ADOM - Crowd-funding Campaign to Resurrect Developmement

Graaphic engines… get real. Even Dredmor is hideous compared to ASCII and that's a commercial game. Roguelike tiles are all ugly. That is simply the situation as it is.

TOME doesn't have a bad graphical tile set. It definitely beats fighting the alphabet.
 
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TOME is hideous... even Stone Soup's tiles look better. Still, they all lack the simple elegance of ASCII. But that's personal preference.

As for why I like ASCII really, I like variety. One shouldn't need to tie monster variety to art asset production capability. You folks should be the ones supporting this- you'd probably agree that for the cause greater dialog diversity voice acting should be cut, right? I'd rather have a theoretical pool of 832 monster types (26 basic characters * 2 cases * 16 colours) for a game to choose from. Especially if it's something randomized like a roguelike.
 
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I think there is one roguelike....Brouge?....which has as it's mission fewer types of monsters, but more significant differences between them. I've heard good things about it, but I've never gotten around to trying it.

Personally though, I still prefer that monsters who look very different from each other stand out from one another, just to make it easier to see them and plan. I prefer not to die because a 2 foot tall psuedragon, and a 500 foot long ancient dragon, look exactly the same, other then being slightly different shades of the letter D.
 
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I think there is one roguelike….Brouge?….which has as it's mission fewer types of monsters, but more significant differences between them. I've heard good things about it, but I've never gotten around to trying it.

Personally though, I still prefer that monsters who look very different from each other stand out from one another, just to make it easier to see them and plan. I prefer not to die because a 2 foot tall psuedragon, and a 500 foot long ancient dragon, look exactly the same, other then being slightly different shades of the letter D.

Brogue is excellent.

Probably the best roguelike that came out in last 10 years.
Well except Incursion...but that one is abandoned
 
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Thanks for the comments!
Honestly, based on the one-liners, each game seems to be the "bestest" anyway:
ADOM: Skyrim, but better,
Dwarf Fortress: very different,
TOME: accessible.
So I think the wisest choice is to test drive each game for a week (ADOM, Dwarf Fortress and -thanks for the tip!- TOME), then decide.

Also, FYI, when I checked TOME, someone has made a retro ASCII-tileset for rougelike purists.
 
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Certainly trying roguelikes is the way to go. I should clarify though, that TOME and ADOM are similar styles of roguelike, they both feature more epic adventures with wilderness maps, multiple dungeons, more story, and less randomization. I wouldn't necesarily describe TOME as being more accessible, except that it's been made more recently, and updated more often, so there has been more work put into interface and graphics. But it's definitely a substantially more complicated game then ADOM is.

Thanks for the comments!
Honestly, based on the one-liners, each game seems to be the "bestest" anyway:
ADOM: Skyrim, but better,
Dwarf Fortress: very different,
TOME: accessible.
So I think the wisest choice is to test drive each game for a week (ADOM, Dwarf Fortress and -thanks for the tip!- TOME), then decide.

Also, FYI, when I checked TOME, someone has made a retro ASCII-tileset for rougelike purists.
 
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My understanding is this isn't a crowdfunding for his second game, ADOM 2, this is to finish development for the original ADOM game. ADOM 2 is a separate project.

I only played ADOM a bit, but I was a bit underwhelmed by his planned changes. I think if he threw in a graphics engine, then I would be excited. D is just too abstract to produce a visceral response in me. It is not better that I have to imagine a dragon from a capital letter, it's just much much cheaper.

Two quick points:

(1) It's a crowd funding campaign to improve the original ADOM (finally I see a realistic chance to do so after I failed for ten years due to limited resources).

(2) The latest blog post discusses a graphics engine as a possible stretch goal: Please voice your opinion and vote if you are really interested in that feature: http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2012/07/pondering-stretch-goals-for.html

Cheers

Thomas Biskup
ADOM & ADOM II Maintainer
 
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ADOM was a great game for it's time, but it's definitely going to need a serious overhaul if it's going to be worth revisiting. The list of changes are currently kind of vague and underwhelming.

I am happy to see Thomas Biskup more seriously working on roguelikes again though. Hopefully this wont distract him too much from working on Adom II.

Depending on the success of the funding campaign ADOM might get a serious overhaul. At least a much better new version suitable for the 21st century.

And this time I am backed by a team so that ADOM II shouldn't suffer too much as our minimum goal is to do one new version (plus further patches) to really leave a legacy to be proud of. Then we'll think about the future or a new maintainer.

Cheers

Thomas Biskup
ADOM & ADOM II Maintainer
 
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If he threw graphic engine. That would easily be worth 48000$ he is asking for.
Otherwise , its seems like just to much.

Two comments:

(1) We are discussing the possibility of a new graphics engine right now: http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2012/07/pondering-stretch-goals-for.html

(2) The question IMHO should not be if $48.000 is too much - the question should be if any amount from $10 to $250 (the realistic pledge levels, although we already have one $1.000 donor) are too much.

Cheers

Thomas Biskup
ADOM & ADOM II Maintainer
 
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Ooh, NotEye looks good for tile-nerds. :)

$25 is certainly not too much! Hooray for this.
 
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