The ADOM front: Steam, UI/UX & more

Hi folks!

Just a quick update regarding our current work:

• We'll be on Steam with a beta very soon now - one more bug/new feature to get right (custom mouse cursors for much better left-click interactions) and then we'll be there.
• We have been spending a lot more time on examining the user experience for new ADOM players. And it's without doubt still horrible (although much better than 12 months ago). I sadly have come to realize that we have been making a mistake (as hard as it sounds) by mostly discussing UI/UX within the existing community. The existing community mostly consists of too many roguelike/ADOM experts who just fail to see (like me) what barriers these games pose to general players. 
• As a result we have started doing supervised tests with new players of varying experience in a UI/UX lab setting and the results have been staggering: ADOM presents incredible barriers to get into the game (still, despite hundreds of UI issues we already worked on). But the good news is that we believe we now finally are learning the important UI/UX issues (maybe a bit late, but whatever) and will be able to work on them without ruining the game for existing players. Our UI/UX milestone in the ticket database lists our findings and while this stuff won't make it into the next Steam release I really hope that we will be able to include most of it into the release after that: http://www.adom.de/forums/projectmilestone.php?do=issuelist&milestoneid=8&filter=active

So our priorities right now are:

1. Releasing on Steam.
2. Improving UI/UX.
3. Finishing the crowdfunding promises (which we hope to do this month!).
4. Getting ready for the Roguelike Celebration (meet me there) and big announcements.

Stay tuned for updates!

More ideas for streamlining the ADOM UI

Hi everyone!

Today I pondered slaughtering a potential holy cow (but maybe not - I'm curious for the responses):

I'm sure people who know their key presses in reflex-like motions will hate me but IMHO it makes a lot of sense to have more intuitive bindings and I never have been afraid to look at holy cows while sharpening a knife.

The next logical step would be to sort races, professions and star signs alphabetically on the corresponding selection screens instead of using the current chaotic mess.

But I have a gut feeling that I will create some irritations with long time fans. On the other hand I strongly believe that all these changes would be very beneficial for new players.

So let me hear your thoughts!

P.S.: Yes, I also shortened the texts in the menus as the many filling words ("View the...", "Read the...", ...) probably just unnecessarily clutter the screen.

P.P.S.: Yes, there is a new game mode progression. The idea here is the following:

• "Tutorial game" is the introduction you should take to learn the basic mechanisms of the game.
• "Standard game" is a game mode that is suited at the "average" (and more casual) player out there. Hunger effects will be lessened (probably just cumulative negative attribute modifiers instead of killing effects, slightly better survivability). It should serve to show all the tricks and traps of the game but with less immediate killing power. No talents.
• "Roguelike game" is the standard way of playing ADOM (but without the customization screen - basically spontaneous selection at each step).
• "Customized game" is the complex customization screen you have today.
• The other modes are unchanged.

The next release also will add more customization options:

• "Hunger" no longer will be just on or off but get a third "debilitating" setting. And "on" probably will be renamed to "deadly".
• "Talents" will be added with the settings "off", "automatic selection" and "custom selection".
• "Balance" will be added with the settings "Roguelike" (die rolls like today) and "Pampered" (making die rolls in certain situations slightly more favourable for the player with the goal of making gameplay even more exciting - I found this article very fascinating: https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/8/16263050/game-design-magic-tricks)

The above-mentioned standard game will use "Talents: off" and "Balance: pampered". 

MerkenMerken

Quick hints & quest dialogs

Hi everyone!

While we continue working on the next release busily I'd like to demonstrate a few things that have been added since my last report:

• ADOM now has quest dialogs to make it harder to miss new quests. (Additionally - but not shown in the video below - the quests have been made somewhat more extensive in their descriptions and the quest status screen offers a few more details. Also not shown is the dialog announcing the completion of a quest... oh, and completing quests now most of the time yields a few extra experience points).
• ADOM now has a quick hint system. ADOM shows a kind of ASCII tooltip in some situations to indicate which commands might be particularly helpful. The tooltips show up only a limited number of times (10 by default, but that is configurable).

See the video below to get an impression of these features:

Additionally we have been working on many other things:

• Krys continues to animate monster by monster - a couple of dozen still are left but we are getting to 100% coverage.
• Zeno is very busy catching up with the many ASCII enhancements and also has started tackling some long-requested features for the graphical mode, Most important IMHO here is the ability to scale much better to different screen resolutions.
• We have added more improvements to mouse controls. Shooting now is just a single left-click onto an enemy (but you can change it to double clicks by configuration).
• I have progressed with the Rolf and volcano quest (but there's still quite a bit to do).
• And there have been tons of other details (like being able to skip (more) with the mouse, new tiles for location entries on the wilderness with easier to discern entries, etc.).

If all goes well I'm hoping for a prerelease version by end of next week (but ASCII only) for our prerelease texters and from there we'll progress to the Steam release. And afterwards we will finally be able to enjoy the benefits of our new GIT based development pipeline by releasing much more often.

Stay tuned!

Rethinking item management in ADOM

Hi everyone!

The past couple of days I have been trying to play ADOM mouse-only. Leaving a well-known environment (playing ADOM by keyboard) sometimes opens up interesting new angles and perspectives on things. Since starting to play mouse-based I have felt uncomfortable with the way of how part of ADOM's item management works - specifically picking up and dropping things.

A week of work on the ADOM UI

Hi everyone!

After being a bit spammy last week, I decided to summarize the progress of this week in one longer blog post (and a second follow-up post will ask a question that bothers me right now quite a bit regarding picking up and dropping items).

But first here's the latest news about the progress of this week:

Communication bubbles in ADOM

Hi everyone!

Today I'm particularly proud to present a masterpiece of ASCII art (*cough*, *cough* - bare with me - without Krys my artistic abilities are somewhat rudimentary ;-) ).

For a long time (and especially with the new graphical mode) people rightfully complained about dialogs with NPCs and monsters and the texts uttered by them were not very well readable.

I have taken these complaints to heart and proudly present the new ADOM speech bubble mechanism I implemented:

These bubbles adjust in size, in theory the text contained can be pageable and ADOM tries to position them smartly so that neither the involved speakers nor the nearby context gets obscured. There yet has to be a lot of testing to see if this works well in all instances (prerelease testers, you'll get work in the nearer future :-) ) but I am very happy with the current mechanism. And I find it remarkably beautiful for ASCII art :-)

Let me know what you think!
(and as usual my dear compatriots in crime [Team ADOM] are under pressure to catch up graphically with my ASCII designs ;-) )

New dialog widgets in ADOM

Hi everyone!

Another milestone has been completed in our quest to simplify the ADOM user interface and make it more accessible for new players: Starting with the next release ADOM is going to use dialog widgets to display meta game information and to input values expected from the PC.

The video below gives a brief demo about how this will look in ASCII mode - graphical mode is still under construction:



Especially in graphical mode players often believed that the game was "hung" when they just had hit an key combination that resulted in some input request and said request was barely noticeable in the message buffer. In the revised implementation the message buffer is only used for actual game information concerning your actions and surroundings and all (most?) meta information is displayed in dialogs.

Next up: Speech bubbles / dialog boxes for conversations to make it easier to follow discussions with NPCs and to reduce irritations about missed message texts from NPCs.

Simplifying the ADOM UI...

Hi everyone!

In our continuing quest to simplify ADOM we today have gathered a long list of issues with the goal of simplifying ADOM more for new players. You can find it here: http://www.adom.de/forums/projectmilestone.php?milestoneid=8

And now we are looking for more input - but the goal is not to refine the UI for expert players and longtime fans - we know that there is a ton of proposals to fine-tune the UI even more for people expertly battling Chaos for a long time. Quite to the contrary we would like to unexperienced players, casual players and newcomers to the roguelike genre more favours. We have made several attempts in the past and want to continue to evolve the UI.

Thus we'd be very grateful for comments on the issues listed in the milestone above. If you have new or other ideas please add issues to our issue tracker and post a link in the comments below for us to review, so that we can decide whether to include your issues in that milestone or not.

Thanks for your continuing support!
Thomas & Team ADOM

P.S.: Naturally in the background we are working on finishing lots of new content. Stay tuned for that, too!

Fiddling with the ADOM Deluxe menu screens

Right now I am toying with the new design and interaction workflow for the ADOM Deluxe menu screens - in ASCII mode. Once the dust settles and I am happy with the design (and Team ADOM agrees ;-) ) Krys & Co. will turn the ASCII design into a beautiful graphical layout.

Slow return

Just a short notice... after the deep grief of the past weeks (which still is far from overcome) I nonetheless will try my best to return to normality. As a first sign he blog colors are back to normal.

Centralized PC data management for the upcoming ADOM release

Below you find a demo of the upcoming centralized data management for all the important data screens for the player character:


The basic idea is to give new players an easy way to access all the data without having to learn 10-12 commands. I'm still pondering whether to remove the top line (with the player name, level and stuff) in order to save one line but on the other hand we might also consider increasing the standard number of lines on the screen. We'll see. Comments and feedback as usual is very welcome!

Demo: Showing some of the new movement commands

One of the biggest advantages of our Steam Greenlight campaign so far has been the tremendous motivation from non-roguelike-players to increase usability. And yes, I know, many fans from the community pushed us into that direction, too (yeah, Darren, I'm e.g. looking at you ;-) ).

I already blogged about the new movement commands I am working on right now and today I'd like to show a little demo:


IMHO they are awesome and I can't remember playing without them (being a lazy guy - if you want to optimize your movements there probably can be more optimized movements occasionally - although e.g. exploration mode is trying very hard to be very efficient).

Just saying...

Awesome new movement commands coming up (and more)

At least I think so. I shouldn't be talking about features that are not yet fully implemented but as I'm going to bed soon and things look as if they will work out in a most awesome way by tomorrow I just had to talk about it :-)

Adding even more context to mouse commands

In a recent post I already blogged about the upcoming context menus for ADOM. Right now I am busy upgrading the context intelligence so that commands really are only offered if they can be executed. This might sound simpler than it actually is because some commands in ADOM check a dozen of preconditions and all that needs to be re-used in the context command selection algorithm. Which again sounds simpler than it is as ADOMs ancient codebase never was prepared for such things. But by the end of today it would be there for all commands. And there will be other side effects (that gamers probably expect but that cause headaches for programmers working on an ancient code base - like me ;-)...

Modern roguelikes: What gives?

We've been on a nice weekend trip and I had some to think. One question that keeps me busy is "What makes a roguelike game a 'modern roguelike game'"?

Fiddling with the UI

Those who follow me on Facebook know that I have been struck down by a bad cold (once again, damn) and everything thus got delayed. I'll definitely need another week or so to release 0.2.4 since I got almost nothing done during the past week. Currently I have been fiddling with the key bindings and now would like to get some input on the whole UI issue.

View modes in JADE... who uses them?

I'm right now finishing the final details of the new 'look' mode in JADE. Due to a bug I remained in a peculiar view mode that is not activated by default. And then I wondered if anyone out there playing JADE is actually using that mode.

Questions regarding 21st century roguelike UIs

As a reaction to yesterdays post concerning JADE: The Ultimate Edition Darren Grey posted something very interesting (to me at least - and I have learned to at listen to Darren in the past couple of months ;-) ):