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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #29) $

« on: March 02, 2016, 03:40:23 AM »

You can buy it from Humble DRM Free, no need to contribute to Gaben`s pile of golden Cadillacs. Mind you, they still have to update the version there (must crank up my pestering campaign up to 11)

I totally updated it

(but you can't actually buy it on Humble at the moment, we have to get the full store site setup and we pulled the widget almost immediately after launch when we realized how much of a pain it was to update. Since they made it easier to update now, I'll probably put the widget back up.)

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #28) $

« on: February 20, 2016, 03:35:42 AM »

I'll update humble with this build if it's stable over the weekend.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #24) $

« on: January 29, 2016, 03:53:10 PM »

Hah, yeah sorry about that, I was just having a dorky day that day and so ended up responding like a dumbass. All the devs that use gog say good things about it, might pick that over Humble if I were to do it again. Like I said, it looks like Humble actually recently (in the last few months, at least) added the self service-build stuff so my main complaint with them is actually gone. Still more of a pain to update than some others, but no longer an error prone nightmare.

The main problem with it before was not actually the individual build updates, but that if you happened to get a build up with critical issues, you really had no recourse other than have it sit out there for days/weeks/etc until they decided to update it with your fix. Usually it was pretty fast, but an update always risked leaving a broken build out there for an unknown amount of time. That typically meant I was holding off until I felt like I had a "solid build", which is basically never; which helped contribute to being lazy about the lateness. Now that I can fix critical issues essentially instantly for certain, it's a lot easier to make the call to post updates to the builds. There's really no excuse not to just update them continually.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #24) $

« on: January 29, 2016, 12:47:28 AM »

Oh, hey, they updated my account to self service builds. All my whining was for nothing.

e: Humble builds now updated to the latest. Since I can now self-service, I'll update them at least once a month.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #24) $

« on: January 28, 2016, 11:45:28 PM »

I suppose I'll just have to write an automated packager and e-mailer for Humble updates; that way it happens without all the additional friction, at whatever rate they can handle.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #24) $

« on: January 28, 2016, 11:32:01 PM »

On a different subject.

Thanks for the talk you did on component systems.
Years ago I had read the Dungeon Siege thing but didnt really "get it".
Getting to see even those few code snippets you had really helped.

Thanks!

Thanks. Assuming I get to go back to IRDC, I was thinking of making it a "making Roguelikes 101" series where I just talk about how I did stuff in Sproggiwood and Caves of Qud (for better or worse); I was thinking of doing AI this year. Are there any topics you'd be more interested in?

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #24) $

« on: January 28, 2016, 11:10:24 PM »

Sorry I didn't update the DRM free build, I'm updating it right now! Hope I don't break anything. 

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #24) $

« on: January 28, 2016, 10:54:36 PM »

e: N/M I'm an idiot and practically I should just shut up and update the humble builds irrespective of any of that and you're totally right that I'm in the wrong for not updating the Humble builds more often. Sorry for snippy responses, I shouldn't have responded like that. Let me try again.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #24) $

« on: January 28, 2016, 10:06:27 PM »

From other developers, I've heard increasingly good things about GOG compared to Humble these days.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #24) $

« on: January 28, 2016, 09:16:13 PM »

(That said I'll try to get an updated build of Sproggiwood and Caves of Qud up on humble. )

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #24) $

« on: January 28, 2016, 09:08:35 PM »

I think it's clear we'll never come close to recouping development costs on Caves of Qud, but that's not the point of making a commercial release of it. The income lets us at least partially defray the personal costs and invest in making even more game (Qud and otherwise) for people to enjoy. The only reason to be in games, particularly Roguelikes, is the love of the thing; the financial side of it is laughable from any kind of legitimate business profitability standpoint. I know I'm not here because I'm trying to make the most money with my hours, but any money we can make with Caves of Qud gives me more fuel to improve on Caves of Qud and/or work on more projects to entertain people (commercial and otherwise). That seems like only a good thing to me.

...by the same margin though, it means that the attitude wherein I'm so privileged to have every single customer that I should snap to whenever any one of them has a disagreement about something is also a little askew (in the specific context of Caves of Qud, at least).

I'm working to make something that's not a commodity, that isn't just a replaceable commercial unit, at the cost of things like 'making a living off your work', and I feel like we really share a passion with our fans for our particular style of game. We work hard to make something that doesn't exist elsewhere, and if you're going to write a nasty diatribe, I'll truly be happy to give you your money back so you can find another game to patronize. I'm not salty about it, I'm just not here to take the maximum number of people's money, I'm here to share a collective passion and do what I can to make awesome stuff. I can do that better with some money, and if you want to help out with some of your money, that's fucking awesome and I love you for it. If you're not happy with what you get for your money, I'm earnestly sorry that's true, I'm doing the absolute best that I can and I'm happy to give it back so you can spend it on something else you can be passionate about.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #24) $

« on: January 28, 2016, 05:06:42 PM »

I just think it's pretty audacious to see insanely hard working indie devs, many of whom (including us) who update weekly on steam, for trivial financial rewards even on Steam, realize that a ton of them are behind on Humble and from that draw the conclusion that the devs are lazy, and not that there's a real problem with Humble's update workflow. Then cap it all off with a direct threat to pirate the game. I'm a congenial chap, but c'mon. 

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #24) $

« on: January 27, 2016, 11:43:52 PM »

Feel free to send me your paypal information, or physical mailing address, and I will be extremely happy to send you a refund.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #24) $

« on: January 26, 2016, 11:52:25 PM »

The Steam executable is drm free, just launch it directly and it won't try to launch Steam. So you can just copy/paste the stuff you get off of steam wherever you need. I have to like manually e-mail people at humble and get them a dropbox link and they have to maybe update their thingamabober, and it's a huge PITA compared to Steam, so it's always way behind.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: Caves of Qud

« on: June 29, 2011, 04:31:10 AM »

Welcome to the temple, unormal!

A while back I finished what exists of the main quest.  Is the part where you burn the plants supposed to be that tedious?  Is there some specific way to do that efficiently?

Thanks!

That quest is just tedious, and a sketch of what will be there in the future. One note is that normal plants count for the quest, you don't have to kill many of the hostile ones.

We've recently completed a total Golgotha redesign, and a bunch of other stuff, like global builders for the canyons (so they flow from zone to zone), and a fully designed 'tonic' system replacing the old, bad, stand-in autoinjectors. If you haven't played for awhile, there's quite a bit more stuff. You're always welcome back, love any feedback we can get.

 The main quest is only really 'done' in terms of having fully designed content through Golgotha, so anything after that consider a stand-in for designed content. We're working on a Bethesda design next.