Ancient Domains of Mystery Update Round-Up, $12,644 Remains

The Ancient Domains of Mystery campaign continues on Kickstarter’s slightly more hipster cousin, IndieGoGo. It’s been a while since we’ve taken a look at the project, so there’s some ground to cover.

The first good news is that Ancient Domains of Mystery looks to be one step closer to its remake, with the project just about $12,500 short of its goal with 15 days remaining in its donation drive. Thomas Biskup breaks that down to a rate of between $840 and $1300 per-day to be able to support various levels of features.

Beyond that, there are many other new snippets of information that have come out. These include everything from a special hint mode for beginners…

I actually am quite happy with its simplicity. It sports little details (you e.g. can click on the highlighted areas to activate the command explained there). It adapts with every move and tries to guess reasonable commands to choose from.

Hints mode right now is only available when you start a game as a beginner (e.g. from the new beginner screen) but starting with ADOM II 0.3.1 you will be able to turn it on/off in every game.

… to clarification on how the tilesets in the game will work:

1. Tiles would be an extra. You always will be able to play ADOM as ASCII-only and thus it would continue to run on older systems. We haven’t yet decided on whether it would be one binary with options for both or two distinct binaries but currently we lean towards the latter as that would allow a much smaller download for the ASCII version.
2. Tile development would happen in parallel to the other planned features. Thus there would be continuous updates for all donors. Depending on the parallel development speeds and challenges we can’t foresee today we even might consider releasing ADOM 1.2.x and ADOM 1.3.x in order to get all things done. This is yet another detail we so far haven’t discussed.
3. Tiles will be 64×64 to ensure a decent quality for the custom built set. It is possible to support other resolutions (like 32×32)rather easily because NotEye is very flexible in this regard. We are going for 64×64 as Krys is actually drawing the tiles at much higher resolution and downscaling them and I learned that downscaling works almost perfectly until you reach that 64×64 limit. 32×32 requires a lot of manual repairs and as computer resolutions seem to be increasing all the time (and things like Retina and its successors are going to be standards soon) we’d love to have a beautiful tile set for the custom variant. But as several resolutions could be supported bot community built sets and my preferred set by Krys are an option.

There’s much more reading to be done at both the game’s IndieGoGo page as well as the official blog, so feel free to take a closer look, and maybe kick a few dollars Thomas’ way.