Sunday, August 23, 2015

ADOM R60 released to the general public: Final release before Steam?

Hi everyone!

Team ADOM is happy to announce the public release of ADOM R60. It is available from the usual download sites, all summarized on our beautiful new download page.

ADOM R60 again is a major bugfix release and we by now hope to have closed all issues that prevented us from going to Steam. All changes and adjustments are listed on our also beautiful new change log page.

Personally I was someone shocked that two days ago we discovered that spell animations for ball spells had not been working for weeks. Neither we nor anybody out there seems to have noticed o_O

So our intention is to do one final (?) round of feedback. If no more major problems are discovered we intend to release R61 to Steam and finally pick up steam (pardon the pun) after that by returning to adding new features instead of just focussing on bug fixing and stabilization. Sadly one bug already has been found during the 9-hour-long deployment process for all 59 (!) versions of ADOM we (meaning Jochen) have to deploy for a public release: the (more) hint in tutorial mode is not working in the way intended.

So we have to ask everyone out there: Test R60 as intensely as possible and try out everything. And then please provide feedback in our issue manager regarding any problems that you might encounter. We really want the Steam version to be the most stable release possible and need your help in this! And we finally want to have it out in the open to restart adding tons of awesome features (which we currently dare not do out of fear of wrecking the initial Steam release).

And now go playing :-) !

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Closing in to the Steam release: Indie Game PR agencies?

Hi everyone!

Things have been pretty silent in the past couple of months (except for two releases ;-) ) and we still are not on Steam. The reasons as usual are varied but we now finally are very close to the release as can be seen by the issues to be fixed that still are on our list. We expect one more public release for stability testing and barring any more important problems then should be ready to go.

One of the issues concerns press related stuff (press kit, etc.). I recently was wondering if any of you out there have had experiences with Indie PR agencies (or heard about such experiences). There seem to be a couple of companies out there that specialize on handling public relations for Indie Games and I'm pondering whether this might help the Steam release given our limited time in 2015. Visibility always is good and I might be tempted to invest some bucks in such an agency... does anybody have knowledge about costs, effectiveness, etc?

Thanks for any pointers!
Thomas