Although marketing and endless cloning have devalued the meaning of the term “roguelike” in recent years (most of which should be called “roguelites,” if even that), there are six games, I say, that should be considered the Major Roguelikes, the canonical ones, those that combine fidelity to the concept with popularity and size of player base: Rogue itself of course, NetHack, Angband, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Brogue, and ADOM, a.k.a. “Ancient Domains of Mystery.”
Of all of these, only the last two could rightly be considered the work of a single person. And of them all, only ADOM’s source code is not available to a curious player. (Rogue was never released as open-source, but the common variant Rogue Clone IV was.) Thanks to the 7DRL competition (“7-Day Roguelike”), thousands of people have made toy roguelikes of their own, but to create one on the scale of ADOM, a game arguably as complex as even mighty NetHack itself, is a terrific feat.
Fortunately, ADOM creator Dr. Thomas Biskup is both friendly and willing to talk about the game he has spent so much time and energy on, and recently spoke with us about both ADOM and its in-development sequel, Ultimate ADOM.
The first part of this interview was done about a year and a half ago. The second half was done recently, and is generally up-to-date.
This interview was first published in the fanzine Extended Play, available for free from its homepage and the Internet Archive. It's also available from the @Play blog.
John Harris: So, first question: How did ADOM get started?
Dr. Thomas Biskup: ADOM got started when I, during my days as a student of computer science, decided to learn a new programming language (C specifically). I learn best when I have some kind of project in front of me and at that time I had played games like DND, Rogue, Hack and NetHack (and seen Omega) and loved the genre. I was fascinated by the random generation parts as well as the single player exploration style of these games and felt I needed to understand how they work. So trying to use my growing C skills to that effect seemed natural. But when I started diving into the NetHack sources (which seemed to be the most detailed and thus most interesting candidate) I quickly learned how advanced and complicated those sources were. Which lead me to believe that it might be much simpler to write a game of my own. And it definitely seemed to be a lot more fun to figure things out for myself instead of spending many hours understanding the genius of others. So I started writing my own roguelike game, first trying to create a map, then figuring out how to dig tunnels, place the '@' on the screen and get it to move. All in all, things were a lot more complicated than I had expected, and so it about two years passed until, in summer of 1994, I finally has something in my hands that seemed like it could be the base for a working game. And that's the true (source code) roots of ADOM. Things started to progress a lot more quickly once I had figured out the real structure of what I wanted to build and so ADOM began to take form over the next two years that lead to initial releases and finally to the well-known and quite widespread game that ADOM is today.
Harris: Ah! I've had a look at the NetHack sources myself and can vouch for the complexity, a lot of which comes from its having a lot of people work on it for such a long time, bolting on features here and there. It's surprising that it holds together so well given its developement history! I remember reading that NH 3.0 was the occasion of a big code cleanup, and the (then) recently released NH 3.6 was another such cleanup.
That has to be one advantage of working on a project largely by yourself, you don't have to worry so much about breaking something someone else has written, either technically or in design. Actually, that's an assumption on my part. Do you have any help on developing ADOM now, or is it still largely yourself?
Biskup: Having a project of your own IMHO has several big advantages:
1. Your learning rate is exponentially higher compared to extending stuff other people have created. Because you need to figure out everything on your own.
2. You can more easily (or better: at all) realize your vision of how a game should be and feel. If you build on someone elses work lots of assumptions already will have been built into the game and if you don't like that stuff it's a hell lot of work (if at all possible) to get this stuff removed. Especially if you are getting into that project as a newcomer.
3. Forking an existing project probably will make you unhappy as you will have a hard time keeping up with ongoing work in the parallel project, both due to technical reasons (integrating parallel code changes can be impossible) and for design reasons (e.g. figuring out what all the minute changes all over the code mean and how they affect the vision behind your fork). And you'll always be compared to the original, which can be good and bad, but IMHO in the end distracts from your own design.
Team ADOM nowadays includes myself, as the maintainer and programmer for the core game and content; Jochen Terstiege, as the only other person worldwide with access to the ADOM sources, he's managing the build infrastructure, the Steam deployments, fixing programming bugs and working on the integration of sounds and NotEye and is a column of stability and quality for ADOM; Zeno, who's the genius behind NotEye and thus the reason for ADOM having graphics nowadays; Lucas Dieguez, who's our master composer and responsible for the incredible soundtrack that ADOM has nowadays; and Krzysztof Dycha, who's our head artist and Michelangelo, having single-handedly created each and every image in the graphical version of ADOM, literally the work of years.
So on one hand I'm still working alone on ADOM (e.g. the core game), on the other hand I'm part of the best team ever, as those guys are so immensely creative and resourceful that we keep pushing each other. I love working with each and everyone and believe that we have a lot of awesome stuff in store for the future.
Finally, there's our incredibly loyal, and once again growing, community. There are so many people out there that spark new ideas by using our bug/rfe database at http://www.adom.de/bugs and thus also help in evolving ADOM. The game wouldn't be what it is today without all these awesome people!
Harris: When I first played ADOM, I came to it from NetHack, which contains many references to classic Dungeons & Dragons, in its monsters and its story, as well as many literary and pop culture references. When I came to ADOM from there, I was taken aback a bit by how the game struck out on its own, largely with its own self-contained mythology and setting. Now, I think that setting is one of ADOM's strongest aspects. It seems to me now that part of the game is discovering the unusual, sometimes terrifically unusual, properties of items like the si, or all the herbs, or the many artifacts. Were these created specifically for the game, or do they draw from some other source, either outside or self-created?
Biskup: I would say that most of the content is "self-created" or "other-created" but inspired by a variety of existing sources. E.g. the general idea for corruption came from the Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing Game with its notion of Chaos encroaching upon civilization. Andor Drakon as the god of Chaos goes back to an AD&D character of mine (1st/2nd edition), who started as an evil cleric worshiping a minor demon and at some point killed his god and managed to ascend to immortality. Imagine the original Andor Drakon in his immortal form a bit like Sardo Numspa from The Golden Child. The "si" also comes from a very long-running 1st AD&D campaign where a friend of mine and I played two dwarves, Gorko Galgenstrick and Groron Garman. One day my friend suddenly discovered a "si" in his hand-written equipment list and we had no idea how it got there. We made fun of it and months later we suddenly discovered a second "si" on this equipment list. From there the inside joke about a reproducing artifact started which in the end made its way into ADOM.
Many other details, like Aylas scarf, Brannalbins cloak and Rolf, come from characters I or friends played during D&D and AD&D campaigns.
Another huge part of influence have been the comments from the ADOM community over so many years. There are tons of awesome details that have been suggested directly or indirectly by fans of the game. I try to select those things that IMHO match the tune of the game best.
Finally, some parts have been created only for ADOM, especially the whole elemental mythology thing that is still evolving. The outlaw village, Terinyo, the black druid and such elements have been specifically created for ADOM.
So, all in all, its a big hodge podge of influences. The main criteria for inclusion being that I either am somehow emotionally attached to the various parts or that I just loved the suggestions or ideas of others so much that they needed to become a part of the game.
Harris: I like that, it gets in some of the community aspects of open source game creation, while allowing the source to remain closed and thus preserve some mystery for the players.
ADOM developed had to pause for a while. Could you tell us why it ceased, when it picked back up, and give us a current status report? It's on Steam now, how is that treating you?
Biskup: ADOM basically paused from 2001 to 2012. The reason behind it was real life. In 1998 I started working full time as my life as a student came to an end, which already ate up lots of free time, and by 2001 we founded a company, QuinScape. I'm still working their today with my two founding colleagues. We have more than 100 employees these days and are a healthy and experienced IT integrator. Founding a company takes so much energy, more than many people think, that my time with ADOM really deteriorated. Then in 2003/2004 I, for some reason, decided that my ego needed to see if I could do a PhD as a hobby project while building the company. So I started doing that during the early morning and late night hours. Then my then girlfriend and I decided to get married, which happened in 2009. Luckily she blackmailed me to finish my PhD by then.
But I was quite busy, to put it carefully. And I had started programming ADOM II (JADE) in Java as a kind of sequel. So I really just did neither have the time nor the inclination to work on ADOM and the longer you pause the harder it gets to come back. Luckily my very good friend Jochen Terstiege, who’s now part of Team ADOM, kept pestering me about doing more with it. And at some point in 2010 he showed me an iPad prototype he had started. (He had access to the sources because he had been doing lots of ports starting with the Amiga port from as early as 1996 or 1997).
That got me back up somewhat, and I restarted work on JADE after a kind of meditation about my hobbies during a vacation in Thailand in 2010. At that point I had been running four or five blogs, been writing various pen & paper RPGs. (I even got published in Germany with the only true world-wide pulp RPG magazine. I don't mean the RPG genre but the RPG format. Search for "Maddrax" and "Thomas Biskup" and you should be able to find some traces.) But I kept wondering: what am I looking for and in the end I noticed that I was looking for something that I already had found with ADOM: A great community to exchange ideas with and then put them into some kind of game.
So I said, "OK, let's scratch all that stuff and resume work on ADOM." Which let to the release of JADE 0.0.1 on the 2nd of July, 2011, which led to more polite pushing from Jochen. which led to us devising the ADOM crowdfunding campaign which started on the 2nd of July, 2012, and was quite successful giving us about $90,000 to work with. The money led to the formation of Team ADOM and the actual resurrection of ADOM development.
While we still have a couple of rewards to finish from the campaign (it's been a very long run), we are immensely proud on how ADOM has turned out in the past four years, with scores of soundtracks, amazing graphics, a modernized UI (although we can do so much more in that area) and so much new content.
The most recent high point has been the release on Steam in November 2015. This has opened up a new source of revenue, which is important. I yet have to earn a single dollar with ADOM. So far all the money is going into paying the Team members while I continue to work for free.
While initial sales have decreased overall sales still are on a good level that should allow us to continue for years to come we now are working in the next level. Which means: Finally getting done with the remaining crowdfunding promises and then moving into a bright future for ADOM. We have collected tons of awesome ideas but so far lacked the time to work on them since we mostly are focused on the crowdfunding stuff. It will be a kind of relief to have that done and be able to do create stuff more freely.
Just pick it up on Steam [http://www.adom.de/steam]. It's an awesome, yet difficult, game.
Harris: Wait, so you got your PhD? I should be calling you Dr. Biskup then! And it's so great to hear ADOM's back up and running!
If you don't mind, I'd like to move more into game design issues. One of ADOM's most distinctive elements is the corruption clock, which replaces Rogue's food clock as the primary force pushing the player forward. While there are ways to counter it, I think it does a good job of forcing the player onward, especially since a few of the corruptions, such as Mana Battery and Poison Hands, have the potential to make the game much more challenging to play. What inspired the idea?
Biskup: Yeah, I got a PhD. But only people that annoy me need to call me "Dr. Biskup," so you are safe.
Regarding corruption: I always loved Warhammer Fantasy Role-play, and how the chaos creatures sported various kinds of corruptions. I also loved how the Broo in Runequest were kind of randomly corrupted. And I always loved mutations in Gamma World. I'm a huge Gamma World fan and in ancient times I even ran the official Gamma World mailing list, when mailing lists still were the greatest thing on earth.
All this came together when thinking about corruptions. I always liked the phrase "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." So I thought that it might be kind of cool to have something in the game that can make you more powerful but at the same time can cause all kind of trouble for you. (Don't ask me about my idea for chaos wizards and chaos necromancers as PC classes….)
As I also liked the idea of having an ongoing story in ADOM, I felt that the battle against Chaos might be more tangible due to a kind of lingering corruption effect that gets stronger over time. In the beginning it was not imagined to be a replacement/substitute/rival to the hunger system, but rather as something that connected you more closely to the overarching story.
The specific corruptions evolved from a mix of my ideas and things that were brought up by ADOM fans during those early golden days. Mana battery, if I remember correctly, is something that was brought up by one of the community people and I loved it so much that it had to be integrated.
Nowadays I love corruption as a rather unique mechanism to intertwine game design issues (the time clock you mention) and story issues (the world becoming a darker place). For ADOM II and ADOM III, if I ever were to do the latter, corruption would be a lot more prevalent in the overall world. Other beings and monsters also would slowly corrupt and degenerate, the weather would be more noticeably affected (it is affected by corruption in ADOM but probably nobody’s noticed), plants should mutate, and I have this vision of the world slowly turning into this purple corruption haze. Tentacles everywhere.
And I would love to add more means where you consciously have to trade power for corruption, such as a means for players to strengthen their spells by absorbing corruption. I love tempting people I guess.
[The following is the more recent portion of the interview.]
Harris: Have you tried D&D 5th edition yet?
Biskup: I actually own most of the books but haven't done much with it to be honest. I like what I see but I am a firm believer in simple skill systems and I am kind of angry about them for not even considering to do a simple standard skill system. And I was a little scared away because I thought that the very flat power curve doesn't nicely mirror the hero's journey I personally expect from D&D. There is just too little difference for me in the skill abilities of a 1st level fighter compared to a 20th level fighter.
But I really like how they otherwise smoothed the system. I hate 4th edition with a passion and 3rd just was too complex for my tastes.
Harris: Yeah, I hate lots of things about 4th edition. Two members of our group played a great deal of 3rd edition and are, by all accounts, experts at it. That made it very imposing to run. They know all the exploits, and so it was almost impossible for me to challenge them! In 3rd edition, it felt like I was either handing them a few XP, or handing them a ton of XP.
Biskup: I'm a 1st/2nd edition traditionalist, and actually there is yet another RPG I'm writing on the sidelines that collects all my house rules for my personal "perfect edition of (A)D&D." But who isn't these days?
The exploitation topic also is one of the things I disliked about 3rd edition. it just seemed to allow for far too much min-maxing for my tastes, and tended to lead people to search for optimal builds and stuff. I don't like that. I'm more into storytelling.
I like kind of crunchy systems nonetheless but I'm more into winging stuff when I am the GM. I need a kind of loose system of mid complexity. And compl
