Encouraging participant creativity in Caves of Qud

All visuals courtesy of Freehold Games/Kitfox Games

The IGF (Independent Games Festival) aims to promote innovation in game design and to commend talented game developers who are advancing the medium. This year, Game Developer had discussions with the finalists for the IGF’s Nuovo and Grand Prize candidates before GDC to delve into the challenges, design choices, and tools behind each entry. Game Developer and GDC are sibling organizations under Informa.

Caves of Qud, one of the nominees for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at this year’s IGF, allows players the opportunity to explore, interact with characters, and experience a broad array of content within its expansive, intricate simulation of a sci-fi universe. Filled with centuries of lore and culture meticulously crafted alongside systems to inspire player creativity, this game, years in the making, offers a remarkable journey depending on how you choose to explore it.

Game Developer engaged in a dialogue with Jason Grinblat and Brian Bucklew, the game’s co-creators, to discuss the challenges involved in providing numerous opportunities for player creativity in the game, how they managed to create the game’s narratives while players can interact in diverse ways, and the difficulties that arise from developing a game for nearly two decades.

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Who are you, and what was your role in the creation of Caves of Qud?

Jason Grinblat, co-creator: I’m Jason Grinblat and this is Brian Bucklew. We are the co-creators of Caves of Qud. Initially, it was just the two of us working on the game, but since our Steam EA launch in 2015, the team has expanded significantly.

Generally speaking, I lead the creative/design aspects and Brian manages the technical side, but our roles are much more intertwined than that, certainly. We both contribute extensively.

What is your background in game development?

Grinblat: We started as hobbyists and we still somewhat are. We grew up together enjoying and creating games. Caves of Qud is essentially the first one we released to the public (as an early alpha in 2010). We took a brief pause from Qud development to create Sproggiwood (released in 2014), and we’ve done some AAA consulting work. However, most of our serious time in games has been dedicated to developing Qud. 

How did you come up with the concept for Caves of Qud?

Grinblat: It was the result of multiple influences. Around 2007, we were developing a tabletop role-playing game set in a vast, far-future sci-fi universe. We were also experimenting with the idea of a turn-based exploration-focused web game. Additionally, we were creating a roguelike engine. Eventually, these projects converged and gave birth to Caves of Qud.

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What design tools were used to develop your game?

Brian Bucklew, co-creator: Caves of Qud initially began as a basic C# .NET 2.0 application. For the Steam launch, we migrated that codebase to Unity. We started on Unity version 4, and 1.0 was released last December on Unity 2022.3. The development team utilizes either Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code alongside Linear, Confluence, Git, and Bitbucket for collaboration and project planning.

Caves of Qud allows players the opportunity to interact with virtually anything they desire in the game’s universe, embodying the chaotic freedom of a tabletop role-playing game. What considerations and challenges arise when accounting for (and permitting) such a variety of player interactions with each object, surface, and character?

Grinblat: It’s a substantial technical and design challenge. In both aspects, we tend to think in terms of modularity—how can we deconstruct elements so they can be freely combined in expressive ways. Then we strive to ensure each module possesses its own unique character. For instance, the concept of a door encapsulates a lot of weight, so we have to incorporate and play with that whole set of cultural associations when you, say, treat that door as a sentient being and enable it to be conversed with, traded with, or interacted with in other ways.

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The game is filled with exquisite writing to encompass its numerous diverse moments.

and occurrences. How do you create well-crafted prose when there are so many diverse actions and activities? When multiple factors can converge into a single moment? How do you narrate for the myriad possibilities while still preserving the quality of the writing?

Grinblat: Once again, I would argue that our approach is twofold. On one side, we have a multitude of “traditional” writing techniques similar to RPGs or interactive fiction, such as detailed NPCs, dialogue, quests, item descriptions, etc. This establishes a foundational framework for the more procedural elements to build upon. Procedural content always requires something stable to anchor it; otherwise, it fails to coalesce into something significant.

In crafting the procedural modules themselves, we strive to maintain sufficient freedom so that the creations genuinely feel alive when the modules are integrated. For instance, when writing creature descriptions, I avoid specifying what they carry or where they are situated, as these aspects are subject to change during gameplay. I aim for something that resonates yet remains adaptable across different contexts.

Ultimately, we have developed a vibrant, unconventional science fiction setting that serves as a soft landing for the wide array of combinations that emerge. In a game world that demands substantial replayability, a dynamic setting is like a moist sponge. It offers yet another squeeze; there’s something in its community of symbols that benefits or enriches from exploring it from another angle. This is the kind of world Qud has become.

The game features numerous quirky elements that players can undertake or experience, and you guided us through the way you generated these ideas in a previous interview with Game Developer. Can you share with us a personal favorite mechanic/ability/action and walk us through how you designed and implemented it into the game?

Grinblat: Some spoilers ahead. Later in the game, for obscure story reasons, you are tasked with creating a golem. To do this, you need to assemble a collection of peculiarly themed components: the body (“as a model”), the catalyst (“to energize the blood”), the atzmus (“as divine direction”), etc. This is a crafting challenge that brings together several systems and aspects of the game world you have inhabited for hours. 

Just like character creation, it was crucial for this to feel expressive—to provide a broad palette that didn’t come off as prescriptive, acting like a raw physics upon which you could build. Over many years of development, we have amassed a treasure trove of rich, authored information regarding our game items—creatures, furnishings, objects, fluids, body components, journal entries. There are several thousand game items, each with distinct personalities. We realized we could align thematically relevant effects with each of these and integrate them into a comprehensive crafting metasystem that felt commensurate with the scope of the quest and the real-world symbolism it draws from. The end result: players uncovering various wild designs for crafting the most unusual and interest-piquing golems imaginable. One player embarked on a personal quest to find a way to give his partner (a tree) wings so they could ferry them to the pile of scrap and clay where crafting occurs to create a tree golem. The game allowed for that.

Caves of Qud was in development for seventeen years. What obstacles arose from working with decades-old code and systems you had previously established? How do you ensure that the game’s older code integrates seamlessly with newer creations, and how do you make certain everything functions well together on contemporary platforms? Can you tell us about some of the work you’ve done to make everything work cohesively?

Bucklew: Caves of Qud is a vast legacy system. One thing we have done, at least somewhat successfully, is to address the technical debt at a modest but steady pace. Our weekly public patch schedule leading up to 1.0 was entirely focused on alleviating debt to ensure we weren’t overwhelmed by it.

Unity helps us maintain our game running on modern systems by alleviating the majority of core engine platform support work. This has resulted in significant cost savings in terms of ongoing technical maintenance. The technical gap bridged between Windows, Linux, and macOS from Unity 4 in 2014 to Unity 2023 is comprehensive, and Unity covered the majority of that technical expense.

Nevertheless, some of the most significant challenges lay in transforming a game that was initially a console-exclusive roguelike into a contemporary game that can run on the Steam Deck. This required the addition of an entirely new user interface, a new input system, tiles, sound and music subsystems, and more. Each of these represented a substantial development effort involving the creation of modern systems and the refactoring of older systems to meet the new standards, and there was no slick trick to it other than putting in the hard work to get each completed. Knowing it would be a long process, at each step we made our best effort to ensure everything