Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What operating systems are you targeting?
A: Windows.

Q: What languages will this support?
A: English. I may eventually add support for other Latin alphabet languages, but it's not within scope currently.

Q: Any release date in mind?
A: No. I'll be releasing development updates for folks to poke at if they have the desire to do so, but I work two jobs and I can't really give a hard and set date for when everything's going to be done. I'm hoping updates will be coming out regularly, though!

Q: So what kind of game is this going to be?
A: A party-based dungeon crawler with turn-based combat and grid movement. Big inspirations for this are Might & Magic III - V, Wizardry VI/VII, and some more obscure crawlers like Avatar and Oubliette. The game will primarily revolve around exploring a large dungeon complex and trying to get to the bottom. I don't expect there to be a crazy cinematic overarching story beyond "hey, here's a reason to go deeper and kill some stuff." I do intend to eventually have 'quests' available that will tell smaller, more interesting stories, which will take place in their own smaller locales and can be repeated if desired.

Q: Turn-based combat... so it's going to be slow, then?
A: Nah. I want the game to move as quickly as the player wants to play it. I intend to allow basic automation (attack, defend, cast a spell) in combat so, if you want, you can automate combat against most enemies. It is very important to me that combat feels very snappy, so having slow ponderous turn-based combat is starkly against how I want this game to play.

Q: What's the party size going to be?
A: Up to six characters, though the player can run with fewer if desired. I look forward to seeing folks trying to solo the game.

Q: What kind of character progression will we have?
A: The game will have multiple races and classes (called guilds here) to build characters from. Every character will be able to be members of multiple guilds to take advantage of their abilities, though XP penalties will arise from that. Gearing will be roughly equivalent to something like Might & Magic III - V or Wizardry VI/VII. Lots of choices to be made, though they'll be introduced gradually so that the player isn't overwhelmed.

Q: Will it have randomly generated loot?
A: No. All items will be handmade. There will be a lot of loot to find, some which will be very rare. Item drops themselves will be randomly dropped by slain creatures, found randomly in the dungeon, and so on. There will be an item property system in place, but that will solely be there to make building new items easier and will also function as a convenient way to pass information to the player about what a given piece of equipment does.

Q: Will there be procedurally generated content of any sort?
A: No. There may eventually be small dungeons built of stitched together handmade 'chunks,' but those are far, far, far away. They're not something I intend to consider until after 1.0, and even then I don't know if they'll be necessary.

Q: You mentioned Avatar and Oubliette, what inspiration are you taking from them?
A: The idea of a huge and dangerous dungeon, extensive multiclassing between guilds, substantial level caps (999 in each guild, though it'd mostly just be to brag about having high levels), and lots of unique items to discover. Just to name a few.

Q: Will this be multiplayer?
A: No. CUDCrawler is designed from the ground up as a single-player game.

Q: How difficult is the game going to be?
A: By default, fairly difficult. I expect, if playing with default difficulty settings, that players will be encouraged to take things slowly and to pace themselves when exploring the dungeon. That said, once some levels have been attained, I also expect players to be mowing through hordes of enemies that they know really aren't a threat. It'll be a fun balancing act, I think!

Q: Difficulty settings, you say?
A: Oh yes. I intend to support a large range of options to let the player tweak the game's difficulty to their tastes. Things like modifying enemy stats, increasing or reducing rewards, and so on. There will eventually be enemies that permanently drain stats, steal gold, steal items, destroy items, and other nasty business. You'll be able to disable all of that if you want, or in some cases make it less nasty but still present. I want this game to be something everyone can sit down and enjoy if dungeon crawling is their cup of tea.

Q: Will you have modding support?
A: Internal dev tools will likely remain just that. *That said*, maps, enemy stats, gear, player character stats, and so on, will be stored in (very, very, veeeeeeeery ugly) plain-text files, so theoretically you could make mods based on that. I'm trying to, ideally, minimize what's hardcoded in the game. Currently it'll just be spells that are hardcoded, though that may change down the line.

Q: Why don't you plan on releasing dev tools?
A: They require too much support. I'd have to write documentation, do a bunch of stuff to keep users from breaking things, entertain feature requests, and so on. Right now, and going forward, the dev tools are made to do what I need them to do, nothing more, nothing less. Never say never, but releasing them is highly unlikely and I have no plans to do so.