A long time ago I tried to learn the C programming language and used my fascination for procedural generation as a foundation: I had played Hack, Rogue and Nethack and was absolutely in love with how these games managed to create random worlds. Being a young programmer I had no idea how this worked and in the pre-internet days information was pretty hard to come by. So I set out on my own and the results after a couple of years of relentless work was ADOM – Ancient Domains of Mystery, nowadays called one of the five foundational roguelike games and a true classic (let’s put modesty aside for a second). It still today sells well on Steam and in October 2025 will again be under my full control – which is something I have been waiting for for quite some time.
ADOM has a long and extensive blogging history and in those pages tons of fun information can be found.
After ADOM I began dreaming of JADE (Java-based Ancient Domains Engine), a sequel to ADOM with a much bigger scope. The scope was meant to be far greater than ADOM – a whole world to explore full of cities and dungeons and tons of other fun stuff. More modern, more flexible, more of everything. Sadly real life caught up with me (I founded a company called QuinScape, now renamed Dataciders QuinScape, I got my Ph. D., I married, etc.) and I did no longer have the time to work on a new game with as much vigor as was needed to get anywhere. Thus JADE lingered and eventually disappeared… for a brief resurrection when I worked on it under the name of “ADOM II”. But all this led nowhere and eventually JADE faded away. Nowadays Oracle has messed up Java so much that I wouldn’t even want to touch the source code again.
Then followed a time of greatness when ADOM was resurrected with an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign where during 90 days a surprising amount of love and support was poured over us and we came to the point of being able to give ADOM an overhaul adding tile graphics (thanks to the amazingly talented Krys Dycha), amazing sound (kudos to the wonderful Lucas Dieguez), a modern UI thanks to NotEye and the ingenious Zeno and a much more modern, efficient and stable foundation thanks to my relentless and brilliant friend Jochen Terstiege. All this culminated in the amazingly successful 2015 Steam release of ADOM.
Afterwards it became more silent once more as real life (and our growing company) demanded a lot of attention.
During Roguelike Celebration 2017 we announced the next step on our road: Ultimate ADOM. As the name humbly suggests our (MY) ambition was endless and Ultimate ADOM really was meant to become the absolute perfect ADOM experience. I had huge plans for it, we gathered a lot of funding (actually hundreds of thousands of Euros), incorporated as a company, built a team and started working on Ultimate ADOM which finally released to Steam in August 2021. I still think it is a decent game but we failed to achieve our ambition – for too many reasons to recount here and now. This might be a topic for a post mortem around 2028 or so… factually we ran out of money long before we were able to implement everything we had planned.
While the financial loss was big, the emotional loss was bigger. We had to close down the company and the team and live with what we had accomplished. Ultimate ADOM is a decent game but its name created expectations that we could not fulfull right away with the first release (or the first couple of release). I had failed to see that the gaming world in 21st century was far different from the time when the original ADOM was created and we were not really prepared to handle the community reaction we had initiated with the name, the announcements and everything. But this is over.
(and if you are angry about having invested $15 or so and not gotten the game you have dreamed of I can ensure you my own loss is more than 10,000 times that amount… not counting time and emotions which weigh even more heavily than the money involved)
After Ultimate ADOM failed to become what we dreamed of I retreated into a dark and remote hole to lick my wounds and recover. I had lost the energy to think about ADOM or games and was deeply frustrated.
And this was all I knew for a long time as far as my game design days were concerned. Basically I buried all these dreams.
In 2023/2024 I sold most of my shares in the company I created with two friends, gave up being CEO and moved to a part time consultant role in order to have a lot more time for my family (now being a proud father) and my hobbies.
Suddenly I was free. And still my inner game design flame remained gone. I even lost my fun at programming after retiring from the life of a CEO of a company group with by then about 650 employees. This was a first for me since I always had been programming since I got my C64 in those days of yore.
But there was so much family fun to be had, so many books to read, so many games to play, so many movies to watch that I never felt bored or truly missed programming. It was more a sense of surprise that I could live without programming after I had been programming for more than 40 years almost constantly.
Finally six weeks ago this again changed. I started talking to my good friend Krys (the amazing artist that created the tiles, the website and many mood images for ADOM and Ultimate ADOM). We talked about doing old school games and I started telling him about a game prototype I had written a couple of years ago as a kind of sequel to JADE. Taking the learnings from ADOM, JADE and Ultimate ADOM and once more trying my hand at “my perfect game”. And suddenly things clicked.
I felt the urge to restart work on this game, Krys agreed to work on graphics for it and the past 6-8 weeks we have been busy on making this game slowly come to life).
Do not mistake me – I am not going to announce or promise anything… I have learned my lessons. And maybe this game never will be finished. And even if it will be finished I am 100% sure the first alpha (with very little meat) is at least 12-18 months away. And the full game surely will take 5-10 years to build because I can’t quench my ambitions.
We will see where this leads… or if it leads anywhere at all. But right now I am full of joy working on the game frantically in every second not taken up by family, friends and other commitments. During the past couple of weeks I noticed that so many features get added in such a short amount of time that I need to track this in some way. Being old-school the best I could think of was a weekly blog entry giving insights into what is happening. If nobody cares that’s fine and the blog will serve as just my personal diary for the development of the game. And if someone becomes interested in the game this would be so much better. But it is not required. We are free to do what we want and that’s the great thing about it. For the first time since I started writing the first lines of code for ADOM I am truly and absolutely free to do whatever I want and I finally can write a game without being distracted too much by real life, budget restrictions, publisher plans, marketing requirements or even community opinions. I simply can work on “my perfect game”. If it ever is finished this is great, if not the journey already is extreme fun.
So enough words for today… soon you will read various tidbits of something that has the working title
Realms of Ancardia: Eternal Strife
(and while this is a game set in the world of ADOM it is not ADOM III, Ultimate Ultimate ADOM or even a sequel to ADOM… it’s a new fresh game in the world of Ancardia… kind of starting at the end of ADOM and even more ambitious and grandiose than ADOM… but only with things I want in MY game)
Read ya soon… Axes high till then!
P.S.: Want some teasers? Here we go. All bound to change a lot but it’s what we have so far…
As the actual gameplay potentially will span centuries I am right now having fun implementing algorithms that model the consistent change and growth of the world around the player… so that a city still is somewhat recognizable as the humble small town it started as like 90 years ago. Lots of fluff I’m doing right now but it is immensely joyful.
I will talk about this and other things in future posts.
Feel free to ask questions and comment.