The end of my ADOM sabbatical

All good things come to an end at some point, so does today my ADOM sabbatical. For about a month I took off from normal work in order to work with full focus on implementing all the rewards from the ADOM crowd funding campaign. A lot got done, a lot more needs to be done, here's the quick summary.

Basically the month was extremely helpful for me to get into the depths of ADOM coding. Since the beginning of the sabbatical in December the following major successes have been achieved:

• ADOM has been vastly expanded. Hundreds of bugs and RFEs (literally) have been processed, mist elves, chaos knights, ratlings and duelists have been implemented as new player options, user defined boss monsters have been added (prerelease testers will be able to check those out in the very near future in ADOM 1.2.0p9).
• For prerelease testers ADOM 1.2.0p8 is the current official release with p9 soon to come, ADOM 1.2.0p5 was released to the general public as a Christmas gift.
• ADOM II saw three releases with ADOM II 0.3.2 being the current up to date version.
• The ADOM self service portal was in full operation to collect all the virtual reward specifications from crowd funding donors and results now are being integrated into the game.
• An official option to get access to ADOM prereleases has been established. And people seem to like it :-)
• I conducted a couple of interviews to spread the word about ADOM.
• And most important of all: I coded, coded, coded and coded... which was blazing fun.

So all in all I'm pretty happy with the results of the ADOM sabbatical month always I'm still bothered a little by the fact that I lost roughly the first week of 2013 due to a serious cold... actually so much more could have been done in that time and now that real life once more will come into main focus I'm a bit anxious about keeping up the good progress we have managed to achieve. But we'll see how this works out... I can't bend reality that much so I'll have to cope ;-)

As for what's next:

• I want to release p9 at the weekend, some more bugs need to be tackled but we are on a good way.
• Then I'll tackle the new statue implementations (another crowd funding reward).
• Afterwards it's a combination of "more bug fixing" and "getting the stories behind the new level additions structured and prepared" - I have a lot of ideas regarding the latter thing but these ideas still need to be hammered into shape.
• We are looking in how to handle the first release of ADOM integrated with NotEye.

Currently I expect another two to three months of pure coding work on ADOM before I will seriously tackle the phyiscal rewards from the crowd funding campaign (specifically the ADOM Lite RPG, the various mailings and the boxes). Please keep patient on that issue... it's quite complicated logistically, the most expensive physical part of the project and I can't afford to botch this up ;-)

Ok, that's it for now... stay tuned!