Ancient Domains of Mystery IndieGoGo Project Updates #1-3, $14,000 and Counting

Ancient Domains of Mystery’s Thomas Biskup has been busy posting a few announcements on the game’s IndieGoGo page, in which he thanks everyone for helping the project get off to a good start before pointing us to blog posts covering some of the stretch goals he has planned and his plans to do a Reddit AMA tonight. On stretch goals, including an ADOM tabletop RPG possibility:

New PC Races
I want to do ratlings (since I love them dearly) and I want to do Mist Elves (a promise I gave to a young ADOM fan 15 years ago and I still need to fulfill it). As far as I am concerned these will be among the first small stretch goals if we manage to make the basic funding goal.

New PC Classes
I’d ove to add duelists (because I love ratlings) and pyromancers (because I always loved fire-themed characters). The latter one is open for discussion if someone has better ideas. Again this will be one of the early small stretch goals.

More Corruption
I always loved the idea behind the corruption system (and I’m going to improve it in ADOM II over time). I’d like to have more variability and thus I would like to add something like 20 new corruptions. With the major change being that a PC only will receive a subset of those corruptions before being transformed into a writhing mass of primal chaos. Adds more randomness and chaos to the process which seems very appropriate.

Now for the big ones…

iPad Port
Jochen and I want them, interest was good (although not overwhelming).

Android Port
Interest was good. We only do intend to do a tablet port though as IMHO mobile devices just can’t handle games with a UI complexity of ADOM (e.g. so many commands, etc.). I couldn’t stand playing any of the more complex roguelike games for more than three minutes on a mobile device and then never returned.

ADOM RPG
If there were interested I’d really be tempted to finally do the ADOM pen & paper RPG as a 128 page full-color hard cover book. But only if there is interest nowadays.

Scripting Engine
It might be possible to add some scripting means to ADOM. This probably would be restricted to new items and new monsters as everything else in ADOM would require truly major changes to make it configurable. Not sure whether it’s worth the effort though.

Tile-based Graphics
Yes. Honestly. I know that I didn’t want to do this (and I won’t probably use it as I love the ASCII display) but about 50% of the folks who said “I’m not going to donate” also said “…if there are no tiles”. While I personally don’t see the need I’m very well willing to listen to others. Darren Grey had a fantastic idea for an approach that might work with ADOM: He suggested getting into contact with the NotEye developer (which we now are) and discussing whether it would be possible to integrate NotEye into ADOM to get a tile-based display.

From what I can currently see this is a lot more complex than many folks seem to think but I hope that we can sort out the important questions quickly together with the NotEye developer (e.g. What screen resolution are we targeting? What size should the tiles be? Should there be a stretch goal to get a unified tile set by Krys or should we try to have a community built tile set? Or both? Which platforms should we target? How do we handle the much smaller display area?). And so on.

Releasing the source code
Since I have been flamed to death over this and really am sick of it I won’t discuss the details. It’s the final stretch goal and it will require more pledges than we are likely to get but I have set my mind and that’s it. Final word for now.

New quests
Want an update about the Red Rooster Inn? Some volcanology? Or read a scroll of omnipotence? Or just get some more initial quests? Or later on? All possible…

Challenge Games
Interested in having integrated challenge games (like Eternium Man and others)?

Highscore Server
Interested in a global hall of fame? Specialized for the type of game you played (see above)?