JADE: First Look

By: Derek Yu

On: March 25th, 2008

Thomas Biskup has released some screenshots and a video of JADE, the sequel to his popular roguelike, Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM). While the video isn’t terribly exciting, it does show off the game’s awesome zoom feature, which is used to great effect to reveal a massive human settlement.

In his post, Biskup admits the game (currently at version 0.0.7), is “woefully incomplete” and that he intends to shift gears soon and focus on gameplay issues over engine improvements.

ADOM / JADE Website Gets Redesign

By: Derek Yu

On: January 30th, 2008

After what seems like an eternity of reticence, ADOM / JADE developer Thomas Biskup has revamped his website by adding a more community-friendly blog, and announced that he is resuming work on JADE, his spiritual sequel to the Roguelike classic, ADOM. Regular updates are to be expected in 2008.

It’s great to hear that he’s back at work, although one has to wonder… since the announcement of JADE many moons ago, Dwarf Fortress has taken the spotlight and already has many of the features that made JADE sound brilliant then (e.g. insane attention to detail in world generation and character interaction), and more. Especially now that Tarn is working on DF full-time, the race to create the most massive, detail-oriented Roguelike seems already won.

Not that there really is a race – if JADE can provide a great single character dungeon crawl and the controls and interface are both extremely intuitive (graphics, plz?), then I can make room for it in the tiny, black chunk of frozen garbage that is my heart.

(Source: Slash, via Rogue Temple)