Realms of Ancardia: Eternal Strife

Realms of Ancardia: Eternal Strife is a sequel to my game ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery) which is lauded as one of the five foundational roguelike games.

ADOM by now has gained the hearts of generations of gamers since its release in the late 90s and I several times tried to create a sequel (you can read a little more about that here). Realms of Ancardia: Eternal Strife probably is my final serious attempt in building a worthy sequel.

Regular updates can be found in the blog.

Some design decisions already have been made and we will see if they endure (I’m pretty sure about that right now):

  • Realms of Ancardia: Eternal Strife (RoA:ES for short – or just RoA) is a spiritual sequel to ADOM. But don’t just expect ADOM with “more of everything”. This won’t happen. It’s a new game with new designs, rules, items, monsters taking place in the world of Ancardia – the same fantasy world where ADOM took place.
  • RoA starts kind of at the end of ADOM: ChAoS has been defeated – but in a kind of surprising way that places you – the player character – in a unique position to shape the history of all of Ancardia.
  • RoA will not be a pure roguelike game (according to e.g. the Berlin conventionsI) because in my book several of those conventions prevent the fun in the games I love to play. More details on this will follow in future blog posts.
  • RoA is a love project: I’m completely free of time pressure and I also intend to ignore all social pressure. The development approach will be similar to the golden days of ADOM: I code what I want to see in a game, (eventually) share it with the community and take the feedback I love and integrate. But first and foremost RoA (like ADOM) will be the game of MY dreams. No business pressure, no publisher direction, nothing of that. Just plain pure design fun and madness from my convoluted, deranged and complicated brain.

More coming soon… Axes high!

Statistics

I love statistics. So I decided to collect some about the development of Realms of Ancardia. Before looking at the table understand the following:

  • The Realms of Ancardia project has two sub projects:
    • RoA (Realms of Ancardia) is the specialized development project for this game.
    • TBRLAPI (Thomas Biskup’s RogueLike API – or on more egomaniacal days: The Best RogueLike API) is a generic API I started to develop a couple of years ago to have a solid and common foundation for all future games I write in this genre. After ADOM, Ultimate ADOM, Grog, Hannah’s Game (not yet published) and various attempts at versions of JADE and ADOM 2 I got fed up with writing the same things over and over again. All common ground usually is collected in my personal TBRLAPI. And used by my games. And no: I have no interest in publishing it.
  • Nowadays I write my games in C#. I really have grown very fond of this programming language as it quite often finds a decent balance between usability and structure.
  • The lines of code (LOC) displayed do not count empty lines or comment lines. The numbers given are plain pure C#.
  • I also do not count lines in other configuration files (like our tile mappings or the translation files).
  • I try to post weekly development updates. We will see how this goes.
  • The build number is always the current number of GIT commits for the project.
  • Starting with week 2 the numbers in brackets give the delta to previous weeks.
Weekly
Update		LOC
RoA		Number
of C# files
RoA		LOC
TBRLAPI		Number
of C# files
TBRLAPI		Build
Number
Week 1
(28th of May 2025)		18,85628918,686297???
Week 2
(5th of June 2025)		24,516
(+5,660)		398
(+109)		19,012
(+326)		303
(+6)		846
(+???)
Week 3
(11th of June 2025)		24,906
(+390)		402
(+4)		20,959
(+1,947)		361
(+58)		980
(+134)
Week 4
(18th of June 2025)		28,022
(+3,116)		440
(+38)		21,635
(+676)		369
(+8)		1,104
(+124)

Miscellaneous tidbits of information

  • I use JetBrains Rider for programming. IMHO the JetBrains products are easily the best programming tools ever built.
  • I use git (via GitHub) for version control.
  • We use YouTrack (also from JetBrains) to track all issues, ideas, epics and what not for the project. YouTrack also has great Wiki functionality. For Ultimate ADOM we used Confluence and JIRA (and I loved it in the days) but nowadays IMHO both have turned into overly complex bloatware. YouTrack has a great elegance to it. Like everything from JetBrains. Call me a fanbo… dedicated evangelist 🙂 !
  • I still do not understand how to write a roguelike game with a test-driven approach (and have fun). In other words: Testing games is weaker (wo)men than me 😉
  • I work on a Macbook Pro (currently: Apple M4 Max with 128 GB of memory, 16 cores, 8 TB of hard disk space and a 16″ monitor).
  • I never use additional monitors when programming because I like to say mobile.
  • I also never use a mouse, just the track pad.