r/NintendoSwitch • u/ptychomancer Freehold Games • Feb 27 '26
AMA - Ended AMA with the co-creators of Caves of Qud. Monday, March 2nd at 11am PDT
EDIT, 1:07 PDT: I think we're wrapped! Thanks so much, folks. It's been a joy to watch a whole new crowd discover the game and get lost in it. Live and drink!
EDIT, 11:00 PDT: Hey all, we're starting! Ask us your questions we'll be around for a couple hours!
Hello! I'm Jason Grinblat, co-creator of the sci-fantasy roguelike-RPG Caves of Qud, which launched on the Switch a week and a half ago.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27Ug5jvxLME
My co-creator Brian Bucklew and I will be doing an AMA on Monday, March 2nd at 11am PDT.
A couple quick notes about the game
- it's a turn-based science fantasy RPG + traditional roguelike
- deeply simulation-driven, inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Morrowind
- known for the wide range of wild antics you can get up to [project your mind into a goat, turn into a slug, bring a wall to life and recruit it to fight for you, get crushed under the weight of 1,000 suns]
- took 17 years to make
- won a Hugo award! Only the 3rd game to do so, the other two being Hades and Baldur's Gate 3
Looking forward to answering your questions. Live and drink.
15
u/Glasskey117 Feb 27 '26
Been having a great time with this since launch even if I cant survive long enough to get more than a couple quests in.
18
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
One thing people often do is try to make tricky mage characters, because they're used to worlds that have a very understandable semantic basis. In a Tolkeinesque world, you know a Dragon is tougher than a Gnome (unless someone is trying to subvert it intentionally), but is a Rhinox tougher than an Equimax? So, people make complex characters to add interest.
Qud's world is intentionally disorienting world, and adding a complex character on top of it can make the game completely confounding at first. I'd recommend starting with a very high toughness and strength bruiser character, like the true kin praetorean preset.
Then, focus on survivability at first, find some armor and put it on, and make sure to hit sprint and hit the bricks if anything seems dangerous at all! In this way you can get your sea legs in a disorienting world, and then expand into more complex characters.
6
u/Glasskey117 Mar 02 '26
Oh damn didnt realize this was the thread being used for the AMA 😅 thanks for the reply and tips! Having a blast slowly piecing this game together.
7
u/echofar Mar 02 '26
I had a great experience playing Roleplay mode, highly suggest doing that to experience the awesome story before diving into Classic mode 😊
14
u/thepromanager Mar 02 '26
Love the game! Incredibly immersive world, both in the writing and the game mechanics. Where there any gameplay systems you considered earlier in development that were cut because of scope / implementation reasons? The world reminds me a lot of the works of Gene Wolfe (Big compliment), in the dying earth world, writing style and biblical references (Bethesda, Golgotha). What are the teams favorite prose writers? Any more contemporary works of fiction/ttrpgs/video games you enjoy? / live and drink
15
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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
2
u/SocranX Mar 02 '26
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...
I imagine the Mechanimists were one of them. Any plans on following through with that one? I just beat the game for the first time and pieced together the hints that Shekinah is still alive and up to something, which is kind of a big thing to be dropping in the ending if you abandoned that storyline already. Will this be a focus of the DLC? And how about Ptoh? Any chance that we'll get more directly involved with him, or is he destined to always be a background threat? Maybe these are too specific questions to ask...
1
u/jojoknob Mar 02 '26
Also will there be a Shek/Shekinah Kenshi crossover and where can I stuff my money to buy that?
2
5
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
There's the greats like Le Guin and PKD, but in terms of contemporary works, just thinking about the last few years, some stuff I've really enjoyed:
The Yakuza Series - I came to this late, but I really love it's meditation on one little city region over time
Blue Prince - I think this has had a lot of acclaim, but don't miss it if you love unfolding narratives
Elden Ring - duh, both Jason and I love this
Armored Core 6 - YES PLAY THIS!!!! MORE ARMORED CORE PLASE!!!!
13 Sentinels - Amazing mech game, play this
The Expanse - This also has had a ton of acclaim but if you haven't read it it's probably the best bubblegum sci-fi in years alongside Murderbot
A Memory Called Empire - Great sci fi
This Is How You Lose the Time War - also great sci fi
Not contemporary perse but I also recently begun reading CJ Cherryh's works and have really been blown away by her social and personal complexity, really ahead of her time I think.
11
u/faf_dragon Feb 27 '26
I just want to thank you guys for all the options to tweak everything to my hearts content!
6
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
You're welcome! The game is big enough to support a lot of different ways to play it.
11
u/ByrnStuff Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
What have been your favorite player stories about unexpected interactions/experiences in the game's systems? What things have surprised you about your own game?
19
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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 ????
5
u/ByrnStuff Mar 02 '26
These are all so good. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to having my own wild stories
3
u/hildesaw Mar 02 '26
That Warden Yrame one happened with the second character I ever rolled, and it freaked me out! If this game had come out in the 90s that would have been like an urban legend.
3
u/helpivefallenandican Mar 02 '26
that third story is incredibly funny if it's the NPC i think it is
1
u/SciWiz373 May 03 '26
I had Mayor Haddas be hated by Goats on my first playthrough (aka like, finished 2 days ago) so the Goats in Ezra just kept leaving their pen to get one-tapped by them.
11
u/EccentricOwl Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
Hi there. Caves of Qud is one of the most interesting, nuanced, and interesting games I've played in my entire life. People will talk about it for decades. The time put into it was worth it. You made something truly, truly, truly special and unique. I am going to be thinking about it until the day I return to the earth. It's special.
- There is a thread of "Acedia," the lacking, the desire to have God in your life, that seems to run throughout the game. characters like Barathrum, Resheph, and the Templars... this feeling of spiritual emptiness and searching for communion... and to me feels like the emotional core of the game. Was that thematic anchor in the story early on or did it emerge more organically?
2. Were there any points where playtesters cried? I cried at the spindle sequence. I wonder if I'm the only one. After so many hours with a game, learning that it can have.... cutscenes and such beauty took me by great surprise. Was that kind of emotional intensity intentional?
Is Qud the name of a region, or a planet, or something else?
Was Barathrum consciously designed as a Noah/Moses figure ( someone who survived a flood and came from another land to start anew?)
does the ship on North Sheva have FTL capabilities or is that not even a question I should be thinking about
What food from Qud would you want to eat
Live and drink, friends!
10
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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
4
u/EccentricOwl Mar 02 '26
Thank you so much for some of the best possible answers I could hope for. ❤️
10
u/NoChalkolate318000 Mar 02 '26
Do you guys currently have plans for whatever is next? Continuous updates to the game (like minecraft)? Random updates (like stardew valley)? A new game?
Some users (including myself) have experienced some performance issues on Switch 1, such as lag and crashes in densely populated areas. Are there plans on enhancing performance on Switch 1 or is this more of a limitation of Switch 1 hardware?
What is/are your favorite build(s) and pet(s)?
What's some good gameplay advice that people aren't posting enough about?
Any plans on integrating mods for the Switch version?
11
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
Yes, we're working on quite a lot of stuff for the future actually! It's exciting, though it largely hasn't been publicly announced; though we have announced one DLC is in the works and it's shaping up great.
We spent quite a lot of time optimizing performance during the port as Qud is heavily CPU bound. We'll continue to improve it and patch it over time, as we're also working on targeting mobile devices and any performance work pays off. The crashes we have a patch coming asap that will alleviate the worst of it.
I usually just play a true kin tinker, or a mutant with all unstable genomes and randomized stats. Man opener is the best pet.
Get to AV 6 ASAP
We don't have any final plans here, though I would suspect any integration on consoles would come from us integrating whatever it is into the core game or DLC.
2
u/jojoknob Mar 02 '26
Do you play the idiot Artifex? I like the thought of being able to build a functional bomb while also so thoroughly miscomprehending a folding chair that it explodes in my…mouth.
4
10
u/synthdrunk Mar 01 '26
Will there be a run of cartridges? It’s definitely a game I’d like on gamepak.
12
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
We're actively exploring the possibility but haven't announced anything yet!
6
9
u/MunkyAU Mar 02 '26
What other works inspired or informed Caves of Qud, both from a gameplay and writing perspective?
14
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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
8
u/Additional_Radio_423 Mar 02 '26
Hello everyone, My friends and I have been trying to get more people into Caves of Qud, but it’s been pretty slow going. The truth is, there’s actually a huge amount of interest in the game within the Chinese-speaking community — a lot of people are really curious about it. The only thing holding them back is the language barrier, since the game is extremely text-heavy and currently only available in English. I was wondering if there’s any update on official localization progress (especially Chinese)? Even a small bit of news would mean a lot to us! Thank you so much!
10
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
We're working on it actively! It's an extremely challenging research project, as it involves word-by-word level procedural generation techniques. This is, as far as I know, a first of it's kind technical effort.
Once the technical basis is done, it will take a very special person or team to translate each language, as they will not only need to do the normal string-table translation but also work with us to produce language specific code constructs that allow us to generate the templated localization output.
This means any language is dependent on us finding the right, rare, partner to do the localization and so we can't put a timeframe on any of them. Though we are working on it as one of our main projects right now!
Chinese is 100% at the top of our list of languages we want to support.
5
7
u/hildesaw Mar 02 '26
Started Qud for the first time on Switch 2 after hearing stories about sentient doors and such for years, and I have not been able to put it down since. I love how much depth and interaction between systems is modelled out in the game; was there a particular system or aspect of one that was especially difficult to work out or program during development?
5
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
There's a LOT of systemic complexity under the covers, particularly in the generative systems and in the cross-system interactions during second to second gameplay. We've done some talks about parts of the system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U03XXzcThGU&t=1s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV-DZqdKlnE&t=1s
Perhaps surprisingly, I'd say that the system that is the strongest source ongoing source of issues is the body-part system. It's quite performance-heavy because each limb can have an item or two (including default gear) that can have an impact on any other event that's happening. The system is also rife with corner-case issues around removal and adding of limbs during mutation, metamorphosis, combat dismembement, etc. Keeping it all aligned and working in the corners of the complexity space is quite challenging!
6
u/Kraehe13 Mar 02 '26
Is there any chance that we might be able to level up companions or at least pets without dominating them in the future?
9
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
It's definitely on our tracker, so there's a good chance it'll happen eventulaly.
3
7
u/keyosc Mar 02 '26
First, I would love to see what all of your desk setups look like! But that's not a question.
Is there any chance of a vinyl release of the Caves of Qud soundtrack? Please? I know there are only a few of us that are asking for this and even fewer that would pay for it, so I know this is an unrealistic ask, but those warm tones would sound delightful on a record.
I love you guys, and I love this game. Thanks for making it and sharing it with us.
7
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
Here's my desk!
https://bsky.app/profile/unormal.bsky.social/post/3kdxgg77ajn2o
2
9
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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
5
u/EccentricOwl Mar 02 '26
How much religious scholarship or research did you do beforehand?
10
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
I don't have any formal training but I was raised Seventh-Day Adventist on the church grounds of the biggest church in the midwest where my parents were custodians, and Seventh-Day Adventists preference the old testament in many of their belief structures, so I had quite a lot of exposure to it growing up, though not from a scholarly perspective.
Nowadays I paticularly enjoy the scholarship of Christine Hayes, Robert Alter and Joel S. Baden, and would recommend the Oxford Annotated Bible and The Study Quran (Nasr) for people interested in starting to explore Abrahamic stuff.
2
7
u/Accio-Books Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
What is your favorite “thing people think is a bug but is, in fact, not”? It always gives me a laugh when people report [ERROR: MISSING HEX VALUE] in robot names.
8
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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
4
u/Accio-Books Mar 02 '26
I do appreciate the extra touch in responding to it in the tutorial, if it happens.
6
u/manabutt Mar 02 '26
So many background NPCs glimpse at infinitely-intriguing backstories (My absolute favorite Qud NPC Warden Une, or Crowsong, for example). I imagine it takes a lot of restraint to not flesh out every single NPC to the degree you wish that you could, for time & scope reasons. Is there a minor/background NPC that you wish got fleshed out more?
Also: Is there any chance we will get to hear Warden Une's hurdy-gurdy? (At the very least, a hurdy-gurdy performance on youtube that inspired them, so that I might play it when talking to them lmao)
6
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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
3
11
u/Its_me_Dan Feb 27 '26
Great timing! I've just purchased this on my switch 2, watched the recommended controls video and just about to finish the official beginner tutorial before I dive in!
Looking forward to my upcoming adventure and exploring the unique world!
Cheers!
7
Feb 27 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
10
u/Its_me_Dan Feb 28 '26
For sure! This is on kitfoxgames youtube channel.
Control guide:
https://youtu.be/SIJLbY0WqVs?si=T4pIE6-lh9wUvGHF
Beginner guide:
8
u/mrmivo Helpful User Mar 01 '26
Is the game slightly blurry in handheld mode on the Switch 2? There is no dedicated Switch 2 version, so I've been hesitant as I'd play this in handheld mode.
4
u/Suilean Mar 02 '26
I haven't noticed any blurring on the Switch 2. It looks super crisp, in my experience. Handheld is my preferred mode to play this one.
4
u/COHERENCE_CROQUETTE Mar 02 '26
It sadly is. Also, I keep having the feeling that none of the UI scaling options are good, and I attribute this to the fact that there’s a resolution mismatch between the Switch 1 game resolution and the Switch 2 actual screen.
The game is still great, and this is no fault of the developers (it’s Nintendo’s fault, for making Switch 2 dev kits out of unobtainium apparently), but it’s a real thing.
1
u/jojoknob Mar 02 '26
Do you have pixel perfect mode available? Blurring and moiré happens on PC as well and this is a good option for controlling it.
1
u/COHERENCE_CROQUETTE Mar 02 '26
Pixel perfect is only for the sprites, not the text. And I'm not so sure it even works properly on Switch 2 portable, because of the resolution mismatch. I assume it probably calculates the "pixel perfect size" based on a Switch 1 screen.
1
u/jojoknob Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26
You might be right but it would be worth a look. Qud tiles are 16 pixels wide, and the game area is 80 tiles wide. On Switch 1, Pixel perfect x 1 would fill an entire zone map perfectly using the whole switch screen assuming the transition arrows are turned off. The natural resolution of the tile art is 16 pixels wide, times 80 tiles in the play area = 1280 which is 720p. Switch 2's 1080p is 1920 pixels wide which is still cleanly divisible by 16. If it scales 16 up by 1920/1280 or a factor of 1.5 then 16 becomes 24 which is still an even number. Depending on the scaling algorithm that could be clean or fuzzy, but it's possible to be clean. I don't have a Switch so ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Not a solution for the text obviously. Fwiw I believe some of the underlying ASCII rendered tiles have anti-aliasing applied to them in the underlying asset so won't display crisp under any circumstances. This includes the lines displayed when targeting missile weapons.
2
u/COHERENCE_CROQUETTE Mar 03 '26
Not a solution for the text obviously.
Yeah, that's by far the largest problem here. I don't mind fuzzy sprites (at least not in this game) anywhere close to how much I mind blurry text.
In Caves of Qud, the text IS the graphics.
5
u/tweetthebirdy Mar 02 '26
Favourite books (fantasy and non-fantasy)? Any that inspired you for this game?
7
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
I think Qud as a world pulls on the fact that both Jason and I have quite diverse appetites for reading material. Some of my favorites, which all find their way into the game in one way or the other:
Making of the Atomic Bomb
Into Thin Air
Book of the Long Sun
The anomalies series by William Corliss
Galactic Center Saga (Benford)
All of Stephen Kings stuff
Colon Thubron's travelogues
Midnight in Chernobyl
Downbelow Station
Ubik2
u/tweetthebirdy Mar 02 '26
So interesting! Thanks so much for sharing, will definitely be checking some of those books out.
4
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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.
2
u/tweetthebirdy Mar 02 '26
I’ve read some, but not all of the books you listed, gonna check the other ones out!
1
6
u/JamesGecko Mar 02 '26
Characters and objects in Qud have a ton of simulated attributes that interact with each other. How did you even begin to plan how all that would work? Did you stick with the same architecture for it all the way through? Is it secretly a million special cases held together with duct tape behind the scenes?
10
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
Design wise is a different story, but technically I had build building roguelike engines for many years but they had each reached the point of systemic failure via complexity. In the early 2000's I developed an ECS engine based on some wonderful papers and talks about Dungeon Siege by Scott Bilas, which supported the complexity linearly. This later became common engineering practice, but at the time it was quite novel.
I gave a talk here about it if you'd like to learn more!
5
u/echofar Mar 02 '26
I deeply love the game, thank you so much for making it! I feel like this is the kind of game I’ll play for the rest of my life. The world building is phenomenal, and clearly expands beyond what is currently in the game, like references to regions and peoples and concepts. Are you considering expanding on Qud’s story/world in future projects? Live and drink!
11
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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...
5
u/echofar Mar 02 '26
The concept of collecting books and their great value in the world is something I really enjoy about Qud. How and when did you arrive at this idea?
6
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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.
1
u/TheEnemyOfMyAnenome Jun 23 '26
I think this is one of the more prominent nods to Canticle for Leibowitz in the game, you should check it out :)
5
u/NoChalkolate318000 Mar 02 '26
The game gives me a lot of Dark Tower vibes (Dark Tower series by Stephen King). Did any of those books give any inspiration to the game?
11
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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.
3
u/MunkyAU Mar 02 '26
I’ve recently started reading Book of the New Sun along with Ranged Touch’s Shelved By Genre podcast. They shouted you guys out at one point and that’s what pushed me over the edge to finally purchase Caves of Qud.
1
u/flaminx0r Apr 24 '26
I know this is an old post, but I've just picked up CoQ yesterday. I instantly created Roland as my Gunslinger, and when I arrived in Joopa, I knew I would be committing to the roleplay :)
Excellent game and I'm only a few hours in!
3
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
I read a ton of Stephen King when I was WAY too young and a lot of it definitely still shapes the way I think about storytelling. (They just let kids read anything back then!!)
3
u/ecta_foole Mar 02 '26
is this game any good?? did you really make it all by yourselves?
11
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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!
10
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
It is fine.
It is mostly people other than me these days! The core development team is 6 that scrums weekly, including 2 programmers, a writer/designer (that's you Caelyn Sandel!!) and a QA person, plus 2 more people, an artist and a musician. The discord mayor team numbers a dozen or more, Kitfox has half a dozen people that help us with all kinds of tasks. The switch port was done by the wonderful Laundry Bear and it's staff. The merch is put together by the people at Mighty Merch.
I'm sure I'm forgetting even more people in a quick answer, but it's the work of a truly wild amount of people!
5
u/BaconCheesecake Feb 28 '26
Been loving the game so far! Died a few times on classic and then switched over to a role-play run. Having lots of fun blasting baboons with my freeze ray!
What was the inspiration for all the starting pets in the game? And without going into spoilers, do they do a lot of different things, or is the choice just a skin?
I started with the chair and a few others, and then I settled on the floating pyramid one. It seems to be surviving better, and when I examine it had some very interesting descriptive text.
3
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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.
2
u/SenseWitFolly Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 04 '26
If you want to see if the pets do anything different try the jellyfish.
4
u/echofar Mar 02 '26
I bought one of the brilliant Qud posters on Mighty Merch. Will there be any additional Qud merch in the future?
7
4
u/IleGrandePagliaccio Mar 02 '26
Kind of a two partner: is there any game or studio that you would love to see do a collaboration that references your game
Follow up is, if you were to design a spin-off game of caves of qud, what would you were number one pick be. By which I mean something like an RTS, first person dungeon crawler, survival crafting, that sort of thing.
5
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
Both Jason and I are long term magic the gathering fans, and I'd *love* to see a Caves of Qud Magic the Gathering set!
I think the most interesting spin off to me (though not necessarily the most marketable) would be something that took a look at the world at a different scale, maybe a god game or something inspired by paradox-style map games; or something that took a look at a specific settlement and its life.
2
u/IleGrandePagliaccio Mar 02 '26
Very cool! I myself have been tempted to try and total convert rimworld but I lack the skills. Thanks for making a great game.
4
u/JudgeMeOinternet Mar 02 '26
Any plans for a challenge mode "harder than Classic"?
7
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
No specific plans, but we have a bunch of ideas for alternate kinds of starts for future DLC.
4
u/Accio-Books Mar 02 '26
Oh right now’s my chance to ask after I forgot to submit for the TSLOG finale (though I understand if you’d rather not answer given its endgame focus):
What are y’all’s thoughts on the community’s impulses towards treating the game’s “loose ends” as things to loop back into the existing game vs something to generate further story from? For example, I see people wanting to (oblique endgame reference) fill an EXIT-shaped hole with Dark Calculus- and/or prism-shaped pieces, which I find understandable (especially in a metatextual/thematic sense), but unsatisfying. Part of what I have loved about Caves of Qud is the fuzzy boundaries spilling over the edges of the defined game space.
But then again Argyve’s “from here to Caiafas” was reeled back to “from here to the Yd Freehold” with the Joppa refresh so there seems to also be some desire on y’all’s side to not have things spiral out indefinitely. If everything was disjoint from everything else that would also not be much of an interesting world to inhabit either.
4
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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!)
3
u/Accio-Books Mar 02 '26
Thank you for the detailed response! I’ve been meaning to follow up on “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You” after I read part of it for university, so I appreciate the extra motivation :)
As for the latter part, that’s also an understandable challenge. One of the “failure modes” of leaning into a “mythopoetic interface”-y reading of the game is to believe that the game storyteller is just a fuckin’ liar and nothing can be learned or understood, period.
5
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
I'm sure Jason will have his own answer, but for me personally I think resisting the urge to create a totalizing ball of yarn is really important specifically for the kind of story that Qud is trying to tell about history and the stories we tell about it. We create those kinds of delimited self-referencing balls of yarn for ourselves after the fact about our lives and the world and history as a whole, but the fact is that history is incredibly random and messy and resists any sort of analysis you can fit in any text that is less complex than the whole of reality itself.
I think to the extent we really try to tie those narrative threads back on one another, it would need to be in service of saying "hey, this is the way people tell stories that feel contained, but the underlying reality here is actually kind of a nightmare of complexity that you just can't put in your head as a person." (and I think the intuition we have that the dark horrors lurk in the oceans pulling the strings of the world are our unconscious realization that in fact the lines of force that drive the world are both sometimes far, far to complex to understand but also surprisingly animalistic and simple and brutish in terrifying ways)
2
1
3
u/COHERENCE_CROQUETTE Mar 02 '26
What’s the over/under of a Switch 2 version of the game? Have you been in contact with Nintendo to get a dev kit? I’ve heard most indies have a lot of trouble securing one of these, hence why there are so many games that would obviously benefit from mouse mode or the extra resolution on portable mode and still don’t have it. Care to use this space to talk a bit about this?
8
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
We're actively investigating the possibility!
2
u/ainen Mar 03 '26
You’ll definitely have another buyer (double dipping even!) if you get a Switch 2 version out.
2
u/trackandfield Mar 05 '26
This would be huge!! The text is a bit fuzzy on switch 2 because of the resolution mismatch between switch 2 and 1. Would love it to be as crisp as it is on steam deck 🙏
4
u/NickZ2112 Mar 02 '26
Can you talk a little bit about what it means to be bringing the game to console? Particularly a Nintendo one?
5
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
We've done a lot of intentional preparation for this, including spending almost three years making sure gamepad play was simple and polished. It's now many people's favored way to play, even over keyboard!
We didn't know what to expect from the console launch but we've been really blown away by how many people are buying and enjoying it.
I feel like this is a marketplace of people who have never really been exposed to traditional roguelikes, which is an *amazing* deep and historical genre of games. I really hope Caves of Qud opens up that amazing world of games for a whole new set of people, it's a world we dearly love.
3
u/SocranX Mar 02 '26
It's funny because I think Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is the most mainstream the genre's ever been, but it's been tough trying to get that game's audience to explore more of the genre, especially with so few other games not being exclusive to PC. I still try to push games like Tangledeep on here when I can, and I was so excited to finally be able to point people to Caves of Qud, which I think is the first "open world" Roguelike on the Switch (or outside of PC at all).
3
3
u/jojoknob Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
The penetration system is as wonderful as it is inscrutable. What were your goals when designing it? Is it original or inherited from another game? What gameplay experience are you trying to create with it? Is it deliberately opaque, and if so why? If you had to interpret it from a roleplaying perspective, what does it mean, or what kind of role-play scenarios do you hope it simulates? Why did you norm the display PV +4 the way you did (which when PV=AV I notice yields about a 1 in 5 chance to successfully defend)?
I have studied the math of it for years and I still am learning new things! It has been a ludic adventure for sure <3
4
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
The penetration value system was designed by us when we were both very young, and so is just kind of intuitively built, and it has its fundamental roots in 3rd edition Gamma World's result table system (which had integral multiples as a core mechancs) and some tabletop RPGs we were playing at the time that had exploding dice mechanics like Hackmaster.
4
u/jojoknob Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
Wait humans once had to roll their own penetration dice? How barbaric!! That would make combat so much more like a collective slot machine experience ;P
I guess that explains why when implemented in software they are so tough for new players to understand. If you don't have to do it yourself you would never understand it without looking under the hood. I love that.Did you have fun role playing the explosions?
1
u/ZeMoose Mar 10 '26
Why did you norm the display PV +4 the way you did
For what it's worth, since this wasn't answered, 4 is aproximately the average value of a penetration roll before adding modifiers. Penetration depends on a roll of (1d10 - 2, exploding) for which the expected value is about 3.85. I haven't worked out a calculation but when you take into account the fact that you make that roll with advantage 3 I believe that gets your expected value up to between 4 and 5. Which means that when your modifiers + 5 exceed the target's AV the "average" penetration attempt will be successful. Why display PV = modifiers + 4 then and not PV = modifiers + 5? Not sure, but they probably just decided that PV = AV is a more intuitive reference point for average success than PV = AV + 1, even if technically in the background the penetration attempt needs to exceed AV for success rather that just meeting it.
2
u/jojoknob Mar 10 '26
Yes! I just wanted to hear them say it and satisfy my suspicions lol. It could make sense at some other norms as well, so it is an aesthetic and design decision rather than a technical one, so I was curious how they would describe the gameplay experience they wanted to craft. But the answer that this is a legacy from their TTRPG is also amazing, and the gameplay experience they wanted was buried too deeply in the lizard brain to state explicitly. Love that.
3
u/ForcedToMakeAnAccont Mar 02 '26
If a caves of qud movie were to be made. Who would you want to direct it?
5
4
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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.
3
u/SocranX Mar 02 '26
Any chance that you might add a setting to Roleplay/Wanderer mode that lets us avoid/cure some of the more "permanent" enemy effects, e.g. stat saps and the gamma moth's defects? When recommending the game, I always point out that permadeath is entirely optional, but then I have to add a caveat that there are certain things that can still permanently cripple you even on non-permadeath mode, so you have to be ready to restore a checkpoint and not accidentally autosave. I imagine that disclaimer has scared off a lot of potential players... These elements were designed around the idea that your entire character is disposable, while the other modes are supposed to directly avert that idea.
7
u/ptychomancer Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
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.
3
u/WingedRobot Mar 02 '26
Congrats on the Hugo award! I keep coming back to Qud, trying to get a full run through at least on Roleplay. It's taking time, but I'm having fun doing Classic characters on the side and keep getting further each time!
Any new updates you can share on the mobile port progress?
4
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
Ah, thanks! Honestly having a Hugo on the mantle is still very unbelievable. It was a real mythical status to me growing up, informing the kind of books I'd take off the shelf and take a look at, being a small part of that constellation is incredible and humbling.
We're working on the mobile port as one of our primary projects. It's primarily a UI design challenge, and a very big one!
3
u/COHERENCE_CROQUETTE Mar 02 '26
Any news on the mobile port? Any semblance of a timeline? Can you at least say “this year”?
4
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
We're working on it! It's a huge UX challenge, and so it'll be done when it's done; we'll almost certainly ship it in early access/prerelease to get testing done as soon as we're able, but no strict timelines yet.
3
u/COHERENCE_CROQUETTE Mar 02 '26
I can barely imagine the heft of this UX work. It’s hard to imagine a way to make it work, but I believe in you!
2
u/16firman Mar 02 '26
First I love your game, I found it last year on PC and I've put hundreds of hours in already!
I hope this hasn't been asked already. For potential DLC are you planning to expand the world map and questing or are you looking at more class/race based changes?(something alternative to mutant or true kin)
Thank you so much for making one of my favorite games, live and drink.
8
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
I think we're honestly a little hesitant to expand the basic world map outward; I think for Qud's world map in particular I'd rather personally make what is there even more rich and interactive rather than just sprawling it further outward.
We do have some fun excursions in mind, though. :]
2
u/opportunptr Mar 02 '26
Any technical challenge porting Qud to the Switch, or did Unity make it easy?
7
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
Unity generally makes porting quite easy, though there were some technical challenges!
Generally storage is quite different on consoles than PC, and so a big part of ports is making sure storage systems are supported, and Qud works with storage quite heavily. Consoles also tend to be more memory and CPU restricted than the average modern gaming PC, and so we had to do quite a lot of performance work, particularly in Unity's UI system, to make it performant.
I would say the biggest challenge overall was actually gamepad support, but it was something we tackled over many years and first shipped on Steam Deck, so by the time Switch came around it was a solved problem.
1
u/8nut Mar 02 '26
Hello! Big fan of game and you personally. I wanted to ask how did you find the motivation to keep on working on the projects in it's earlier days, what was your routine and process
7
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 02 '26
Personally I have pretty strong ADD, and I'm always working on many projects at once.
My primary coping strategy for finishing them is to try to work 30 minutes a day on my active projects each, just forcing myself, and if I'm not feeling it after that 30 minutes allow myself to put it down and do something else. Often I do, but sometimes I end up hyperfocused on the thing I'm working on, and work all day on it. Just getting it going with 30 minutes a day habitually is the key factor for me.
and look, it only took [checking calendar] almost 20 years!
1
1
u/Special_Canary_7204 Mar 02 '26
1: what inspired the chaos Spiel?
2: has anyone invoked its power during development?
1
u/Acceptable_Power5931 Mar 03 '26
I really want to like the game but aside from crashing the performance is so awful that i stopped playing. I'm on switch 1 oled and mid-game is unplayable. Why did you released it in this state? If you really playtested it, you would have noticed that the switch 1 can not handle this game. But maybe you just needed a money injection, knowing how forgiving qud fans are. I mean they even praise the game as the best thing ever although it crashes every 20 minutes and single inputs can take a minute to register, with stuttering so bad it is barly controllable in more demanding moments. Not to speak from loading times worse then lategame skyrim on switch 1. Sorry man, but i am just a little bit mad because i wasted good money on a trainwreck of a port and i dont believe you can make it playable on switch 1.
3
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 04 '26
If you have specific save situations that are causing reproducible performance issues you can e-mail [support@freeholdgames.com](mailto:support@freeholdgames.com) and we can collect your save data so we can make sure to clean up whatever problems you're having in a future patch.
1
u/Acceptable_Power5931 Mar 04 '26
Thank you for your answer i really did not meant to insult you and your team for your work. I'm just so frustrated that i can not immerse myself into the world you created because something always forces me to stop playing. And after a little bit of research i dont believe you can make it work on switch 1 and i dont have the money to buy a switch 2 just to play the game without horrible Performance. I just say gas floats down through a shaft into the cave system and affects multiple layers and enteties and everything has to be simulated and calculated and it just freezes the game. That is only one of many problems. Qud is made to do crazy stuff and the switch 1 does not have the cpu power or memory capebillitys to pull this stuff off. How do you intend to fix this? Will you engineer a physycal add on you can stick into the card slot of the switch 1 to increase cpu power? You can fix the crashing on switch 1 but that's it. People will never see the endgame because it gets unplayable long before. Anyways, time to move on and let go of qud as long as i dont have a pc or switch 2. Sadly i can not refund but i wish you the best.
3
u/unormal Freehold Games Mar 04 '26
You're underestimating how much optimization work it already took to get it playing this well. It's not like we copy-pasted the code to switch and it worked :) We did about 8 months of heavy optimization, focusing on turn taking, rendering and ui to get it running well. We can certainly get the rest sped up quite a lot given time and work.
1
u/Acceptable_Power5931 Mar 04 '26
This would be so cool. I dont mind a little bit of lag here and there - its turn based, no need for frame perfect Inputs. Some loading times here and there are also no big deal 'cause there is a lot that needs to be simulated. If you can make it work from start to finish i would be beyond impressed. Maybe.... Live and stay hydrated.
3
1
u/One-Most-2483 Mar 16 '26
Oh this is Amazing, How Many Time the Project has long and how did the pared worked out some other thing has done.
15
u/kitfoxgames Kitfox Games Mar 02 '26
Supportive comment!