In an interview, the Freehold Games team shares the story behind their utterly unique fantasy saga Caves of Qud, a project over 15 years in the making. Get insights into the genesis of their roguelike engine, why they moved the game into Unity, and how the creative team approaches imaginative worldbuilding and systems-driven design to power singular storytelling for players.
Brian Bucklew, Cofounder and Technical Lead: For a very long time, more than a decade, I don't think success to us meant anything other than making a game that our one friend enjoyed.
Jason Grinblat, Cofounder and Creative Head: I think we were all the way back in 2007 is really when we started working on the game. We were working on a few projects around that time. So Brian was building this roguelike engine, and we've been working many years on the kind of the technical complexities of a roguelike. And at the same time, we were doing a lot of, we're big tabletop fans. We were doing tabletop gaming, and we were building out our own setting and our own rule set. And at some point, we kind of had the idea to combine these projects and to make this wild science fantasy world we were building to put it into the terms of a systems-driven roguelike, and it kind of just snowballed from there.
Brian: We had no commercial aspirations for the project at all and instead had taken an idea which was mixing up this mesh of influences which we had drawn from [...] Just having anything that was playable was successful.
Jason: We did take a break in the middle, 2012, to make a game called Sproggiwood, which is a much more condensed, little distilled roguelike, and we put that out in 2014.
Brian: Sproggiwood was in fact our first big foray into Unity. It was a testing ground. Caves of Qud at the time was a C# project [...] I decided use Unity to ship Sproggiwood on both PC and mobile, having never shipped a mobile game before. And I found the process really easy. I was able to do it by myself. I was really impressed with Unity's ability to go cross-platform. And that led me to when Sproggiwood shipped to say, well, let me experiment with taking Caves of Qud and putting it inside Unity as a host because then maybe I can gain the ability to go to mobile as easily as I was able to with Sproggiwood.
Brian: Before Caves of Qud, the engine that became Caves of Qud was finalized. I had been attempting to build roguelike engines for many years. I found huge issues with very classic object hierarchy class systems in a game where we wanted very diverse kinds of things. [...] Unity and Caves of Qud allow you to say, well, an object isn't a tree of components, it's a set of properties that are composed together to make it. So I can say... Here's something that defines the liquid volume, and here's something that defines armor. I can make an object that's just a bag of those properties and that's exactly how Unity works. And it ends up being a very powerful tool for building complex games. And so it works very well in Unity, it works well in Caves of Qud.
Jason: Sometimes people look at it and say like, I don't see the story here, or it's just, you're going and exploring this world, but I don't, there's not cohesive narrative. But I think it's a paradigm of narrative game that has existed for a while and that we love where these systems are colliding and the collision and the emergent stuff that happens becomes fodder for this really your personalized narrative that we've sketched out as the authors and designers of the game, but a lot of it is going to be particular to the player.
Brian: That interactive form means involving the player, involving them in the stories that are being generated. Those stories are still authored, right? It is true that they're being produced by systems, but those systems aren't random. They're not. random things that are happening, those are carefully authored systems by our narrative team to produce the kind of stories that the players traverse through.
Jason: Caves of Qud's approach to procedurally generating environments tends to be very, like, multilayered. [...] So our big example is we generate these villages. We want these to feel like lived in villages with history and with dynamic characters in them that have desires. They'll send you off on quests, but also like spaces you could examine and see the paintings and sculptures on. And a lot this is like, we'll take one technique to generate the history. We have like this complex state machine where. We're running through thousands of years of history, and then we're going to use that to inform what the government of the village looks like and what characters might be and what type of buildings might be placed in the village. And then we are going to go like, okay, now we're actually going to generate this map.
Brian: I think the most important thing in Qud is to give people the important bones to hang a interesting story on. And that's true for almost all of our systems, like the AI system, like the narrative system. We aren't painting every pixel, we aren't simulating every thought that the creature has, but they are taking interesting actions, and there's a lot of meaning imbued in those basic mechanical systems, like the weights of the actions that they're gonna take. The designers can control that and that controllability is really important because the stories we're trying to tell aren't stories about random actions.
Jason: What's fun to see is that players get really good at kind of reading the tone of what we're setting up in the game, the types of stories that might exist in this strange science fiction, far future setting, which contains a lot possibilities, but still we have a very strong voice in the games, and so it's kind of like a distinct place. And then players get good at telling their own stories in that voice because they're engaging with these systems and they are, they're learning what is interesting to them and what is interesting to the system and what that overlap is.
Jason: You know, there's so many pressures to make a certain type of game and to think of games as a sort of product.
Brian: I would say if you're interested in making games, the business is so, so hard. The technology is so so hard, everything about it is hard, except the people that are working in games are all the most amazing people because they're all reckoning, mostly successfully, with all of these difficulties. And they're all happy to find somebody that wants to throw themselves into that volcano with them and learn and help each other make it.
Both speakers: One, two, three. Live and drink!
