Monday, August 20, 2012

ADOM crowd funding: 11 days and $8,714 to go...

Whew... this sunday was very weak as far as the ADOM crowd funding campaign is concerned - we barely made $480 (no new artifact today!). Which still is a nice sum but not enough to make the campaign successful.

I'll try to put up the final stretch goals tomorrow morning and hopefully we will have a cool new video to get more undecided people to pledge now. If we lose momentum I fear the worst as a failed campaign would mean that everything is gone (as I mentioned a couple of times). So we still have $792,18 per day to reach the minimum goal and $1428,55 per day to really be able to do a beautiful tile based version of ADOM Classic. Tense... and remember: the power pledge drive: artifacts is running for but four more days. If you tarry too long you will loose the chance to see more new artifacts and items in ADOM. It's now or never ;-)

On another topic I'm still working on ADOM II 0.3.0. Some of the latest new additions include:

  • Simplified game mode for beginners
  • Intelligent hint mode
  • New game modes (e.g. no hunger, four direction movement only)
  • Major changes to the skill system (no more fiddly skill selections during character generation, more limited skills, more focus on race and class)
  • Changes to the weapon skill system and the way weapon experience is gained (the weapon skill level compared to the opponent level now plays a much larger role)
But it's still not quite ready...

9 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. I know the development of a game is hard, but, I never understood how are you going to spend 50.000 to make a roguelike! i mean, the first creation of ADOM didn't cost anything, how is the new version going to cost so much?

    the team?
    The beta testers?
    your hours of work?
    The price the game deserves?
    the platform conversion?
    ADOM II being created in parallel?
    The time it's gonna take?
    Everything together, plus
    some bonus for doing a
    great game?

    Actually, for being honest, at the start I thought the campaing wouldn't get mor than 5.000. I always thought roguelikes was the kind of thing that didn't had a big community...
    Maybe it's just by being used to the lack of
    geeks on my country...


    P.S:(I'm just curious, i have nothing against the price, i just want to now how do you spend it)

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    1. Hmmm... "the first creation of ADOM didn't cost anything". That's a really interesting statement :-)

      It did cost a lot. Thousands of hours of work. But as a student I was able to cover that cost because I had nothing better to do. Now three things are different: (a) I am no longer a student, I have to earn money to live, pay for my house, my family and basic necessities of life and (b) I actually have a day job and very little spare time - to have more time I need money to offset my day job and - last but not least (c) my compatriots in this endeavor also need to eat and pay for their lives. What do you think how much effort it e.g. would be to draw more than a thousand tiles? Yo are talking about a full time job for half a year of more, not some hobby work. And ask' Lucas about the amount of time it takes to compose the music. Or Jochen about the amount of time required for a build system for 10+ platforms, hundreds of bug fixes, native platform ports, etc. So we all have quite a bit of work ahead of us if the campaign succeeds.

      In short: Money pays for time and people,

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    2. About the first adom i meant cost with price. I know it costed a lot in terms of work. Adn i didn't knew the team was so big. In how much time will ADOM 1.2 be realeased? So basically it's that, the team and the time spent creating the game will be what costs more...

      I just hope ADOM campaing won't fail.. I'm so excited right now! I just wish I could donate more than 25, but i'm just a kid.

      By the way, is there another option of realising the tiles (the jochen ones) besides the campaing? Because they're so AWSOME!!

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    3. The tiles are done by Krys (our artist). Jochen and Zeno probably would do the major grunt work of integrating the tiles engine into ADOM and I'd help wherever I could ;-)

      We will be starting with ADOM 1.2.0 prereleases about a week or two after the end of the campaign (latest) as Jochen will need a little more time to fully automate our build system for all the platforms (otherwise each release costs too much time). I'm not quite sure how long it will take to finish ADOM 1.2.0 as one of the major challenges is trying to fix all known bugs... and there are quite a few of them and bugs have the ugly feature of being fickle ;-)

      Thanks BTW for your contribution!

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  3. Arkano: it's paying for several fulltime staffers who need to eat to live :P

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  4. Is $40k really not enough to start this project? The starting goal just seems to me like you were asking for a bit much. There have been several successful projects that have gotten funded on far less. I understand needing money to pay for assets and for people to afford to perform the coding as a job, it just seems a little much, to me.

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    1. I actually don't consider it that much money. From the 48k, 7% will be fees for indiegogo and credit card fees. Fulfilling the different pledge levels will take a lot of time, and thus also cost money. With the remaining money, you can pay one person fulltime for several months, and 4 of them only for a few months. That might sound like a lot of time to do a few bug fixes, but I think that most developers will agree with me that software projects just take A LOT of time, and in a few months you are not really able to do very much.

      I guess that if Thomas would have calculated with realistic salaries for the team, it would not have been 48k, but a LOT more than that.

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    2. You bet! Despite all the money there's still quite a bit of sacrifice by everyone. Not that I'm complaining.

      I just need to ask in return "For what do you $40k figure to be enough?" We have tried our very best to estimate a realistic figure and by now there's already a lot more promised if the campaign succeeds than I initially planned (hey, I need to write an RPG - do you have any resemblance of an idea about how long that is going to take?). Again: I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to be realistic.

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