Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Clockwork birds

Hi everyone! Lucas already is working on cool new soundtracks for ADOM and he's sent me a nice piece for a kind of steampunk side venture, maybe related to the casino level. Enjoy the clockwork bird.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Crowdfunding & taxes: Lessons learned so far

Disclaimer: I'm not a tax accountant, I have only my own limited understanding of the German tax system (which might be wrong in places) and I advise anyone to confer with a professional tax accountant of their country of origin if serious advice about crowd funding and taxes is required. Nonetheless here's what I learned so far regarding crowd funding and taxes in Germany...

The 'ADOM: The Resurrection' postprocessing woes

Wow, I really underestimated the effort for postprocessing all the pledge levels from the ADOM: The Resurrection crowdfunding campaign. Every troll out there deserves to get treated with a week or two of "crowdfunding postprocessing work". An accountant's dream... a programmer's nightmare. This week I'm double-checking all pledge levels I have noted down and it seems that a lot of people either forgot to send an email when upgrading their pledges (so I didn't notice) or the emails got lost for whatever reason. At least that accounts for about 95% of my pains. Then there are some folks who made a mistake due to the UI design of Indiegogo which is more easily corrected. And there were some special wishes I promised to fulfill. All in all it probably means yet another week of my time being spent on spreadsheets ;-)

Now for something important: There already have been a couple of mail accounts that no longer seem to work. Which means that I no longer can get into contact with the relevant persons... if you by now did not receive one or more mails regarding your pledge level from me there probably is a problem. I sent one mail per reward level for which you are eligible to.... (standard level from the original campaign, seeker, mega-legend).

Now for something else important: Some folks failed to add the shipping cost for the Master Thief level. I'll be getting back to you and we'll have to adjust your pledge for that.

Now for something also important: I did not send out any mails regarding the free ADOM Deluxe license (because I still need to sum up all pledges per user at some point). If you pledged $40 or more (in whatever combination) you definitely are going to receive a free ADOM Deluxe license. No need to ask. Thanks a lot!

:-)

Monday, September 17, 2012

ADOM: The Resurrection update

Hi folks! Quick update... I'm still doing preparatory work...

Sunday, September 16, 2012

The final public prerelease: ADOM 1.2.0p3 is out!

As if you didn't know by now ;-) Jochen was much faster in updating than I and I guess I need to give him write access to the blog to prevent us from getting out of sync ;-)

Monday, September 10, 2012

Answering ATR party questions

On September, 1st, we celebrated the ADOM: The Resurrection virtual party on IRC. You can find the complete logs here, additionally a lot of questions were directed at me that I'm going to try answering in this blog post. So, warning ahead: This is going to be quite long :-) You can find the collected questions here. I have taken the liberty to omit separate answers to some questions that were included in other earlier questions and hopefully didn't forget anything important.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Trolls everywhere...

While it was nice to see that the ADOM trolls truly are a meaningless minority (IMHO proven by the extraordinary support out there in favor of the campaign) it's sometimes also a kind of relief to see that others suffer from their particular ilk of trolls, too. Here's a great story about a kind of Raspberry Pi troll that Jochen pointed me to. Even if in this case it's more or less a money-grabbing troll. But I find the story hilarious and thus had to share it.

Monday, September 3, 2012

Preliminary thoughts on the ADOM Lite RPG

Just some thoughts as part of the ADOM: The Resurrection project (the one with the least dependencies) is already moving. I have been putting some thoughts into the ADOM Lite RPG. Here's a short summary:

Planning ADOM 1.2.0+

Greetings everyone! After ending the ADOM: The Resurrection crowd funding campaign with a blazing success, after having a nice ADOM: The Resurrection virtual party and after getting some rest from the campaign I'm starting this week to setup the new project (as the many changes and the additions during the campaign completely wrecked our old plan ;-) ). Here's an overview of things to happen first...

Saturday, September 1, 2012

ADOM: The Resurrection virtual party

Folks following me on Facebook already knew about it but I'd naturally like to invite everyone else, too. On Saturday, 1st of September, at 7pm UTC (9pm my time) we are going to hold a virtual ADOM: The Resurrection party on IRC.

Here you can find all the instructions... love to meet you all and party!

Thanks to Leon Planken, Tapani Harkila, Anders Andersson and Juha Suvanto for preparing and supporting this. I'm sadly as much of an IRC dummy as I was nine years or so ago when I last did an interview round on IRC. But I'm really looking forward to this and hope that we'll all be having a lot of fun!!!

See ya in about 20 hours... Thomas. Still exhausted ;-)