Roguelikes: I never met@progression I didn't like

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hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

dis astranagant posted:

Every now and then my water merchants start with helping hands but I haven't really noticed them doing anything besides being a place to stick a glowsphere.

They should proc additional attacks too.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2013 19:01

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 02:18

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

_jink posted:

Is that a viable way to play? It sounds interesting, but also like a hefty chunk of micromanagement unless your minions get substantially stronger.

also yo Unormal (& Luke if youre still about) I really enjoy the writing in this game!

Thanks!

# ¿ Nov 4, 2013 19:10

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

I don't believe that was ever actually accurate.

Their starting stats and stat gain were nerfed at some point.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2013 19:18

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

dis astranagant posted:

By the time you finish grinding out to level 10 you have enough money laying around to buy just about anything you might want, including several midrange tinkering recipes even without hoovering up every bronze piece of crap you find. You don't just have one good item you scrimped and saved for, you have everything that looked remotely interesting. Walk out of grit gate with a carbine AND a combat shotgun AND sometimes an eigenrifle AND Polluxus AND ulnar stimulators/the leg equivalent, AND all your mental mutations are near max level despite sinking all your points in carapace and another physical mutation you picked up for the hell of it. It enables you to afford being all the ludicrous mixed build you want to be.

Svenlainard isn't supposed to sell Polluxus, but apparently he occasionally judges his lead slug or crayon box to be more valuable.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2013 16:46

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

_jink posted:

I drew my esper :-D

COMEDY OPTION

That's very cool. Does your character really have that khopesh?

# ¿ Nov 6, 2013 16:26

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

_jink posted:

ahh thats more reasonable

Awesome.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2014 06:11

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Glad you like Qud. Even though Sproggiwood is a much simpler game, like Unormal said, we're working to make sure it's tactically challenging and fun. In scaling the town back we know that the game is going to rest on its tactical chops.

We've also grown quite attached to Sproggi.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2014 03:18

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

Without asking you to actually give it away (unless you want to), is CoQ set in a specific part of the present-day Earth and are there enough hints to work out where it is? Or is it more of a "the continents have cracked and shifted and nothing is recognizable any more" kind of deal?

Unormal posted:

Well yes and no; we have a reasonably developed backstory for the world and a good idea in-general for where it's set, and a set of rationale for why the environment is the way it is, and how it relates to the current world; but it's a vast amount of time in the future, so it's not anything directly corollary like Wacky Adventures in Apoclyptic Suburban NewJersy with Guido the Turtleboy. We always loved a lot of gamma world, but never the specific so-close-to-apocalypse-youre-adventuring-in-your-local-mall-plus-mutants setting elaboration; so this was, essentailly, an attempt to fuse the good (as defined by us) subset of Gamma World with a lot of other influences into an original work.

I'm going to be a little more terse and somewhat contradictory and say: there are hints.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2014 19:22

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

For anyone interested, we have a pretty big cache of supplemental material for our pen and paper setting that Qud is part of -- like Unormal said. Now that we're revamping freeholdgames.com, we'll probably make a lot of it available. Stuff like this expands on some of the fringe elements of Qud that play larger roles in the greater Freehold setting:

The Tribes of Men is a travelogue and oral tradition of the desert-dwelling dromad merchants. It is an account of the myriad humanoid civilizations the dromad have encountered and with whom they've traded over the courses of their lengthy treks across Moghra'yi, the Great Salt Desert.
[edit] The Tribes

The Wading Men - The slugmounters of Ettinspine and the Pale Sea salt marshes
The Gathered Men - The citizens of the colossal desert freehold Nanru
The Hidden Men - The denizens of the comb-cave freeholds found throughout the Sunderlies
The Kneeling Men - The Odrumian disciples of the Eustace-sutta
The Wrathful Men - Called the salt eaters; the manscorpions of northeastern Moghra'yi
The Screaming Men - The cavern-dwellers of the rust-caves of Qud
The Breathless Men - The men of the jungles of Yyp, specifically the citizens of Ekuemekiyye, the Holy City
The Vanished Men - The long-dead race of giants that perished crossing the salt desert
In their chronicles, the dromad refer to themselves as the Thirstless Men.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2014 22:31

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

bisonbison posted:

unormal, thanks for the beta key. What kind of feedback are you interested in right now?

Balance issues and game-breaking power abuse type stuff would be hugely helpful.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2014 03:48

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Hey, for anyone beta testing Sproggiwood who's finding it pretty easy. You can go into settings and change the difficulty from Easy to Hard (I know -- that settings menu is a mess right now). Hard is substantially harder than Easy and at the moment there's no way to start a game on Hard, so you guys may have missed it.

We'd definitely appreciate if you tested on Hard if you're finding Easy to be a breeze.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2014 22:26

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

dis astranagant posted:

I did my testing on hard but I don't think it's possible for anything to actually be difficult with biting frost and/or ice traps.

Ice traps are long deprecated. When did you do your last testing? You might find the later dungeons more challenging (swamp/hills on Hard). I'll be adjusting the hills population over the weekend, too, so that the boss doesn't subdivide for all eternity.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2014 22:41

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

HP is actually mostly the same, but damage is way higher and out of depth encounters are more common. Basically, the game is a lot less forgiving, so you have to use optimal tactics more often. You should get into more sticky situations.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2014 00:13

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Doom Goon posted:

Right now "Hard" is pretty much what I'd consider normal, in that I usually make it through unless I'm choosing a class that I think is weak (Vampire seems pretty tough).

Which dungeons in particular?

# ¿ Oct 4, 2014 01:47

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Naar posted:

Thanks! Here's another one for you - you don't seem to actually need to equip the Alchemist's Vial to get double potion uses. It's selected as default when I start a map, but I can select Rumakko's Jewel instead and still drink a health potion twice.

Keep these coming, please! Both of these bugs are new to us and extremely helpful (Unormal might have a better way for you to relay bugs to him; I'm sure he'll chime in if he does).

# ¿ Oct 4, 2014 20:16

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Thanks, everyone, for the Sproggiwood well wishes. You god drat roguelike masters who blazed through it -- you were instrumental in us choosing to bump "normal" down to "easy" and "savage" to "normal" --- we want to push a real "savage" mode out at some point.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2014 02:07

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Angry Diplomat posted:

I just downloaded Caves of Qud to try it for the first time. My first character, a hellish axe-wielding mass of limbs Marauder, killed a whole bunch of poo poo and then got fatally shot in the rear end with an arrow while spectacularly dismembering a dude. My second character had light manipulation and every single fire-related mutation, including spontaneous combustion. He caught fire IN THE STARTING TOWN and had to fling his blazing rear end into the watervine pits. Then he burned down a shitload of jackal dudes, including a unique, before finally being killed by an angry flaming bear (which is just about the most metal thing I can think of).

This game is hilarious and rad.

Live by the flame, die by the flame.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 03:11

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

For the record, I don't agree with Unormal's axioms. I think he described a subset of roguelike properties that are particularly harmonious and could form the basis for a subgenre. I think several more of those subsets exist. The definition is also pretty far away from what I'm colloquially looking for when I browse Steam for "roguelikes".

The semantics are fun and useful, though.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 09:52

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

andrew smash posted:

Is danneskjold a specific reference to ayn rand's pirate ubermensch or mere coincidence?

It's not a reference so much as I just liked the name. But that is the origin of it, yes.

Just to clarify, those Clan descriptions were from the supersetting of our long-dead pen and paper RPG that the Qud setting was part of.

hand of luke fucked around with this message at 10:05 on Dec 5, 2014

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 10:02

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Desideratus posted:

Pro shortcut: Use a rubbergum injector and fling yourself down the elevator shaft on the surface, it's totally survivable and jumps you right to the, uh, "boss" guy and the waydroid.

And yeah, axes own so hard they allow you to hack apart logic itself!

Logic wasn't hacked apart, you just killed a LIVING, BREATHING rifle turret.

You monster.

hand of luke fucked around with this message at 10:15 on Dec 5, 2014

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 10:04

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

RickVoid posted:

And bookmarked. Thanks!

There's also an actual wiki: http://cavesofqud.wikia.com/wiki/Caves_Of_Qud_Wiki
It's not official or complete, but it's a nice resource.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 10:10

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

megane posted:

You inspired me to have a go at making some CoQ tiles, so here you go.

These are gorgeous. I love that ape -- and albino ape is my spirit animal.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2014 22:58

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Finally back from vacation, I can play some CoQ! So, feedback time.

In the intro help, item 4: "it's attitude towards you" should be "its"

In the intro help, item 6: The "Alt" key is "Option" on OSX, and I dimly recall that it's called "Meta" in Linux?

In the attributes help, on Mental Armor: "will have a sever effect on you". I sincerely hope enemy mental attacks can't decapitate me!

In the Tonics help: "enhance your mental and physical states in a variety of ways". Technically not wrong, but I'm guessing it should've been "stats".

In the Combat help: "has a penetration value ->4, for example)". Missing open-paren.

In the Combat help, item 3: suggest making the parenthetical just an ordinary sentence.

In the Combat help, missile combat item 2: the coloring for the "header" text doesn't continue onto the second line, so it looks a bit odd.

Both Toughness and Willpower are described as modifying your hit point regeneration rate. Intended?

Mutations, Electrical Generation: "You acquire electrical change" should be "charge"

Mutations, Wings: says "You fly." twice.

Mutations, Light Manipulation is similarly redundant.

Mutations, Stunning Force: invoking a "concussion" seems a bit odd.

Suggest allowing access to the help menu by hitting ? in-game.

When examining equipment, typing the letter of a slot brings up the menu for that slot (with drop, look, etc.). When examining inventory, typing a letter first selects that letter; you have to type the letter again to bring up the menu. Seems odd.

Suggest using numpad 3/9 as "page down" and "page up" commands in large menus, DF-style.

Keymaps menu: the "Rest until healed" and "Rest until morning" commands show as "Oemtilde" and "Ctrl+Oemtilde" respectively.

I tried to equip a two-handed sword when I had an axe equipped, and got the message "You need another free Hand to equip that!", but then my axe and merchant's token auto-unequipped and the sword equipped anyway. Seems odd.

...wait, the king is King Haberdash? Is he king because he has a really nice hat?

When trading and you look at an item, you press space to dismiss the look dialog, but this then also selects the item for trading.

What determines when I attack with my merchant's token vs. with my dagger?

It might be nice to note that Temporal Fugue clones loving explode when they die cripes

Swarmer ability: "who is adjacent to its' target". No need for the apostrophe.

I made myself a mutant water dealer with Light Manipulation, Temporal Fugue, Carapace, and Analgesic. Bought a carbide dagger and an artifact (successfully ID'd as an EMP grenade) from the merchant in Joppa, then went to Red Rock, which was swarming with baboons. Killed them off, entered Red Rock, was stomping everything until I got nailed by a poison grenade from a snapjaw brute. Fled up the stairs, which at least pulled the brute away from his pals, but then he beat my face in before I could lase him to death. In retrospect I should've tightened my carapace before firing lasers; oh well.

EDIT: take 2 completed the Red Rock quest (well, I got the corpse, didn't turn it in). Then I died from stepping on a Young Ivory, becoming terrified by a Dread Root, and fleeing over another Young Ivory and bleeding out. D'oh. I must say that Analgesic seems like a good defect to take, though, since so far I haven't much missed not knowing exactly how much health I have.

I went ahead and fixed these typos. With Sproggiwood I felt compelled to comb over every inch of text before we released it. With Qud, though, the enormity of the game crushed the perfectionist out of me.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2015 09:33

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

For you Qud esper veterans, what's your opinion on the Ego/Willpower buffs to mutation level and cooldown? Main feedback I'm looking for:

Do you think they're too powerful once you get over the early game hump?
Do you like them, flavorfully or otherwise? Would you be sad to see them go, or be replaced with toned down Ego/Willpower skills that perform a similar function?

# ¿ Jan 3, 2015 02:13

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

ToxicFrog posted:

To be fair, it's pretty easy to miss; that whole questline is kind of badly cued.

- Argyve is tucked off in the corner of town where you can easily miss that he exists at all, and none of the other people in town mention him, IIRC
- Before he even sends you to the Rust Wells, he wants two artifacts, which is great for characters who start with grenades, but means everyone else can complete the whole Red Rock quest and still possibly have no way of triggering the Rust Wells quest
- He doesn't send you to Grit Gate until you bring him the 200' of wire and bring the corpse back to the elder

To be fair, Qud isn't about well-cued quests, or any kind of leg up for the player...

GLOTROT FOR EVERYONE

# ¿ Jan 4, 2015 22:34

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

dis astranagant posted:

Kinda sad because literally the first thing anyone messing with mental muts thinks of is taking 2 heads and wearing a pair of knollworm skulls

You should get the additional non-armor bonuses. It's possible you don't, though.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2015 22:43

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Blackray Jack posted:

A question for Unormal, is the evil twin downside thing still in existence? When I saw that the first time I laughed.

Yes, it's still a defect.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 09:50

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Angry Diplomat posted:

Will we eventually be able to influence the fortunes of the various factions and change the balance of power, even in a relatively simple, abstract way? Because that sounds awesome. I'd love to decide I like a faction's style and help them gain strength and territory, or find out that a certain group is dealing slaves or whatever and just go around burning down their bases in a righteous rage like some kind of axe-swinging mutant Punisher.

Something like that, eventually. Right now, you have a reputation with every faction in the game, and faction members' base attitudes toward you are based on that rep. So if you manage to get your Snapjaw rep to neutral, Snapjaws will ignore you, and if you get it high enough, they'll assist you in fights.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2015 07:24

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

hand of luke posted:

Something like that, eventually. Right now, you have a reputation with every faction in the game, and faction members' base attitudes toward you are based on that rep. So if you manage to get your Snapjaw rep to neutral, Snapjaws will ignore you, and if you get it high enough, they'll assist you in fights.

By "right now," I mean in the patch we're working on -- not in the live version.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2015 07:25

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Angry Diplomat posted:

That is one badass plant.

e: holy poo poo a sparking baetyl just gave me a Ganglionic Teleprojector for bringing it a bunch of dragonfly corpses

That is the most metal plant in Qud.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2015 03:11

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

ToxicFrog posted:

Speaking of which, it should probably be either "vicious" or, maybe, "viscous".

A lot of the descriptions haven't been touched since their first pass, have never been touched (hideous specimen), or are the victims of Unormal mashing the keyboard (to be fair, he has produced some gems). I'm planning to do a pass on all of them.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2015 03:14

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

LotsBread posted:

Hey, Unormal, can you do some Paleotechnoarcheology and pick up some more lore about Caves of Qud? This is hella hoooot.

Hmmm.. Can you elaborate on this request?

# ¿ Jan 14, 2015 18:26

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

LotsBread posted:

I want to read lore. More lore. I want to know about the races of Qud and the factions.

I'm just so pumped.

Great to hear! Have you found and read all the lore or loreish books in the game?

Also, I promise there's a book of sonnets by a plant named Shakesprig going in some time soon.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2015 19:26

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Unormal posted:

Currently I'm just thinking it's an real-time action game with a somewhat more stately, tactical pace that tends to happen along 90 degree gridlines. Not a twitchy bullethell. We'll see how that thinking goes when I've actually got it going in reality.

The "inventory" I'm thinking is more Sproggiwood-like, but with more slots. Basically make the 4 back bumpers (and maybe 2 face buttons?) "use" slots, and have enemies drop equipment you can swap into those slots. So your character becomes an assortment of 4-8 small abilities that you mix and match as you survive through levels.

I would expect some bizarre poo poo beyond this because I got a bizarre bag of bizarre ideas ready to go.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 18:05

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Helical Nightmares posted:

So excited!

Out of curiosity what do you and Hand of Luke think of the Morrowind faction reputation system. Is there a better way to manage faction reputation? Is it difficult easy/difficult to code?

What aspect of Morrowind's system are you referring to? NPC opinions based on your faction alignment? Or the quest-based, mutually exclusive House advancement?

Our original idea of intertwined faction quest lines was similar to Morrowind's House advancement. Some of that system is sticking around, since we're trying to make alignment with the major factions important in the mid/late game. But in the Qud tradition of "here's a giant system to play around with," rather than making the major factions special, they're just pieces of a bigger faction ecosystem that includes apes, hermits, crabs, etc.

The core faction system is already in place and to some degree driving monster behavior -- it's why Argyve murders the zealot if he wanders too close and glowpads murder glowfish (for whatever reason in the past, glowpads got set to hate glowfish). We're just finally taking advantage of it and adding much more granular factions. And on top of that, we're adding a reputation system that controls each faction member's base opinion of you. This'll let us do some cool things immediately, like make the Carapace mutation give you reputation with the tortoise faction, and also lay the groundwork for your interactions with the plot-oriented factions.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 21:28

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

dis astranagant posted:

When did Tam start carrying fullerite?

E: I went into the Rusted Archway and Qud started leaking memory like crazy. 2 GB and counting.

Most of the loot tables have a chance to penetrate to the next table, so it's possible for Tam to carry fullerite. From a quick look at the code, looks like there's about a 0.03% chance. So it's a quite rare world where Tam's caravan dredged up the remains of an experienced adventurer with a fullerite sword.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 22:03

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

dis astranagant posted:

If you have a carbide axe and ~10 AV you can take on Equimaxes 1 or 2 at a time (do this at night to keep the rest of the herd from noticing) for 350 xp a piece.

You horse-slaughtering, night-stalking monster.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 20:35

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

One Badass Elder Irudad.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2015 07:13

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

Angry Diplomat posted:

So, next character is going to be a Proselytizing Esper with Temporal Fugue and Evil Twin.

I kind of want a "Clones of You" faction, but there are problems unifying all clones into a single faction, since Evil Twins need to behave differently than Fugue clones.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2015 04:53

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 02:18

hand of luke: Oct 17, 2005; Mmmhmm, yes. I suppose I will attend your ball. Someone must class up the affair, musn't he?

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Could you just have a "You" faction and an "Evil You" faction?

Yeah, I thought about splitting it into something like "Time clones" and "Alternate dimension clones," but that seemed less cool.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2015 05:24

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