ADOM: Resurrection via IndieGoGo (~$90K funded, 1.2.0p4 private update out)

[Darren Grey]

Those interested in more info might want to check the latest podcast:

http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2012/07/special-on-adom-indiegogo-campaign.html

Thomas gives some extra details about his plans for the content additions and the pledge rewards, amongst other things.

[getter77]

New power pledge drive afoot and a new "classic" build with some degree of various fixes inbound at some point:

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).

[Krice]

It doesn't look good, the funding seems to have stopped on halfway. I think it's revealing how limited interest there is for roguelikes.

[Alex E]

It doesn't look good, the funding seems to have stopped on halfway. I think it's revealing how limited interest there is for roguelikes.

I'd say it's more so the limited interest in ADOM. Or maybe $48,000 is too much for the roguelike community.

[kraflab]

I think it was the high number.  I understand that he claims that it is how much he needed but I just don't see it justified.  You can't argue with me that you don't have time when you're already busy making another game.  Clearly he has time, and anyone who is a hobbyist developer knows that setting aside time is just a matter of discipline.  He had plenty of time to set up this campaign when there was the potential of profit/

[getter77]

Well, his last power pledge initiative netted it several thousand dollars---and in the week or so since then he was unable to log into IndieGoGo to manage, update it, or read messages left to him until just a day or so ago.  If he can manage about the same sort of performance on the KS for the second month as he did the first, the numbers should pretty much make it, a new interim release should help a bit versus the "he'll never release ANYTHING" detractors not unlike how a new ADOM II release should help via general audience spillover as well as a bit of proof that he can deal with both projects in tandem.   The funding amount would be a bit "premium"(Ie you still get to be poor as shit after the processors and IGG get their cut by a country mile) by most standards for a solo operation, but given there is essentially 4 guys involved?  Not so much.

In terms to time to set up a campaign, eh, it is more of a living animal I'd reckon.  You can plan out duration, and tiers to large degree, but time and again many Kickstarters and whatnot spiral out strangely one way or another and you'd best be able to react to them swiftly and deftly---even if he couldn't log in this past week to do just that he'd have been far better served to keep it going on the official ADOM blog as if he'd not had interrupted service and then catch up the IGG page ASAP.   Time in terms of work done is also a bit off in this case, as he is using an entirely different design and language paradigm this time around for ADOM II's "hobby work" versus ADOM's ungodly mess of 150K lines of incredibly hacked together old C code----even my own programming ignorance that persists knows to cringe when I see mention of " tons of hacked old C code".

So much so does this complicate matters:

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]

Latest grand pushing:  Artifacts and Tile considerations at the forefront

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 ;-)

With a sample pic there within.

[getter77]

Final super drive:

http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2012/08/adom-crowd-funding-lets-get-over-with-it.html

Ok, today so far has been a totally awesome day for the ADOM crowd funding campaign: We had a new record pledge level for recent weeks, there is a new audio demo by Lucas Dieguez and the stretch goals have been announced. Now I'd like to try to get over with it by passing the $48,000 goal for successful funding as soon as possible.

In order to try this we'll be now doing a kind of Dutch (reverse) auction (only kind of):

    -If the ADOM crowd funding campaign is successful within the next 24 hours (until 10:04am, August 22nd, GMT+1) I will add an extra special new boss monster with a special new map, 2 new artifacts, 4 new minion monsters for said boss and 16 new items that only will be recoverable on said special level.
    -If the ADOM crowd funding campaign is successful between 10:05am, August 22nd, GMT+1 and 10:05am, August 23rd, GMT+1, one new artifact on a special new map, 2 new minion monsters and 8 new items recoverable only on that map will be added. And a note somewhere on that map saying "Away for treasure hunting. Will be back soon." (to explain the missing boss monster).
    -If the ADOM crowd funding campaign is successful between 10:05am, August 23nd, GMT+1 and 10:05am, August 24th, GMT+1, 1 new minion monster and 4 new items recoverable only on that map will be added. And a note somewhere on that map saying "Gone for artifact creation."
    -If the ADOM crowd funding campaign is successful between 10:05am, August 24th, GMT+1 and 23:59pm, August 24th, GMT+1, 1 new minion monster and 1 new item will be added as a wilderness encounter.

So if you have been waiting to donate, do it now - it will get you extra free content :-)

And remember that the power pledge drive: artifacts also still is running!

Final stretch specified:  http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2012/08/adom-crowd-funding-stretch-goals.html

At $48,000 we just will have reached the minimum funding goal. If we don't get there all is lost, all the money is returned to the donors and the future for ADOM Classic looks pretty bleak. So please keep the excitement up and tell more people about the last 10 days of the campaign (and don't wait too long - the occasional technical problem we had so far doesn't give me a good feeling about the final days ;-) ).

At $50,000 Jochen, Zeno and I will be doing a basic NotEye integration in ADOM. This will be sufficient to allow the community to define their custom tile sets but we won't be able to provide one by ourselves.

At $55,000 I will be able to pay Krys (our artist) for six months or more (adding part of the basic art budget from the basic funding goal) in order to produce a totally awesome and beautiful tile set to make ADOM Classic the most beautiful roguelike game ever created.

At $60,000 we will add ratlings and mist elves as new races as well as duelists and chaos knights as new classes. This stretch goal will cash in on ancient promises I gave lo so many years ago.

At $65,000 we will create a Steam version of ADOM - the ADOM Deluxe promised so long ago (EDIT: And we'd try to do our best to also support other platforms like Gamersgate and Desudura). Every donor of $50 or above (and all who pledged for the ADOM Lite RPG) will receive a free license for ADOM Deluxe. ADOM Deluxe will add a more detailed character generation process, restorable save files, challenge games and some other neat details for paying customers. Why paying customers you might ask? Because it's all about a sustainable lifecycle model for ADOM. As has become clear from the campaign we'll be able to fund some ADOM development - but we still are looking for a sustainable model. I believe that with the addition of tiles and audio tracks ADOM has all the potetial to become a tiny mainstream success - and that's why I have defined this stretch goal despite other voices from my call for votes to the right of this blog. Because I believe that this might be the one chance to earn some continuous income from a much larger audience which in turn would allow the continuous financing of the free version of ADOM as well as the commercial Deluxe version. So it's a gamble but it seems to be a good one to me.

At $70,000 we will be adding achievement systems and global highscores - again extending the ideas behind the $65,000 level.

At $75,000 we finally get to the vote results to the right. A special and long volcanoe quest will be added to the game. Just a boring variation of the tower of flames you might think? By far not, be assured!

At $80,000 a new extensive quest regarding Rolf (you know him?) will be added. It will offer quite a number of new levels, challenges, monsters and items and will answer some of the unanswered mysteries of ADOM.

At $85,000 we will add two more new quests.

At $90,000 we will add three more new quests.

At $95,000 we will add four more new quests (for a total of 11 new quests by now).

At $100,000 we will produce the ADOM Lite RPG in full cover and distribute the upgraded version to everyone who pledged for it for free.

Additionally the initial pledge levels at $55,000, $60,000, $65,000 and $70,000 each will upgrade the quality of the music included with the game.

So that's what I got. I hope that you like some of the ideas even if I again decided to not totally comply with majority votes. But I believe this order to be the best for the game. Now let's just hope that some rich person picks up the $50,000 level (warning: I have learned that this probably won't work directly through Indiegogo - it seems that you need to contact them and arrange some kind of bank transfer... don't ask why I learned that ;-) But you don't want to wait until the last moment if you are either a very rich or a very generous person ;-) ).

Cheers

Thomas

Less than 4K to go until the minimum funding target is reached and 9 days outright left in the campaign.   

[Pueo]

I like how he continues to hold his source code hostage. I like how it's "the highest stretch goal". Classy.

I agree.  I'm one for open source code (unless your code is horrible-looking, then hide it on your hard drive ).  Of course, people need to eat, but he's obviously been doing fine all these years.

[getter77]

I just can't see it as a hostage situation unless the pledge level was to keep him from destroying the only copy live in a video with acid and fire or some such---otherwise just a sort of tongue-in-cheek pledge level as a crazy attention grabber more than anything else.

Open source can have upsides to it, but there's something to be said for the classical personal project still having a place at the table here in 2012 and beyond.

[guest509]

  There are 3 people giving $1000. That's amazing.

-JO

[Darren Grey]

It looks like it'll hit the goal in the next few hours...

[XLambda]

It's done.

[getter77]

Well, his reverse Dutch auction thing paid off in spades it would appear----best version of that event is now a lock and we shall see what stretch goals may come.   

[Skeletor]

As for THIS particular project, it's never going to happen.*
I doubt he'll be getting any money out of people who don't know ADOM.
[...]
_{*I'll write these words down on a piece of paper and eat them if I'm wrong.}