles-in-adom.html
Let me know what you think - I'm really looking forward to the next release and now hope that my compatriots can catch up fast enough with the graphical repesentations for the ASCII visualizations.
Stay tuned!
Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM
New dialog system for the next ADOM release
As part of our UI enhancement quest we just finished the ASCII implementation of a new dialog widget system for ADOM (the graphical counterpart takes a bit longer bit is upcoming, too).
The following blog post has a demo illustrating the new dialog widgets:
http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/06/new-dialog-widgets-in-adom.html
This in the future will make it much simpler to recognize input requests from the game and display detail information.
Stay tuned for the next release!
Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM
Weekend UI enhancements for ADOM
And just to show you that we are very serious this time (after a long sequence of frustrating events): Just after yesterdays demo for the new look mode in the next ADOM release ( http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/06/look-better-in-adom.html ) we today have a demo for a new direction selection dialog: http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/06/better-direction-selection-in-adom.html
More to come... and yes, I know it's only ASCII so far - the graphical stuff needs more work and I need my colleagues from Team ADOM for that... I can only do gameplay and ASCII stuff ;-)
Thomas Biskup
ADOM Maintainer
ADOM development returning to normal (& more)
It has been an awful long time since the last update but things are returning to normal (or rather: better than normal - expect a pretty exciting announcement probably within the next six weeks). Lots of work has happened behind the scenes by my team colleagues and I took longer to recover than I expected from my broken arm/wrist/hand (see older posts) but finally we again are moving forward and working towards new releases.
We have been focussing on several areas and the next release will bring a number of pretty fun features and changes (besides the usual batch of bug fixes and minor improvements). With me being fully back in the saddle and our GIT infrastructure finally in full motion I hope that we also will be able to switch to much faster release cycles (especially as far as bug fixes go).
Below you will find main areas of work of the past months:
Art
Krys is extremely busy on animating the PC and all our monsters. This actually is pretty tedious work considering that we are switching from still images to animated parts but the results are nothing but wonderful. ADOM feels a lot more alive now and some of the animations are incredibly funny and fascinating. The following blog posts provide various sneak previews:
http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/05/advanced-adom-animations.html
http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/05/sharks-in-adom.html
http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/04/a-glowing-example.html
http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/03/animation-and-line-of-sight-live.html
The animation system also finally will simplify enhancing the player character as outlined in http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/05/customizable-player-character.html
Sound
Lucas has been very busy over the past couple of months adding both sound effects and musical scores leading to an ever expanding sound library. Here's one blog pertaining to that (and other refinements of graphical nature):
http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/03/ever-expanding-soundscape-where-no.html
Gameplay
Besides working on a pretty big package of new features a major part of the next Steam release will be an even more simplified UI with much more focus on a more intuitive mouse interface and generally better interaction between the player and the game. We have been doing field tests with new players (and are continuing to do so) and defined a batch of issues to address for that release, as outlined here: http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/06/simplifying-adom-ui.html
For ASCII mode you can see one example for the look mode of ADOM here:
http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/06/look-better-in-adom.html
Very soon this will be integrated into the graphical mode and I hope for true tooltips so that in the future you don't even need to know how to activate look mode but rather just can hover over the map to get more detailed information about specific spots.
Another example for such improvements is the long requested standardized handling of the ESC key (e.g. showing a popup with the most important commands like saving and quitting).
The full list of issues to be addressed (still growing) is listed here:
http://www.adom.de/forums/projectmilestone.php?milestoneid=8
Organization
Our team organization behind the scenes currently is improving greatly but I can't yet explain the details. Sadly I can't even explains the reasons for not being able to explain that - but some of the most recent delays have been caused by re-organizing. It's worth the wait and very soon I can speak... stay tuned.
All in all I am happy to be back to much more time to work on ADOM and we'll focus on releasing ASAP.
See you soon
Thomas & Team ADOM
State of ADOM / My state of health
I keep forgetting that not everyone is reading the blog. My health has taken a hit due to a pretty serious hand/arm fracture (which basically prevents me from programming). You can find the details here:
http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/01/broken-arm-update.html
I'll post updates when things will improve. I also can do a foreshadowing comment about "big things being set in motion". But I'm only going to announce that when I'm back in the saddle (I expect March or April). And no, this is neither an excuse or a diversion for yet another delay ;-) I promise you will not be disappointed ;-)
Kind regards
Thomas
ADOM Lite RPG is shipping today
Although this announcement is only indirectly related to the Steam version of ADOM I thought it worthwhile to post it nonetheless because I hope that it illustrates our long-term commitment to evolving the game.
Part of the crowdfunding campaign that brought ADOM back to the stage was the promise to print a pen & paper RPG version. Last night me and my awesome team of packing djinnis assembled the very huge first batch of RPG shipments which are going to leave my home in about two hours. You can read the details in our latest blog post:
http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2016/12/adom-lite-rpg-is-shipping-today-yeah.html
As far as I know there are very few games on Steam with a pen & paper RPG to boot (and none of the small titles as far as I know) so I thought it worthwhile to mention.
Additionally I would love to point you to another awesome crowdfunding campaign for an exciting roguelike game with beautiful graphics and an amazing UI. Right now the Jupiter Hell Kickstarter is still running and the team around Kornel and Darren can need a helping hand to reach their funding goal. Check it out - I think it's awesome and I know that the team is nothing but brilliant:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2020043306/jupiter-hell-a-modern-turn-based-sci-fi-roguelike
I already backed it and there is a Steam Greenlight process running for it, too:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=804488499
I'm now back to work - the next digital ADOM release now needs to be done - and it's going to be awesome :-)
See ya!
Thomas Biskup
ADOM Maintainer
Please give us a vote in the Steam awards (BTW, r72 released for everyone)!
We'd like to motivate you to give us a vote in the currently running Steam awards nominations (http://store.steampowered.com/SteamAwardNominations/). We feel that ADOM particularly deserves to be nominated in the "Stood the test of time" category as according to our knowledge there are very few (any?) games on Steam that can look back to a 20+ year history and still are in active evolution.
While we know that there are still many UI wishes we feel that we have made some good progress and by now sport enticing graphics combined with incredible game play and replay value). So if you feel you want to agree just click on the Steam award links on our store page and give us a helping hand: http://store.steampowered.com/app/333300
While we are working on the shipment of various physical crowdfunding rewards (ADOM Lite RPG & postcards) and will have those finally out within the coming days we also have turned ADOM r72 (version 2.2.6) from Beta to public release so that everyone now automatically gets to play this release (actually this happened under the hood a while ago ;-) ). Just to let you know.
Additionally we are working on a very major content update that will feature greatly enhanced graphics (we are starting to animate all beings in the game) and tons of new content (rechargeable items, a time trip, the legendary Rolf and volcano quests, dozens of completely new items and monsters among them antediluvian orcs and dwarves and so much more). Due to the extensive size of this update we'll still be busy for a moment.
In the meantime enjoy ADOM and if you have not yet bought it enjoy the 10% winter sale!
Thomas & Team ADOM
ADOM R72 (version 2.2.6) released as a Steam beta!
We are very proud to announce the release of ADOM R72 (version 2.2.6), again as a Steam beta (but available for anyone who owns the Steam version). This release should bring yet another big performance boost - see the blog post at http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2016/10/adom-r72-version-226-released-as-steam.html for all the details.
The short version is: ADOM R72 should be up to 1500% (!) faster on older systems and hopefully bring another 30-100% of speed increase on newer systems. The exact increase depends heavily on your setup (e.g full screen versus windowed, graphics cards, etc.), so don't get overexcited ;-) Nonetheless we believe that this is yet another big step forward.
Please let us know what you think (you find the installation instructions in the blog post linked above).
Kind regards
Thomas & Team ADOM
ADOM R71 (version 2.2.5) released as a Steam beta!
Jochen just released ADOM R71 as a Steam beta. You can find all th details here as well as the instructions for activating the beta: http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2016/10/adom-r71-version-225-released-as-steam.html
Enjoy playing and let us know your impressions!
Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM