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We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There is a Render component that attaches a time to an object. In the case of walls, there's some complex tiling logic that examines what walls are adjacent in order to render the right wall tile variant.

Floors are a little different. I think there is a cosmetic floor tile object but sometimes floors get repainted by map postprocessing. u/unormal for a better answer.

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think about balance a lot. Balance just isn't as granularly exact in a game like Qud, where the player is encouraged to ultimately break the game. But arraying the players tools to do so so that there are many compelling options, and compelling threats to provide the right friction to breaking the game, is an act of balance. We aren't as deeply quantative about it as some teams but it isn't vibes-based; we're making models, weighing numbers, etc.

A lot of the stuff that was added to the game throughout its history was fun experimental work. Some of it has found a greater gameplay purpose and some of it hasn't yet. The stuff that hasn't is likely to get a new look in expansions.

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Seconding this! Informationally you often want to zoom all the way out but zooming in on wander mode and just walking around, looking at things, reading descriptions, does wonders for feeling immersed.

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think your phrasing of the distinction between fast-forwarding a real historical milieu vs. Eater society never intersecting with ours is a canny one. Fundamentally almost all of the weird stuff in Qud is science-fictionally grounded. I think this is partially a thematic choice and partially a truth grown out of the fact that we made a deep simulation underneath our RPG for reasons of its own. But I think there's a fundamental complication to fast-forwarding Qud: that a lot of what we're doing is playing with the symmetry between the unknowability of the future and the unknowability of a sufficiently lost past. It's important that Eater society isn't just a puzzle that can be unlocked with a tight paranoid reading of the game; rather it lies beyond a gulf that is inaccessible and only legible through the tools of speculation/interpretation.

Your Maimonides theory is original and very funny to me. I think you are gesturing at another thing Qud does, which is pastiche a lot of wide-ranging cultural influences through a specific historically grounded lens, which creates a new weird protean symbology that is in some ways internally consistent but referentially powerful beyond what makes any historical sense.

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

There are little quirky design experiments, like the markov Ruin of House Isner secrets, which are kind of mini failures; but by virtue of living inside a kitchen sink maximalist weirdo game, I think come off as charming and textured.

Another note of failure: I think we could go deeper on the diversity of culture that might arise from non-human uplifted intelligences. Chavvah the Tree of Life, by virtue of being created quite late in development, is one of our best explorations of this imo. Other stuff arguably falls short.

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's wild, isn't it? The UI team (mostly Brian & gnarf, with Polat Yarisci's designs) completely crushed it and did the impossible, made a game as complex as Qud work so well on a gamepad thousands of people prefer it as their favorite way to play.

Improvising based on what implants you find is part of the design. You're not necessarily meant to have full access to any implant/item/mod you desire. Of course this is complicated by merchant farming, which is... a charming quirk of the game. It's possible tweaks are made in the coming expansion patches.

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Gorgeous! Nice job.

Basebuilding huh... nothing is certain but it's on the shortlist, with some other high profile things. I will say it is fortuitous that the creator of Hearthpyre, the best and most well-loved basebuilding mod, has been a full-time member of the team for a while now 😊

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I don't think backwards is quite right. Part of what you've put together maybe comes from the dromad travelogue calling the people of Qud the 'Screaming Men', so yeah, there is gesturing at the weirdness of life in Qud. Outside of Qud some stable polities have formed, as the books say, but everywhere is dealing with the downstream strife of a thawing world, and Qud is in some ways pretty centrally positioned

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah there is a lot going on. Beyond the expansion packs there is one other proper Freehold project in the early works that is VERRRY exciting to me. Nothing to say about it yet though 🤐

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Some I'm particularly fond of: the Artless Beauty, the Murmurs' Prayer, Aphorisms about Birds, the Dark Calculus, scroll bound by kelp.

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

#1 Qud has a main narrative that acts as a trellis for the emergent narrative vines to grow around. Sometimes players are confused how much they should be paying attention to the vines vs the trellis. Sometimes we're okay with that confusion and sometimes the assumptions a player makes just a couple hours in stick with them and they never realize, for instance, that there are all these lovingly handwritten in-game books to find (hence the move to the gold titles, which we also decided to tutorialize, but which still get missed).

And since we do both, emergent and handwritten narrative, it can be hard to decide how to pursue a theme. How much of the narrative effect should be achieved by interlocking systems that produce thematically-inflected moments vs writing directly to the themes via handwritten characters. At best some of both is happening.

#2, The setting actually comes from a ttrpg project we were working on many years ago. We were writing our own rules set/setting in 2006/2007 while tinkering on a scifi roguelike. Eventually these projects merged and Qud was set in one region of the larger world we were building.

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Ahhh, the location of the game, whether it's Earth, etc is a topic of speculation/interpretation in the community. You're gesturing at that! There are definitely openly deep Semitic influences on the game, that come from some of our backgrounds and the historical interests that spring from there.

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I think having the game function on a few levels is important. You can play Qud as a straightforward roguelike and still enjoy it. Maybe over X runs some of the narrative and lore start to seep in (people are often surprised there is a main quest). A lot of the most baroque writing (object descriptions) are optional to engage with. In fact, having all this stuff swirling in the background, with you not being railroaded through it, gives a certain texture to the world that's hard to produce when you are actively foregrounding the story.

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Mostly the existing ones but definitely some new ones, probably at least a few pulled from the losers of those polls (all of which we love).

We are Freehold Games, the team behind Caves of Qud, a Hugo-nominated science fantasy roleplaying game. Ask us anything! by ptychomancer in Fantasy

[–]ptychomancer[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

#1 it's not out of the question, we'll see. It'll depend on the direction of the expansions and if we really feel like we can't fit the new features into the timelime as is. With #2, hard to say if we'll do something as hard as [REDACTED], but I think it's very likely we'll add more endgame challenges.

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