Thursday, January 10, 2013

Episode 58: The Resurrection of ADOM

Happy New Year roguelike fans!  It's 2013, we're all still alive, and we're back with a new episode of Roguelike Radio.  This week we cover the Resurrection of ADOM, with Darren Grey, Thomas Biskup and Ignacio.

You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.




Topics discussed in this episode include:
- Reflections on the abundantly successful crowd-funding campaign on IndieGoGo
- What Thomas' wife thinks of it all
- Dealing with the aftermath and organising the rewards
- Fulfilling decades old promises
- Touching decades old code, and its comparison with modern languages
- A bit of celebration of the new content and gameplay modernisation in the 8 new releases in 2012
- Community involvement and suggestions
- Response to ADOM and ADOM II coming 2nd and 3rd in the ASCII Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2012 poll
- Schedule for ADOM development in the short and long term
- The aim to get on Steam
- Lessons learned from the crowdfunding campaign
- Permadeath and taxes


Join us next time for further highlights from the Roguelike of the Year 2012 poll.

12 comments:

  1. As an example of the difficulty of bug reporting in the closed source ADOM, one user recently made a suggestion of making it harder to accidentally attack non-hostile invisible creatures, because of an important late-game NPC that one can have easy accidents with. Turns out... that NPC shouldn't have been invisible, it was a bug.

    10 fecking years we've been avoiding that dude or deliberately wearing See Invis equipment or having horrible accidents! And it was a bug all this time! We never knew! It's amazing what gets accepted as a feature when you don't know otherwise...

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  3. So is this basically just a long informercial for ADOM?

    Darren: So, Thomas, you're telling me this game can clean up that bag of soot I just dropped on the floor there?

    Thomas: Well, we'll have a go, Darren! But it certainly looks tough to clean! ... Well, look at that! It's coming right out!

    Audience: gasp! pause applause

    Darren: Join us after the break to watch Thomas hand-painting colour onto messags for cold hard cash. Remember, he need that cash to colour those messages! It's hard work!

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    1. Why the bitterness, graspee? You didn't complain about the FTL and Dungeons of Dredmor infomercials :P And this ep is clearly aimed a bit more at the ADOM community.

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  4. Hehe, I really enjoyed the episode for one. Listening to one of the greats of the genre is always a pleasure!

    That's YAGP from me!

    I appreciate the update on ADOM's progress. Hopefully it can be an inspiration to all the other crowd-funded devs out there, or those who play with the idea. I also really like that Thomas is so honest when it comes to the amount of work and challenge running such a crowd-funder is. Should warn all of us to not just jump on the wagon as if it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

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  5. I've played a fair bit lately and enjoyed it a lot, but recently I went on the forums and found the list of interesting seeds, how to replay the same seed, and how easy it is to scumsave, and it has destroyed most of my enjoyment of the game... Is this considered an ok way to play roguelikes? Does roguelikes take measures to overcome this if its considered a problem?

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    1. Played a fair bit of Brogue I meant to say :-P

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    2. I've seen some interesting discussion about this elsewhere - people who believe that it's a viable way to play with the game, that it encourages community sharing etc. Personally I think as a designer one should take some efforts to ensure that savescumming and seed replaying is not easy, to make it clear this is not the right way to play. Seed replaying especially seems wrong to me.

      As a player you just need a bit of willpower! It helps if the game is on a server or such where this sort of behaviour is impossible.

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    3. I play Brogue without seed scumming. People seem to do it in order to learn how to play from selected equipment:

      http://brogue.createforumhosting.com/1st-build-contest-1-8-1-11-conj-seed-17152689-t620.html

      cheers

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    4. Yes, I also took in this approach for the sake of better learning how to survive in Brogue, thinking that playing the same game over and over, I should be better able to learn from my mistakes... but to me it kills the game. Identification potions becomes useless, there's no sense of exploration, and the game gets this same feel that I get in action rpgs. You keep respawning until you surpass a challenging part in the game, but ultimately it's just tedious and boring.

      I've finally mustered the will to NOT do this anymore, and the enjoyment of the game is starting to be felt again... though the knowledge that I "could" be playing a more optimal dungeon seed is still nagging in the back of my mind :P

      I can only see the server solution too, Darren, but that would prevent games from building any mod community or bug-fixes/patches from the community... I guess you can't have it all though :)

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  7. Looking forward to trying this game when it's in a presentable state! That new tile work is looking nice.

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