New followers: you may want to check out the weird game we're making, Caves of Qud
It's a far-future, sci-fantasy RPG that's heavy on language, simulation, & sentient plants. The tagline is "Chisel through a layer cake of thousand-year-old civilizations."
I love maps & their promise of fractal discovery.
I love procedural generation and the aesthetics of the unauthored.
Where do these two loves intersect? Generated maps.
I am the procgen map admirer. These are my favorite map generators and the folks who create them.
👇THREAD👇
this is so funny. just a great bit to pretend to worship a goose perched majestically on a rock. it's wild that kids can tune to this frequency so young, but also *I* remember being these kids, finding this exact sort of joke funny
there's something irresistible in the idea that Link is a hero with a sword & bow but if you give him the equivalent of a mechanical engineering degree he rides around Hyrule on a hell chariot of crucified koroks
re Unity: I love it when a corporation strategically fails to execute its growth-mindset, appease-the-shareholders compulsion so hard they accidentally pierce the ideological veil draped over all of capitalism and have to eat shit forever because of it
It's finally done.
I wrote and edited and rewrote (over the years, in some cases, several times) descriptions for the 2000+ objects in the game.
Here's the last one, finished 5 minutes ago. it's trash
A funny bit of history about our game. At some point it became convenient mechanics-wise to convert Beak from a defect to a mutation. So what was an arbitrary stake in the ground of player beak aesthetics (always unsightly, -1 Ego) had its valence inverted (always sightly,+1 Ego)
I hate to inform everyone mad at this tweet that Brian's position on the relationship between curry and western civilization is the least extreme on the Caves of Qud team. Several of us don't even think England is real
Speaking as a suburban white guy raised evangecal the first time you have good naan and curry is the moment you realize you were birthed of a failed civilization
Time for my normal spiel: Dwarf Fortress is one of the best and most important games ever made
It's one of two or three PRINCIPAL influences on Caves of Qud
Accessible DF is a game-changer, buy it 10 times, etc
⛏️⛏️⛏️
4. I just wanna play the game without bringing politics into it. There's nowhere I can do that.
This one's gonna hurt but you can't construct a fictional world without bringing politics into it. You can recapitulate the dominant ideology uncritically, but that... is political.
I'm no discourse fiend, but two things:
-You'd have to murder a loved one of mine for me to take you out of the credits of a game you worked on with me
-If you're making cyberpunk in the year of our lord 2019 and you put a white dude on the cover, get in the trash
Kitfox is publishing Caves of Qud, the legendary sci-fi roguelike by
@freeholdgames
... and it's coming to 1.0 in 2024!!! LIVE AND DRINK, FRIENDS! Let's all be mutants together, it's in Early Access!
Steam:
:
I'll say this for anyone who's earnestly questioning the implications of this kind of moderation: for every _1_ nuanced discussion about the Templar that's lost, 100 more flower in its place because the mods created a comfortable space for people who don't feel welcome elsewhere
The screencapped tweets are utterly inexplicable as coherent thoughts until you realize the op is the CEO of Quora, at which point both they and Quora make a lot more sense
My brain is leaking out of my ears. What the fuck did I just read. This is not how laws, or policing, or morality, or epistemology, or “AI”, or anything works.
A 🧵 of AI-generated images using Caves of Qud wall descriptions as their text prompts (via BigSleep, all first-try)
To start, limestone:
"Invertebrate life was sucked of its tissue and bled still over millions of years. The glaucous rock is a necropolis."
Let's do more city maps. How about
@watawatabou
's crisp, clean medieval fantasy city generator. I love the sense of urban concentration these produce.
in light of the news of the day, if you like
✅ esoteric religious disputes within Judaic subcultures
✅ hidden tunnels bisecting a sprawling metropolis
✅ brawls breaking out inexplicably
may I suggest
bout time that I tap the sign
If you enjoy our game Caves of Qud, please leave a positive review to counteract all the negative reviews that also enjoy the game
If you haven't played Caves of Qud in a while, the update that dropped today is a nice point of reentry. The new vfx in particular complement the simulation really well – just enough lofi sauce to make the game feel alive
Phew, It's been a long road but a whole new quest leg, new input manager, new visual effects, tons of sound effects and content have just hit the live branch! Huge effort by the whole team, hope everyone enjoys!
The fetishization of choice in the context of healthcare coverage is so gross and misleading. It's a move of false scarcity that divides the pie into coverage "choices". On the point of who wants to be healthy, I think there's consensus?
@Authogin
We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point.
We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their
2. The devs made Q Girl unkillable as a political statement
You can't kill Q Girl because, despite being cruel roguelike devs, we have hearts & feel bad when you brick your twenty-hour run by murdering a major quest giver.
Now we get to city maps and
@mewo2
's equally stunning
@metropologeny
. I love how tiny neighborhoods of rectangular order are concatenated along the sinuous paths of nature.
I love every piece of Caves of Qud fan art we receive, but none quite so much as the very first piece someone ever sent us, just about five years ago.
It's wild. Please look at it.
Hades reveals something interesting about the structure of the roguelike loop and its narrative potential:
Most of our social lives are spent doing the same things over and over again, deepening relationships with the people we do them with
3. You can't join the Putus Templar because of the devs' political views
You can't join any of the seventy factions in the game other than the ONE the main quest revolves around, the Barathrumites
6. They're so angry all those tweets must be about Sseth
They're not about Sseth, they're about the knock-on dummies who get irate when we tell them they aren't entitled to this _one_ specific space that isn't even contained within the game they bought
why isn't there a game where you're a giant hermit crab crawling through a ruined city and upgrading your shell with the progressively larger hulls of rusted out cars and trucks
The thing you want, being able to talk about the game while leaving these specific thirteen rocks in your ideological rock maze undisturbed, actually exists all over the internet. The Caves of Qud channel in the Roguelikes discord is one example.
It's time for another PC Gamer roundtable! The brains behind Dwarf Fortress (
@Bay12Games
) and Caves of Qud (
@cavesofqud
) get together to talk about making the kinds of deeply simulated games they love to play.
After the addition of Elon Musk to the Star Trek and Mass Effect canons, I want to address the rumors about us adding him to Caves of Qud.
The truth is, we did. Officially: Elon is the plankton microfossil crushed between levels 26 and 27 of the subterranean shale under Joppa.
I also think it's crucial for cis men to resist the urge to portray abusers as if they operate by a completely different set of mechanisms than we do. It's much more useful to interrogate how we ourselves are socialized to feel entitled to womens' bodies, minds, time, energy.
I believe Natalie and Zoë and I'm sickened by what I read in their accounts. It's important for men to stand up, show support, hold other men accountable, be loud advocates for the women and non-binary folks in our spaces.
In case you missed the announcement earlier,
@lorenschmidt
is doing the new Caves of Qud UI!
This is basically a dream come true and simplifies our strategy of telling a UI artist "make it look like it was made by loren schmidt".
psst
CAVES OF QUD is now available on itch and GOG
for you if you're into
✅sentient plants
✅unabashedly purple prose
✅imagining how far-future cultures might make trellises from the bones of the civilizations that preceded them
Next: the continents of Dwarf Fortress (
@Bay12Games
) were the first generated maps that truly blew me away. They're the most artful use of ASCII I've seen and the biggest influence on the visual style of Caves of Qud.
It's been a year of immense transformation and big, confounding emotions. I've shared my grief, now I'm happy to share a bit of joy: a baby ptychomancer is arriving in December.
💜💜💜
The Bernie memes are so therapeutic because they're allowing us to express this moment's joy without apology to the disappointed radical inside of us. The tension is laid bare through the image of Bernie, and so the emotion is ironed out
It's important to keep lambasting NFTs because no matter how bad a technology is if you anneal it with enough charlatan force of personality it *will* harden
Gamers can have opinions about videogame production but they will be untethered from reality 80% of the time. It's more an expressive literary form than material critique
I'm damn excited about this next Caves of Qud patch — in part because it's all I've had time to think about. Can't share much yet but we've got
✔️ wander and roleplay modes
✔️ preset builds to get started
✔️ gorgeous new chargen UI
my father's day story is that I've been playing totk with my 2.5yo.
whenever I get to a loading screen she says "where'd the man go" then when it's done "oh, there he is"
her fav activities ranked are 1) craters 2) launching rocks 3) towers 4) shrines
I'm lucky enough to be insulated from, and so shocked at the reminder of, the level of cowardly corporate nothingness that has to live in your heart for you to say "I don't support sexualized content of any sort."