ADOM video competition winners announced!

We asked for participation in an ADOM video competition. And you competed!

Now we have a winner!

Watching a ton of extremely good videos was quite an extraordinary experience, and a humbling one - so many of you are better at playing ADOM than we are.

Over 20 hours of viewing material made it into the preliminary selection, so it took a bit longer than anticipated to select our winners.

We have them now, though, and will happily present these to you.

While we struggled with everything else, the first place goes to 'Mercury Jack' for his exceptional explanation video showing what ADOM is and giving valuable advice for both fresh heroes and experienced adventurers. Well done!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI01T8_Gr80

The second place goes to the tale of Ork the Ratling Duelist by FritzCouchPlays. It is a tale full of wonder, twists and an interestingly named Ratling who grows beyond her small frame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYG6n7mtBo8

And finally, though Not Really Safe For Work due to sweary words, we agreed on Blind Ryan's hilarious streak of bad luck for Ryan the dwarven mindcrafterto be followed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP0DwURyj6k

All winners will be contacted over the weekend, and prizes will be sent out as soon as we have all addresses.

Honourable mentions need to go to Denox and Yana who made us wish we speak Russian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKWPKVFYqXc

And to the wonderful Adam Grzyb who basically sent us billions of hours of highly enjoyable viewing stuff.

Thank you all! We'll keep the prizes a surprise until they get to our winners, but then we'll share the absolute stunning and amazing thing we've created here.

Thank you all for participating! We were blown away by the quality of items you sent us.

A call to arms: Videos wanted!

Heroes of Ancardia!

Whether you regularly perish in the attempts of saving a cute puppy, accidentally bump into shop keepers in a menacing way, get eaten by kobolds or challenge Andor Drakon himself in all your glory, we want the world to see your exploits. Record your playthroughs for us! Ancardia has a dire need for Youtube heroes showing the world the glory of ADOM, because to be honest, there's not much out there yet, and we think it's a shame.

We're looking for true heroes and fallen ones, devious tricksters and brave knights. Record some of your playing and share it with the world. Half an hour to an hour of playtime, if your character survives that long, of course. Show us anything! From creating a new character from scratch and braving your first few encounters, clearing out the bug temple, raiding the thieves' guild, destroying Terinyo in the name of Chaos or robbing a Casino, all is fair game.

Feel free to explain what you're doing, but this is not mandatory.

Both ASCII and Tilemode are perfectly acceptable.

If you submit your uploaded playthrough (Youtube, Vimeo or whatever other platform you can think of) with a link to marketing@adom.de before the first day of June, you'll even be eligible to win something really amazing to put on your wall or dazzle your friends with. We'll be having a look at all the submissions and pick the best three videos.

When submitting your links, please let us know if you're happy with us using your material for trailers and other promotions of ADOM.

In brief:
What: Record yourself playing ADOM for up to an hour, upload it somewhere accessible and send it to marketing@adom.de
When: Before the 1st of June 2018, whatever timezone you are.
Why: Fame, glory, our eternal gratitude and the chance to win something really cool and unique.

We are looking forward to your submissions!

New ADOM overview video posted

Hi everyone!

This morning we finished a new ADOM overview video:

 Enjoy!

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.

Better direction selection in ADOM

Hi everyone!

As part of our "Ease of Use UI" milestone I am happy to present the new ADOM direction selector in the following video (it is easy to notice, reminds you of which action you currently are trying to execute and lists the keys for selecting a direction in a more mnemonic way):


As usual the NotEye implementation for our graphical mode is upcoming.

Enjoy!

Look better in ADOM

Hi everyone!

As part of our "Ease of use UI" milestone we are tackling a variety of issues with ADOM. Today I spent quite a number of hours on completely rewriting 'l'ook mode and by now think that the new look mode has become really nice and beautiful.

We still need to implement it in NotEye but below you can already find a video that shows you the new 'l'ook mode in ADOM:

• Navigation now adds the ability to iterate through "interesting" spots (e.g. stairs, altars, item stacks and more) besides the existing ability to iterate through monsters and manually navigating the map.
• The information about the current spot now is displayed in a kind of ASCII information window that collects all information about the current map spot. ADOM tries to position the information window as smartly as possible so that it is close enough to the cursor for easy persual but far enough away in order to not obscure your view.
• You now can inspect item stacks as long as they are in sight.
• Monster memory is available as usual.
• For all types of situations all information now is displayed (e.g. tiles, features, monsters and items).
• As all information is displayed in an information window the key help for look mode no longer will be obscured and you can see all available keys all the time.
• The mechanism is easily extendable so that if we decide to add more data we no longer will have problems with lack of space in the message area.

In total I believe that the new look mode really has become pretty beautiful. I'm also looking forward to the NotEye implementation for our graphical mode. Hopefully we will be able to implement true tooltips so that you don't even need to activate look mode explicitly but rather just can hover over the map with the mouse.

And now enjoy the ASCII demo video:

New video review of ADOM by James Allen

James Allen kindly did a video review of ADOM on his Youtube channel. I'm very happy about him as a non-power-roguelike-gamer taking the time getting into ADOM. I really love various aspects about his video as I learned quite a bit about the problems a game like ADOM poses to new people we might try to attract.

Several of these problems are well-known but others only now really left an impression upon me. So, thanks James, for a having a deeper look at ADOM!

Prerelease 1 video of ADOM 1.2.0

I just posted a new update to the ADOM crowd funding campaign which contains a short video with a very first glimpse of a (yet unfinished) prerelease 1 of ADOM 1.2.0. We intend to do one release of the current state of development within the next seven days (keep your thumbs pressed!) in order to raise more awareness for the campaign. So soon there actually will be a new ADOM release after almost 10 years of silence. Please enjoy the (IMHO) wonderful intro theme composed by Lucas Dieguez for ADOM... it's not yet integrated into the game but we used it for the video. And enjoy my bumbling efforts of moving through the small cave ;-)

Updates to the ADOM crowd funding campaign

The ADOM crowd funding campaign has started pretty well during lunch today (after a few technical problems that have been resolved by now) - see the current results to your right. More than $2.500 in the first couple of hours and no sign of getting slower for now. I'm curious for tomorrow morning and hope for the very best.

Now I'd like to ask for your help in order to not only enthrall old ADOM fans with the campaign but other people who might only have heard a little bit about ADOM.

Question regarding videos

There are interesting questions that pop up during the last preparations for the ADOM crowd funding campaign and hopefully there's someone knowledgable about the issue out there:

During the pitch video for the crowd funding campaign I plan to have a computer monitor on the sidelines of the video playing a video. I found some cool videos from the ADOM community I could see there but the originator of my most preferred video doesn't seem to be reachable right now. The video is available on various video platforms like myvideo, youtube, etc.

Now the question: Is it permissible to have that video running at the sideline (e.g. it never will be full screen, during the video I will mention it as an example of a fan video, etc.) or is that a problem?

Alternatively if there's someone out there who has posted some great video illustrating ADOM gameplay and wouldn't mind me using it as background filler for the campaign pitch video, please post a link here and a small statement saying that I may use it.

Thanks - any help is appreciated!