The (almost) final crowdfunding reward wave has shipped!

Hi everyone!

Today a very important milestone has been reached: The final wave of the "Resurrect ADOM development" crowdfunding campaign have shipped.

(well, it's probably the second to last wave because there will be one more small wave, probably at the end of October, in order to fix returned packages, etc. - but then it's over and done)

I've slept but 8 hours in the past 72 hours because it took a suprising amount of effort to

• sort out addresses, check them and fix some of them (e.g. because some persons omitted their country)
• select code pieces for the code certificates and get these printed,
• package the certificates safely,
• pack all the ADOM Lite RPG boxes (which we affectionately named "ADOM Resurrection Loot Boxes") including more code certificates, box certificates, the ADOM Lite RPG rules and the ADOM Arcana boxes, the poster map, a die (attuned by rolling it) etc. pp.
• fill the boxes to prevent damage,
• then bubble-wrap the boxes,
• package them in the shipping boxes,
• fill out tax forms, shipment forms, etc.
• fulfill more ADOM Lite RPG orders,
• personalize more ADOM postcards and send them.

So I'm really happy about having managed this. Below you find some impressions from the past 72 hours:

• Packaging stuff:

• Protecting the ADOM Resurrection Loot boxes:

• In mid-packaging I ran out of my first batch of bubble-wrap, luckily I had taken care of that by ordering ample reserves:

• In the end I prevailed:

• Next I stuffed the car of my wife with all the boxes:

(the other stuff is not visible due to all the boxes)

And then I brought our small local post office to a kind of halt for about an hour. I had announced my coming, they were well prepared but sadly other visitors blocked the second worker with very problematic requests - and I got some angry looks from a slowly growing lynch mob because I was standing at the counter with my mountain of boxes.

But luckily after one efficient hour of processing the shipments plus me paying a minor fortune for shipping now everything is on its way. All boxes can be tracked so that problems should be easily identifyable.

Time for celebration :-)

I'm now looking forward to get photos (please post them in social media, too) of packages arriving (I'm curious what the state will be), unboxing videos, etc.

I'm now back to working on the remaining software promises - I still hope to get all that stuff finished by end of September. Wish me luck :-) !

Updates to the ADOM self service portal

In order to answer a few more questions and help those people who seem to have problems with their passwords I have added a couple of things to the ADOM self service portal:

1. There are more explanations on the login screen. Read them carefully if you are confused.
2. When you request a password the on-screen response will be more detailed in order to tackle a few special cases that I so far had to process manually.
3. Anyone who is allowed to specify a magical statue now can see how his text and description will appear in the game (when logged in). Please check your descriptions as there were some questions about the correct format. The portal now displays how your input will appear in the game. If it doesn't seem to be correct please adjust the text.

And some repeated clarifications:

1. If you are a 'Questor' level donor (or above): Address verification will be handled separately. Don't care about that detail right now.
2. If you are a 'Seeker'-only level donor: You are not expected to do anything right now.
3. If you receive some virtual rewards be sure to pick them up at the ADOM self service portal as soon as possible. Time for that runs out on the 10th of December.

Thanks a lot for your patience. I'm now off to answer the remaining mail requests for help... and then I hopefully finally will be able to work on the other administrative stuff to be then hopefully finally able to program... so much for the rock star life of a solo game designer ;-)

Donors: Act NOW!

Dear ADOM: The Resurrection crowd funding campaign donors!

December has come and most of December I will spend on adding as much stuff as possible to get all the crowd funding rewards handled. Except for the Fridays and two other days I'm completely freed from work (having taken an unpaid holiday). But to be able to successfully implement the stuff promised in the campaign I need your help: Please specify your rewards on the ADOM: The Resurrection self service portal.

In order to allow me to implement all the stuff promised in time I need your feedback before the 10th of December, midnight (German time). I will not accept any later submissions thus resulting into the forfeiture of the rewards (and no payback). While this might sound hard I - to be honest - was shocked to discover that but 22.39% of the donors so far have provided feedback (at the time of this writing)!!! Have a look for yourself - I added a new statistics display to the self service portal (at the bottom of the login page).

So please specify your rewards before the 10th of December!

Thanks a lot :-) 

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!

:-)

What if there were an ADOM fundraiser...?

Let's brainstorm a little bit (as I have been extremely impressed by the success of the Order of the Stick Kickstarter fundraiser): If we (that's Jochen and me) would decide to do a fundraising campaign to push ADOM ahead...