Andrew Doull and Rob Parker interview Jason Grinblat and Brian Bucklew, creators of Caves of Qud, about the milestone 1.0 release of their game.
You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Synopsis & Useful Links
- Other recent interviews with Jason and Brian on 3MA, Eggplant, AIAS Game Maker's Notebook
- How Jason and Brian split up roles on the game's development
- Project management and feature design in long term game development
- The timeline of the game's development, including time out for Sproggiwood
- Inspirations from Dwarf Fortress
- Integration with Kitfox Games, publisher for Caves of Qud
- UI challenges for the complexities of the game
- The "roleplay" mode that removes permadeath and plays more like a classic RPG, but without the sort of guardrails and content control of popular RPGs
- "Wander" mode that makes all factions neutral and removes xp from combat, allowing a more narrative exploration experience
- Violence in Qud and how it fits with the theme
- Designing the end game
It is said that Caves of Qud is "non-traditional" in some places, such as having non-permadeath mode and literary focus, but I would say that it is actually more traditional. Old roguelike definitions would mention things like simple graphics causing the player to rely on their imagination and allowing an enormous amount of variety and features, and that describes one of strengths of Caves of Qud well. I think there is not a big jump from "simple graphics causing the player to rely on their imagination" to literature, as evidenced by the genre itself being an offshoot of text adventures, ADOM's amazing monster descriptions, and more recently, the "poetic" writing of Path of Achra, and Roguelike Radio hosts writing their own literature (as we have learned from the last episode). Such old definitions did not even mention permadeath, and non-permadeath modes are common in classics too; even if classic ADOM did not have such mode, apparently most people played it like that, at least to learn the game. After ADOM I remember we had lots of huge roguelike projects like "ADOM but bigger", most of them never produced any fruits, the community was impatient and instead put focus on shorter roguelikes, tightly designed around permadeath, which lead to the Berlin Interpretation. Caves of Qud is like these dreams, but ultimately successful. So basically Caves of Qud refers to the pre-Berlin traditions (which I believe agrees with when the project was started).
ReplyDeleteI think using ASCII to engage the player's imagination, even if it is not popular currently, could be something that other genres could learn from, as a new kind of "game with roguelike elements". I have a project about that, although it seems that it would require good writing and I do not feel strong in this area. Anyway Qud does that very well (although it is a roguelike and not ASCII).
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DeleteAlso "savescumming is cheating*" is a general rule in CRPGs. If, in a CRPG, you have a combat encounter and you prefer to reload a saved game until you solve it perfectly, hoarding all the consumables, rather than accepting the consequences such as using up your consumables, you are clearly playing it wrong*. I have seen many discussions regarding Baldur Gate 3 about how you should accept the consequence of your choices and not savescum, and similar for older CRPGs such as Ultima. Calling something CRPG because you can cheat looks weirdly elitist.
Delete* I just use the loaded terms such as "cheating" and "wrong" because they are commonly used in the context of making the game easier than intended; there is nothing morally wrong or shameful about it, you can play however you want.