2019 has been a very exciting and very busy year for us, and 2020 is shaping up to be even more of both. Part of that is that we’re planning to release a playable Alpha very, very soon. The other is that we’re still aiming for a full release next year! Well, as full as it gets – you know, Roguelikes are never really finished. After all, we’re still supporting classic ADOM for over 25 years now.

But first let’s talk about what made 2019 so fantastic. In April, we founded our own company! Acting as the Team ADOM GmbH instead of a bunch of individuals allows much better planning for business and potential partnership deals.

In June, we finalized the art style, the skill system and other core game mechanics and finally began working full-time on the client towards a prototype we will be able to share early 2020.

In August, ADOM was once again selected as one of the top 50 PC roleplaying games by our friends at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. We obviously agree, but every time this happens it fills us with pride and pleased that there’s still an audience out there who appreciates hardcore, complex roleplaying games. Like you

In November, we have been exposing our pre-alpha client of Ultimate ADOM for the very first time to the public in Berlin, with fantastic feedback. Many visitors had little to no knowledge of the ADOM or roguelikes in general, but still enjoyed themselves immensely.

Not only the players enjoyed what we have shown and planned, though, we are one of 14 new game projects to have received funding from North-Rhine-Westfalia to develop our prototype. That’s a vote of confidence we greatly appreciate.

So what’s going to happen now?

We are busy getting the last skills in for the prototype. We already have Literacy, Pyromancy, Swords, Axes, Stealth and Athletics ready and are currently working on Grafting, the art of attaching surplus limbs to your or other creatures’ bodies. We still have plans for Hydromancy and Animancy, the arts of manipulating water and life essences respectively, as well as a few more weapon skills.

While this sounds like a lot, we’ve gotten really good at creating content, which means we aim to have the Alpha version ready by February. Not so far ahead, right?

We have been considering on how to distribute the client. We decided against doing an Early Access via Steam – we’ll go there when we’re ready. You will soon be able to wishlist it though, which will help us gain more visibility. Stay tuned to where you will be able to get the test client! If you haven’t already, please consider signing up to our newsletter.

Thank you for being with us and for following along.

From the depths of Chaos, from the bottom of Andor’s corrupted soul, from the purifying light of the Eternal Sun, we wish you a great start into 2020. We hope it will be as exciting as ours!

 

Your Team ADOM.