ADOM: Resurrection IndieGoGo campaign

[getter77]

http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/
http://www.indiegogo.com/resurrect-adom-development

After a a lot of discussion and preparation today is the day to throw the dice of Fate and see where they fall: Just seconds ago I activated the crowd funding campaign for resurrecting ADOM development on Indiegogo. Now please: if you ever loved ADOM and/or still love it - go there and pledge to get some of the cool rewards and help ADOM to step into the 21st century. Or at least spread the word! Now is the time!

The campaign will run for a total of 60 days as many fans already indicated that they right now aren't able to pledge as much as they'd like to and since times are pretty tough in many places I hope that the 60 day limit can help.

I also hope that the "Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo" discussion really is moot. My impression during the last days and weeks was that having access to a great community always seemed to be most important, far more than the actual crowd funding platform - and as far as I am concerned the ADOM community is the greatest of them all!

So if you care(d) for ADOM, please

-pledge as soon as possible. It seems to be highly important for crowd funding campaigns to get a great initial momentum and this also helps in getting featured on the front page of Indiegogo! You can upgrade your pledges later so there is no (?) reason to wait
-spread the word about the campaign and the link to the campaign. Talk to friends and family, blog, tweet, etc. Share this on Facebook, post on newsgroups and mailing lists and raise as much ruckus as possible to mobilize everyone who ever cared for ADOM and enjoyed playing it. (But don't annoy people )

I really really really hope that we make the campaign goal (and if we make it that we make it as soon as possible) as the true fun will begin with the planned stretch goals (new races, new classes, new corruptions, new items, new monsters, new artifacts, new quests [dare I say words like Scroll of Omnipotence or Red Rooster Inn]?), the ADOM pen & paper RPG, iPad and Android ports, an extendable and scriptable version of ADOM, more elaborate character generation options and maybe even open sourcing ADOM. And so much more I don't want to talk about right away... So let's have a go at it!

I think the initial sum target of $48K is fair considering it is a 4 man effort, aims to tackle a variety of tasks that I'd imagine to be easily underestimated, and it isn't every day that an essentially "ancient" project tries to revive on up. How different the world would be considering the dev teams of old if only they'd maintained their own IP(game) as opposed to be being held hostage by publishers in a Vault of Legality someplace...

There's also something wonderful about the very circumstance of a game seeing a new lease on life to become better than ever while the sequel is also well underway with Alpha releases to exceed it on various, yet ultimately different, fronts.

[BlueSalamander]

Yeah. Nice video, although I wish Thomas Biskup would speak slower.
Certainly he deserves the money just for the existing version of ADOM, which is completely free.

[getter77]

Heh, I think he was just excited, plus if he was more subdued the bit with the dragon wouldn't have been so amusing.

Poll is also up on the main site to allow community voting on a selection of possibilities for the initial stretch goals should the starting goal be met with the good pace they've achieved thus far---2 new races/classes are already pretty well locked in though.

[BlueSalamander]

Ahah, yes I liked the bit about the D&D dragon. 'Oh no! it's looking at me! Someone help me... please!'

He's already raised 16,000 in five days so he's well on track to reach the goal.
Looks like this will be Indiegogo's first great success in gaming? (Not sure if any game raised more than 15,000 on there before)

Do you have a link concerning the new classes and races?

One thing I'd like would be an option to change the background colour to maybe white or blue. I think the black background tires the eyes.

[getter77]

http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2012/07/pondering-stretch-goals-for.html#more

This gets into it a bit:

New PC Races
I want to do ratlings (since I love them dearly) and I want to do Mist Elves (a promise I gave to a young ADOM fan 15 years ago and I still need to fulfill it). As far as I am concerned these will be among the first small stretch goals if we manage to make the basic funding goal.

New PC Classes
I'd ove to add duelists (because I love ratlings) and pyromancers (because I always loved fire-themed characters). The latter one is open for discussion if someone has better ideas. Again this will be one of the early small stretch goals.

Hence those in particular are not in the poll on the right side.

[BlueSalamander]

Thank you! Pyromancer sounds like an Elementalist with just fire spells. A class where you have to develop both your fighting ability and magic.

[getter77]

After a successful power pledge drive that is going to add 12 new corruptions into the game's next release, and a deadzone of tech woes where Biskup couldn't log into or manage IndieGoGo at all the past little while, another drive has just began as well as a prospect looming of a "classic" interim release of an assortment of bugfixes to better the momentum towards the more comprehensive funding target overhaul:

As pledging for the ADOM crowd funding campaign has slowed down to a trickle a new power pledge drive has been announced!

The ADOM crowd funding power pledge drive #2: Monsters & items is all about those! For each $300 collected until the end of July one new item will be added to the next release of ADOM (as of today we start at $22.601... so raise that!). Additionally for every day in which we manage to collect multiple of $1.000 three new monsters will be added to the next release for each such multiple!!! (and if we manage to pass that mark by quite a bit on any given day there will be an additional new monster and item for every $500 past $1.000 on that day)

Example: We raise $2.150 on a single day. That makes for 7 new items ($2.150 divided by $300) plus six new monsters ($2.150 divided by $1.000) plus yet another 2 new monsters and 2 new items (passing $1.000 by $1.150 on a single day, $1.150 divided by $500). Thus pledges of $2.150 on a single day yield a total of 9 new items and 8 new monsters!!!

So how's that? This is your best chance to up the number of items and monsters for the next release by a huge margin (as I had no specific plans for them).

Also, in an unusual bit of relation:

Sometimes conference talks really are fun. The next one that is going to be big fun is my talk about

Event driven architectures and concern driven programming in roguelike computer gaming

at the ICT Innovations Conference 2012. Here's the abstract and the keywords:

Abstract. Roguelike games are challenging single player games driven by a multi-agent environment. The game complexity stems from a mostly randomly generated world interacting with potentially thousands of independent agents trying to simulate a believable world. Traditionally roguelike games use REPL (read-evaluate-print-loops) as the standard architecture in order to handle the turn-based game approach.
This practice talk shows how the combination of event driven architectures with a variant of aspect oriented programming (called concern driven programming) simplify the architecture and allows to reduce many complex programming challenges to very simple and locally manageable tasks. This allows for much more complex game designs and reduces maintenance costs. The talk will illustrate the concepts with examples using two real world game designs that highlight the different architectural approaches (the hugely successful game ADOM using the REPL-approach and its successor ADOM II using a much more efficient event driven architecture).

Keywords: event driven architecture, aspect oriented programming, EDA, AOP, concern driven programming, roguelike, ADOM, ADOM II, software engineering

It's from 12-15 of September in the beautiful town of Ohrid in Macedonia. If you by chance happen to be there I'll be happy to meet with you.

Sometimes you are lucky when submitting conference papers and this time I'm very much looking forward to preparing the slides

[getter77]

Now a a few new monsters and several items later: We have a pre-release next version of the game available to all on a ridiculous selection of platforms in the most amusing way.

http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2012/08/adom-120-prerelease-1-now-available.html

After almost ten years the unbelievable is happening: A new release of ADOM (Classic) is out.

ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 1 is the first of hopefully a long line of releases to bring ADOM up to date, fix all known bugs and polish the game up. This will require the success of the "Resurrect ADOM" crowd funding campaign at Indiegogo, but the current new momentum gives me a good feel about that and we hope that the prerelease will get back a lot of old time fans into the fold.

I would like to take a moment and thank Jochen Terstiege for his incredible drive and the huge amount of work he already put into resurrecting ADOM and I would like all the people out there who already have put and still are putting their energy, love and support to back the crowd funding campaign - you all are there greatest ever and without you ADOM never would have become what it is! Thank you all so much!

Now for ADOM 1.2.0 prerelease 1: There are a number of awesome things to mention about it:

-We have an incredible lineup of platforms for the start and Jochen really is trying hard to add more to them: Windows (XP, Vista, 7, 8), Mac OS X (>= 10.4), Linux (Ubuntu 32 bit and 64 bit, Debian 32 bit and 64 bit, Raspberry Pi, NetBSD 32 bit and 64 bit, FreeBSD 32 bit and 64 bit and finally Amiga 68000, 68020 and 68040!). Jochen did an incredible job in creating an automated build system for all that and we are curious to see if we missed many hidden bugs.
-Quite a number of bugs already are fixed in the release but a couple of hundred still are to be done, so there's a huge amount of work ahead of us (first we fixed the easy ones, now the harder ones are waiting).
-The release really is a prerelease... while we fiddled with a lot of stuff we had little time for testing and hopefully didn't introduce too many awful new problems while fixing old ones. So far we didn't touch the manual or FAQ extensively and neither the start screen nor other parts have been adjusted greatly.
-A little bit of fine tuning also went into the game... patching new loop holes, etc.
-We managed to find a surprised number of very serious code bugs that simply went undiscovered by the compilers I was using during the last period of active development... and even today each new compiler detects now serious problems. Quite surprising...

What does the future hold? This is going to be determined by the success or failure of the ADOM Crowd Funding campaign. We are moving towards $29.000 of $48.000 while I type this and I think that we can make it - even if it might become a close call. If the campaign is a success ADOM will see a flurry of development activity and releases (but note that all further prereleases currently only are planned for donors of the $25 pledge level and above - all the rest only will get to see the final version... probably something like 4-7 months after the end of the campaign from what we can see today).

If the campaign succeeds early enough (which makes it important to pledge now and not to wait till near the end) we are going to talk about the first two stretch goals of the campaign:

We are considering to add tile support to ADOM by integrating NotEye.
We would like to add more quests to the game.

To make this happen we need to be successful and we need to pass the initial goal a bit... so let's see what is happening.

Ok, enough marketing talk about all this Now go download ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 1 and let's hear your feedback!

Changelog now ahoy, perhaps in the next couple days as they were burning the midnight oil in their timezone to try to make it today.

- Issue 9 - Choosing the skilled talent crashes the game
- Issue 10 - Dropping unIDed metal ingots can crash game
- Issue 11 - Killing corrupting monsters that stand behind other monsters with mindcraft crashes the game
- Issue 25 - Several bugs can crop up during play due integer wrap-rounds
- Issue 69 - it was possible to decrease the number of game turns
- Issue 95 - Circle kick bug allows you to kick indefinately
- Issue 97 - Dipping gold into a potion of exchange causes a crash
- Issue 99 - Chatting to Thrundarr while corrupted results in a game crash
- Issue 100 - Invalid bonuses for Good Learner and Great Learner skills
- Issue 106 - It is possible to rob some shops unnoticed in broad daylight and in front of the shopkeeper
- Issue 107 - Background corruption only increases once, on day 90
- Issue 109 - Berserking monsters behave oddly and can lead to an annoying crash
- Issue 111 - Dragons are able to replicate gold
- Issue 113 - The 'n'ame command can be used to detect invisible monsters
- Issue 117 - Wizards not charging wands after all
- Issue 119 - Fireproof blankets don't function properly while doomed
- Issue 120 - The unicorn starsign makes it easier to change alignment
- Issue 122 - Kicking walls with extremely low strength produces hilarious death
- Issue 128 - Walking against a wall with monsters nearby allow for free regeneration of HP and PP
- Issue 129 - Approximately half of the game's artifacts are currently unavailable
- Issue 134 - Artifact Grod does not grant a critical hit bonus
- Issue 135 - You always fall at least once when entering the rift
- Issue 138 - The formula for potential stat gain is bugged
- Issue 139 - "dwarven weaponmaster" and "dwarven mystic" are now flagged as "unique" monsters
- Issue 148 - The Allow_Default_Name = true flag in the .cfg can either result in a crash or a strange, exploitable effect
- Issue 203 - ADOM crashing during character creation on a 64-bit machine
- Issue 711 - Starvation tolerance for farmer class not working correctly
- Issue 712 - Slow Poison is far too good
- Issue 713 - Dipping fluff ball into water: game crashes if there is no room for the Gremlins to spawn
- Issue 714 - Spell learning chance mixed up for arcane and clerical spells
- Issue 715 - Only every other inventory item is considered for destruction
- Issue 717 - Berserking monsters don't kill themselves any more
- Issue 723 - (Greater) karmic vaults seem to end up getting filled with goblins instead of ancient karmic dragons
- Issue 726 - The "Drop items in a comfortable way" command regularly drops the wrong items if used on too many items stacks of the same type
- Issue 727 - If you kill a creature using a potion of cure corruption (and other potions), you don't get any experience
- Issue 728 - Eating some corpses can result in a 'your muscles bulge' message without any strength gains
- Issue 729 - Applying concentration skill while stunned
- Issue 740 - There are a few ways that cause the game to unfairly and irrevocably crash
- Issue 741 - Some words are missing in the talents screen (e.g. "encounters" for Scout)
- Issue 744 - Having enough stacks of scrolls of item destruction as your sole inventory and reading one will crash the game
- Issue 745 - PC gets experience from door traps that triggered by monsters
- Issue 749 - Mad Minstrel songs don't display properly
- Issue 750 - Wrong alignment message when reading tracts
- Issue 751 - PCs with high swimming skill use more energy to move while in water than PCs without it
- Issue 752 - Monsters don't leave any of the guaranteed artifacts when sacced or transformed
- Issue 754 - Certain skills can be successfully 'a'pplied under nonsensical circumstances
- Issue 765 - Answering no to "Really attack/backstab the -foo-? [y/N]", reduces the energy cost of the PC's following action
- Issue 766 - Some items in the game have no plural form to display when the PC owns more than one
- Issue 790 - the "Justifier" artifact is completely useless to priests, despite the fact they can be crowned with it
- Issue 823 - Monsters give double xp when invisible even if the player can see invisible
- Issue 848 - Under certain circumstances, owing money to a shopkeeper (or reversed) can trigger some bugs
- Issue 851 - Illusionary wall bugs: Monsters standing in those walls can't be hit by non-bouncing bolt spells
- Issue 857 - Prayer can both help and punish you at the same time
- Issue 925 - The PC can receive a DV bonus worth half what he'd get from fighting unarmed, but *only* if the *right* hand slot is free
- Issue 950 - There are a few bugs regarding 'n'aming monsters
- Issue 1109 - Reading spellbooks can make them shift place in your inventory
- Issue 1122 - Abusable overflow when entering the character name on MS-DOS

Partially fixed:

- Issue 716 : an uncountable number of typos have been fixed
- Issue 735 : There are several ways to make an ADOM game unwinnable
- Issue 743 : around 55 "illogical messages" were fixed
- Issue 882 : the PC is able to illogically perform several actions while stuck in webs. The webs themselves also have some quirks

Additionally many bugs encountered while refacturing and reviewing the code were fixed. They don't have separate tickets.

A large mishmash of lower hanging fruit in terms of difficulty to solve, but still quite a mass of them on the whole that should bring a fair degree of gameplay improvement for the players---especially some that are very much game changers outright.

[getter77]

Apparently the final drive is an Artifact one...that and it is quite possible that a 64x64 official tileset(which is essentially the current highwater mark in the RL world outside of 3D and special cases like Dungeons of Dredmor---though ToME 4 is the only major one currently sporting said level of graphical fidelity that comes to mind as the very good looking set for Angband is complete but stuck in Dev-Hell while they try to cobble it together code-wise to support it) is going to be moved far forward indeed in the queue depending on how things shake out:

http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2012/08/the-last-and-final-power-pledge-drive.html

I've just started the last power pledge drive that will happen during the ADOM crowd funding campaign: Artifacts! For every $500 donated starting at the current level of $31.468 a new artifact will be added to the game. For every day in which which manage to collect a full $1.000 amount, 2 new items will be added to the game! (Multiples count, yes) This power pledge drive is going to be the longest running as it will be up for a full 14 days and end on the 24th of August. This really is going to be the last power pledge drive for ADOM - there is nothing else to save for, so if you haven't pledged yet, now is the perfect time!

-Tiles would be an extra. You always will be able to play ADOM as ASCII-only and thus it would continue to run on older systems. We haven't yet decided on whether it would be one binary with options for both or two distinct binaries but currently we lean towards the latter as that would allow a much smaller download for the ASCII version.
-Tile development would happen in parallel to the other planned features. Thus there would be continuous updates for all donors. Depending on the parallel development speeds and challenges we can't foresee today we even might consider releasing ADOM 1.2.x and ADOM 1.3.x in order to get all things done. This is yet another detail we so far haven't discussed.
-Tiles will be 64x64 to ensure a decent quality for the custom built set. It is possible to support other resolutions (like 32x32)rather easily because NotEye is very flexible in this regard. We are going for 64x64 as Krys is actually drawing the tiles at much higher resolution and downscaling them and I learned that downscaling works almost perfectly until you reach that 64x64 limit. 32x32 requires a lot of manual repairs and as computer resolutions seem to be increasing all the time (and things like Retina and its successors are going to be standards soon) we'd love to have a beautiful tile set for the custom variant. But as several resolutions could be supported bot community built sets and my preferred set by Krys are an option.
-Regarding Steam and others. Yes, it might be an option to position ADOM (Deluxe) on Steam in order to finance both the continuous future development of the free and the paid version - but this requires the game to be beautiful.
-There won't be any facings. The whole ADOM engine doesn't have any notion of facings and thus there is no need for that.
-Right now we are not planning to do images for the individualized parts of a characters equipment. IMHO this is so much work that we'd probably need another $10.000-$20.000 for just that feature. Which is too much as far as I am concerned.

Right now I'd like to pose a purely theoretical question: Some of the goals of the ADOM crowd funding campaign have been pretty personal (improved manual, in game graphics) and I know they didn't meet that much enthusiasm. One other goal - tile support - didn't meet much enthusiasm on my behalf as I didn't see a viable way of doing it. So far. This has changed.

Jochen, Zeno and Krys seem to have come up with a very decent approach to be able to integrate NotEye into ADOM to support graphical tile support (thanks again to Darren Grey for bringing it up).

The final tipping point for me was to see how amazing the tiles look that Krys created so far for demo and testing purposes. Beautiful. As far as I am concerned the most beautiful tiles I ever have seen in a roguelike game. But that's my opinion (and the reaction of a few people I showed the demo sketches to - they were... amazed... to put it carefully).

So I finally am changing my mind:

-Tile support for ADOM seems to be possible with reasonable effort (kudos to Zeno for the flexible way in which NotEye integrates into other games!).
-Tile support can be beautiful. Having seen Krys' demo tiles so far I'm for the first time ever willing to leave ASCII characters behind me and play with tiles. And that for sure means something.
-I now think that ADOM should have tile support.

But the question is: How to do it with out limited resources? Basically there are three approaches:

-Define stretch goals for the campaign. I'd guess right now (we are still crunching numbers) that the effort mostly lies with Krys who'd have to draw an amazing amount of tiles and to a lesser extent with Jochen, Zeno and me to integrate NotEye into ADOM and maybe also port it to the Mac. Seeing that right now we'll be having a tough fight to reach the funding goal stretch goals do not really seem too realistic... even if it just were something like $4.000-$6.000 extra (uneducated guess - don't hold me for the numbers... as I said... we are number crunching right now... it might be less, it might be more, don't know yet).
-Change some campaign goals of the existing campaign - at the risk of alienating existing donors. The way I'd go would be to drop the "restructure the manual" subgoal, change the "Exciting new graphics for the title screen and some quest-related events" subgoal to "Create the most awesome tile set ever" and see how Jochen, Zeno, Krys and I can get by with that.
-Do a mix of the two. Try to get some work done with minor changes to the goals defined but define one stretch goal for a really beautiful tile set (e.g. integrate NotEye in a way that would allow for a community effort and then see if the stretch goal is met). Personally I'd love to have a unified tile set from Krys as his demo is the most beautiful tile set I so far have seen for any roguelike.

So there we are. How do you feel about minor alterations to the campaign goals (exchanging static images for tiles, not revising the manual) in exchange for at least a minor NotEye integration and maybe more? Please give feedback as I don't want to hurt any feelings Sadly we didn't have the knowledge we have now when we started the campaign - so that's evolution.

BTW, there would be an extra benefit of this: ADOM II could make use of the same tile set and if we can make this happen for ADOM I hereby promise to integrate tile support into a future ADOM II version

Please post to the comments and I will consider your opinions carefully! Oh, and please spread the word regarding this discussion on Reddit, Facebook and wherever else you feel it might be well placed

[getter77]

Minimum funding level reached as well as the first stretch goal as well as a special event packed with new content for managing to hit the target so quickly with 9 days yet remaining.