Announcing the redesigned ADOM homepage!

Hi folks!

Yet another puzzle piece towards the Steam release finally is live. Krys has redesigned the ADOM homepage and given it a modern and fresh look which I've totally fallen in love with.

There are probably quite a few kinks left to be worked out and we plan to expand it greatly in the future but for now it should be sufficient to present ADOM in a modern, fresh and vivid manner.

In the future the following additions are planned:

• As soon as we have a new video up for the Steam release it also will be embedded with the play button on the front page.
• We might decide to randomize the player quotes on the website if we receive more good quotes that we can use.
• The new home page will be the foundation for the extended website and the community site we are going to develop after the Steam release. Major features of the community website will include:
• an event Stream displaying events from games played while online (e.g. character creation, deaths, achievements, unlocked, special levels discovered, ...
• shared global high scores
• community statistics (e.g. races & classes played, levels achieved, ...)

Let us know what you think - all feedback is welcome as usual!

Thomas & Team ADOM

Why do *you* love ADOM?

Yesterday I had an intense design and architecture meeting with Jochen to prepare ourselves for the final push towards Steam (which is the single most important thing we need to do next to hopefully ensure the continued and long-lasting resurrection of ADOM). One of the many topics we addressed in our milestone plan was the question of redesigning www.adom.de (which now has a totally antiquated look and definitely needs to transport a different message).

As I envision www.adom.de to be te future central portal hook to move from their into the Steam shop (with GOG and Desura to follow), to Facebook, Youtube and Twitter it also needs to answer one important question: Why would people newly pointed towards ADOM want to buy and play it. And thus I find it appropriate to ask the most important question of them all to you:

Why do *you* love ADOM?

Answers in the comments are very welcome and if you can, then try to focus on the top three most important aspects for you, straight from your heart.

Thanks for providing your opinions!

P.S.: If we receive awesome quotes we might consider using them for the website. If you don't want that to happen please add a small note. We have not yet finalized the plans for that but we have been talking about it.

Slowly redesigning the blog

I have started to slowly alter the blog layout. A long while ago we had an ADOM II design competition and for more than two years Kalle Kolaris header served us well (thanks once more). But now we are slowly creating a unified ADOM brand and Krys' ADOM designs (derived from the awesome tiled graphics we now have) will become a prominent feature of the new design.

If you don't see any changes please shift-reload this web page. Their should be a new awesome logo and header at the top of this page. And for the sake of completeness, here it is, too:

More changes to come over the next couple of weeks. And www.adom.de also will receive a revision soon. Obviously ADOM is currently in focus and ADOM II rests on the back burner...

Back to normal: More undead to the game

Since the hacker incursion finally has been repelled I'm quickly trying to get back to the normal schedule. At the weekend I was interrupted adding shadows to the game (and ghosts and spectres being the next) which introduce attribute drain as a new special ability. This new ability opens up so much room for cool new items that all the PC to drain monster attributes (gauntlets of the shadow touch draining strength, vampiric blades draining toughness, weapons of sorrow draining charisma, etc.) that I love this new addition.

Talk to ya soon about game-related stuff again!

Forums survived the night... hacker attack finally repelled?

No new garbage appearing on the adom.de server overnight. Finally we might have managed to quench all the damage inflicted by the script kiddie attack. I'm picking up hope again and maybe soon things can return to normal... specifically I hope to recover the fun I had working on JADE in the past couple of weeks. Stay tuned...

Hacking aftermath: Forums down again :-(

And yet another hole found, data destroyed, files damaged and the forums down again. I wish I'd be able to get my hands on this cowardly hacker freak... he'd suffer some real pain :-(

I'm not sure when (or if) things will be back up soon - I'll make one more attempt to save stuff tonight but I'm slowly getting tired of reinstallating the forums. And reconfiguring them... which really is a pain in the ass with vBulletin due to the immense amount of features... configuring those just takes too long.

Oh well, dark times for ADOM and JADE. So much time and energy lost...

Update on the hacker attack: Forums back online

I'm slowly making progress. Here are the latest news and a plan for revenge...