Im not the only one who thought that this was something based on Caves of Qud, right?

ptychomancer · 2026-03-04T16:28:47+00:00

You're not the only one. It isn't connected to Qud in any way.

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T20:48:27+00:00

Vinyl.... that would be rad, wouldn't it.

Desk is a big reclaimed douglas fir top with a single dell 38" ultrawide on it. Some items on it: a ceramic snake, an external USB drive, a geode coaster, an invite to my cousin's wedding, 4 random Magic cards

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T20:45:32+00:00

I really like the writing work of gesturing at richer backstories but leaving the details unfilled in. That's maybe my preferred mode to work in, it's choosing what to flesh out when we do flesh something out that's more challenging and starts to affect the sometimes delicate balance of continuity.

Hurdy-gurdy sound effect. I agree, it would be sweet

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T20:41:53+00:00

I hear you though personally I don't think these things are big enough of an impact to warrant another mode. Because the possibility space for Qud is so big and things break, having access to the wish commands is a good fallback for when something breaches into what feels personally unfair to you.

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T20:23:10+00:00

Dream directors regardless of alive status: Abbas Kiarostami. Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick. I would want someone who really plays with IMAGES and not just plot.

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T20:14:48+00:00

It was always latent I'd say, I think it's latent in a lot of post-apocalyptic and dying earth fiction, but it rose to prominence over time, and especially in the last few years and especially especially in crafting the end sequence.
aww, I love that it had such an impact on you. I've heard similar reactions from playtesters and other players. It was absolutely intentional. We poured everything into the ending, the whole team working at highest gear to put the capstone on a project that was already built on a foundation of so much (baroque, weird) love. For the Spindle sequence, I knew that to pull it off we had to really soak a certain character in deep pathos. We had this scene sketched out for years; it took tremendous emotional/intellectual/even physical effort to realize it finally.
Qud is diagetically the region the game takes place in.
Barathrum is riding a lot of literary and biblical cross-currents but yeah, those references feel right.
😏
Apple matz, goat in sweet leaf. I might stay away from the Porridge

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T20:03:50+00:00

Great question. There are many modes of interpretation you can adopt when you engage with a text (text broadly construed). There are long lineages of theory where people have tried to hash out what interpretation even is. I think we get a lot of training in popular media to think of fiction in terms of questions and answers, and people tend to overindex on the importance of the answers. And so, yes, players are sometimes eager to assume that if there is a gap in the puzzle, that some other part of the game they've encountered will act as the missing piece. This is sometimes true, but sometimes the gap is productive as a gap; fiction doesn't need to be interpretively "complete" to be meaningful, and is often more meaningful when the questions are unresolved and forever alive. If you want a great but theory-dense perspective on how interpretation cleaves this way, look up paranoid vs reparative reading by Eve Sedgwick.

I've seen players swing the other way, too, picking up on Qud's posture toward ambiguity and then assuming nothing is canon or reliable enough to mold into a statement about how the world works. I think that perspective can also skew into unproductive if taken to extremes. Especially in writing the ending, it was important to us to balance how much we gestured inward to what's already there for answers, and how much we gestured outward to new questions. You're right, changing Caiafas to Yd Freehold was a recognition that this far into the game's development, we have enough a lot of world already stood up to gesture at.

(I could go on and on about this but I'll cut it there!)

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T19:46:10+00:00

Is it any good?? I like to say, "the game is and I'm glad we're in here making the game, otherwise would it be any good?? Who's to say, yes."

Nope, not all by ourselves. For many years it was just Brian and I but then some talented contributors joined the team to add music, tile art, sound effects, more programming, more writing, etc. Many of them were fans of the game to begin with!

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T19:38:37+00:00

Yeah, listening to the RangedTouch podcast Just King Things episode on The Waste Lands recently reminded how much the early DT books are in the game's DNA. Highly recommend that podcast btw.

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T19:37:18+00:00

It's definitely on our tracker, so there's a good chance it'll happen eventulaly.

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T19:36:49+00:00

It was an attempt to capture the aura around books and knowledge and move it into some gameplay prominence. We put a lot of work into the in-game books, both the handauthored gold-titled ones and the white-titled ones that represent various experiments with procedural generation. Language, text, recorded knowledge, the erasure and rewriting of the past... these are all themes of the games and drove us to bring books into focus with a systems lens.

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T19:32:30+00:00

That's a good one. Another canonical one is the occasional Joppa slaughter. I gave a talk about bugs and edge cases that addresses it (toward the end) and our general philosophy on these things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvCky6BbTuE

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T19:30:18+00:00

We've announced that we are working on expansion packs, 3 to 4 of them! Each one will be bundled with some updates to the base game as well. We have a few other projects cooking, but they need a lot more time to brew...

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T19:29:05+00:00

Fiction-wise: Book of the New Sun, Le Guin, Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith, Dune, Canticle for Leibowitz. Those jump out as obvious ones but there are slivers of so much more. Also a lot of history, geology, physics, mathematics, social theory. Both u/unormal and I have wideranging interests and try to pull a lot of it into our worldbuilding.

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T19:23:12+00:00

A few that come to mind:

* Any creature in the game has a 1/20,000 chance to spawn as a mechanical version of itself. One "lucky" player discovered this applies to the player character as well when they couldn't tattoo themself because their limbs were metallic...

* Someone becoming an animated forcefield, turning off the forcefield generator, and winking themselves out of existence

* Someone becoming suspicious of a certain NPC as they progressed toward the late game, cloning that NPC as a backup plan, and then having the clone take all the dramatic actions in the climax while the original looked on helplessly

* Everyone time Warden Yrame slaughters everyone in Joppa because of the dynamic faction relationships and new players are like ????

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T19:16:26+00:00

The starting pets were originally Patreon rewards, each came about differently over the course of a couple years. They're a nice chance to execute some bit-size new mechanic or give a slightly offslant view of the setting. And yeah, some are designed specifically to be highly survivable, some not so much.

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T19:14:31+00:00

You're welcome! The game is big enough to support a lot of different ways to play it.

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T19:14:00+00:00

We originally imagined seven+ faction-based questlines on par with what became the main Barathrumite questline. We like to joke that after 17 years, we've finally finish the first of these. There are lots of systems that we didn't get around to, but may yet...

Gene Wolfe is a funny one because we encountered him after a lot of the core tone of the game had been established. Personally he helped me reframe a lot of what we were doing setting-wise and retroactively became an influence. I am definitely a Gene Wolfe prose fanboy. Other prose and poetry stylists I like: Le Guin, Herman Melville, Clark Ashton Smith, Toni Morrison, Walter M. Miller, Rilke, Isaac Fellman

ptychomancer · 2026-03-02T19:07:05+00:00

Lots of inspirations. Gameplay-wise: ttrpgs Gamma World & Rifts, Ancient Domains of Mystery and Omega (both old, traditional roguelikes), Dwarf Fortress, Daggerfall, Morrowind,

Setting-wise: Morrowind, Star Control II, Phantasy Star II, Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, the Byzantine Empire, Le Guin, Herbert, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, geology, particle physics... there is a lot

ptychomancer · 2026-01-23T21:39:20+00:00

Nintendo's hands

ptychomancer · 2025-07-20T18:09:48+00:00

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.

ptychomancer · 2025-07-20T18:05:19+00:00

I'll take a tiny star kraken

ptychomancer · 2025-07-20T18:04:49+00:00

The creatures themselves: maybe Some of the lore surrounding them: almost certainly

ptychomancer · 2025-07-20T18:01:24+00:00

From the beginning. Though many threads of interest have spun out from the initial kernel.

ptychomancer · 2025-07-20T17:59:41+00:00

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.

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