How to gug without getting gugged

GUG can create a great many unique and interesting abilities. While the core game loop consists mostly of inputting interesting and new words or phrases, and seeing how far you can get, there may come a time when you know exactly what you want. This guide is an attempt to help craft the perfect prompt for this scenario.

Terminology

The shortcut to the Gugging-Guger effect

In order to be on the same page about what we are talking about, let us establish some terminology first. If you are familiar with card games you might recognize some terms.

Prompt

The prompt is the string of characters you put into the window in the amniotic pool. It is the basis for any Gug. Without it we cannot recreate it. For limitations on prompts see restrictions. For verbiage in prompts see keywords. The pulling it together section has tricks to fit more into a prompt, and the aliases section has different ways you can word your prompt.

Generator

The generator is the large language model (often called AI) behind the generation of our Gugs. We feed it with a prompt, and it will try its best to interpret our prompt, look for appropriate API connections within the game, and generate our Gug’s ability.

The generator has access to knowledge about popular culture (try “the legend of zelda” as a prompt), and can also interpret languages other than english (see languages).

Trigger

What makes a Gug’s ability happen. See image below for an example of a Gug’s ability. For more details see the triggers section.

Effect

What a Gug’s ability does. See the keywords section for common verbiage in effects.

Battlefield

The battlefield consists of the two middle rows during an encounter. This is where combat is performed. The battlefield has one side for the player, one side for the enemy, and consists of several lanes. Moving a Gug to, from, or within the battlefield will spend their move for the round, and make them unable to be moved again.

Pool

The pool is the equivalent to a player’s hand in a card game. Gugs in the pool during the end round phase will gain the stats corresponding to the icon directly below them. Gugs can be freely moved within the pool, however Gugs will always move to the leftmost empty spot.

Lane

A lane describes two spots within the battlefield which form a column. Combat is resolved within lanes, with each Gug resolving attack versus health against their opposing Gug in the same lane. Unopposed lanes will cause enemies to hit Mother Morula, or cause your Gugs to generate coins.

Mother Morula

Mother Morula is your player character. She is the big Gug in the bottom left during gameplay, and has her own set of hp. If her hp reaches 0 you will fail the run.

Encounter

An encounter is the entirety of a battle against enemy Gugs. It ends and you can continue onwards if there are no more enemy Gugs left. Your run fails if Mother Morula dies, or you don’t have any remaining Gugs left.

Round

Every encounter consists of a number of rounds, which in turn consist of certain phases. The bottom right has a counter showing the current round number.

Phase

Any round consists of several phases. Starting with the start round phase, which is followed by the player turn where you can position your Gugs, and the enemy turn where enemies move forward. Afterwards starts the combat phase, then the cooldown phase, and finally the end round phase. The round counter in the bottom right also shows the current phase. Additionally, the top left during gameplay has a scroll icon you can click on, which will open up the action history where phases, and actions performed during them, can be looked at.

Coins

Coin (officially called Glug, unofficially called Gug nectar) are generated when one of your Gugs is on the battlefield with no opponent in the same lane. See the image below for the coins you currently possess (left, during gameplay in the top left), and coins generated by attacking an empty lane (right).

Coins can be spent within a shop, which can appear after an encounter.

Max Stats

A potential point of confusion is when “max stats” or something similar is mentioned somewhere. This refers to the baseline stats of a Gug.

In the image above, the left Gug’s stats are both green. That means both stats are above the baseline. The right Gug’s attack is white, meaning it is at the baseline, while the hp is red, so below the baseline. You can see the base stats of a gug when transcending it (the + numbers above attack and health) or you can look at the stats it has in the garden.

Token

A token refers to a (usually summoned and temporary) Gug which is mostly used to block an attack for a round. Tokens can be very useful to buy time for your stronger Gugs, or to simply wear down an enemy by throwing enough tokens at them.

Tokens are usually spawned from left to right, and in the same area (battlefield/pool) as the summoner.

Gugs with a token trait get deleted at the end of an encounter.

Trait

Traits are tags added to a Gug. For more detail see traits.

Basics

To get the bitterness of trial and error out of the way

Now that we know what we are talking about, let’s get a few basics out of the way.

Using the same prompt will always result in the same Gug
Ordering words differently is interpreted as a different prompt
The prompt window supports copying and pasting (ctrl+c and ctrl+v)
The limit on stats and money is at one trillion (1.000.000.000.000). Once that point is reached, the number is replaced by !!! and will not grow further
The game might detect that an effect will break something, and fry a Gug. This doubles the Gug’s stats, but removes the effect
A Gug can have more than one trigger+effect

Following this, we are getting into the meat of things.

Restrictions

It’s the man-tian keeping us down

The only hard restriction we have when writing prompts is a 20 character limit. In theory, given the amount of characters we can use, we will never run out of possible new Gugs to make. However, that does not mean we are unlimited in our triggers and effects.

Another constraint is how understandable (for the generator) your prompt is. Even with just the english alphabet, we are approaching 2*10^28 possible combinations. That is a 2 with 28 zeros after it. But how many of those combinations actually make sense?

If you are aiming to make the Gug of your dreams, it is important to provide the generator with as much information as is possible in the limited space you are given.

Triggers

All of these thoughts runnin' through my head

As mentioned in the terminology section, triggers are what make an ability happen. There may be triggers we have not found yet, and some triggers are equivalent but written differently, but these are what you can expect to encounter.

Enter Battlefield

This is the most common trigger. The effect will happen once the Gug moves to the battlefield. Note that this means moving from the pool to the battlefield, not moving within the battlefield. To trigger this effect a second time, the Gug will have to move back to the pool first.

Leave Battlefield

A rare trigger, which is the opposite of the Enter Battlefield trigger.

Start Round Phase

The start phase happens at the beginning of every round. If you want an effect to go off first, this would be a good place to do it.

Combat Phase

This is the phase during which attacks are resolved. Effects which modify damage temporarily are most useful here.

Cooldown Phase

This phase happens immediately after the combat phase. Has the advantage that “cd” is a very short acronym for it.

End Round Phase

Last phase of a round. This is when the buffs in the pool happen.

Attack

Triggers when the Gug attacks. May have a modifier so it triggers when enemies or allies attack.

Receive Damage

Triggers when the Gug recieves damage.

Move

Triggers when the Gug moves. This may even trigger when moving the Gug within the pool, giving the possibility of triggering the effect however many times one wishes.

Heal

Triggers when the Gug recieves healing.

Start Encounter

Triggers once, at the very start of an encounter, before even start round phase triggers.

Phase Change

Triggers on End Round Phase.

Phase Event

Triggers on phase updates. Very powerful if it has the “any” modifier.

Destroy

Triggers when something is destroyed. Usually appears together with a trigger modifier.

Click

A rare trigger which happens when you click on something, usually the Gug bearing the trigger.

Other triggers

Very rarely you can encounter some other triggers. I have seen “Gameplay” or “At Night” for example. However, I have not seen them do anything yet.

Trigger modifiers

Triggers which are not phases may also have a modifier, which makes the effect happen when something happens to gugs other than the gug bearing the effect. Examples are Ally Enter Battlefield, or Enemy Receive Damage. Currently known modifiers are:

Any
Ally
Enemy
Player
This
Other

Keywords

shibboleet

Now let us look at what keywords we can use or can have show up in our effects, and how they will affect the battle.

All

This might be obvious, but it still bears repeating. If an effect says it affects all Gugs, then this includes your own. Something that heals all Gugs will heal the enemy, and something that destroys all Gugs will make you lose.

You will want something along the lines of “all enemies” or “all allies” to control which side you want affected.

Ally/Enemy

Another obvious one. Ally means your own Gugs, enemy means the opposing Gugs. Forcing effects will quite often include either of these keywords.

Player

Together with the keyword hp, you can affect Mother Morula’s hp. When used with the keyword “ally” this will mean your own Gugs.

Battlefield

The two rows in the middle, where combat is executed. A majority of effects only affect this region. See terminology.

Pool

Your hand in card game terms. Gugs in the bottommost row (uppermost for enemies) will be affected. See terminology.

Target

You will be prompted to choose a Gug to perform an action on. If the effect is limited to enemies/allies then only those will be selectable. Selectable Gugs will have a faint glow around them.

As a warning: There is no way to stop this effect other than to make a selection. If the effect is to destroy the target, but no enemies are on the field, then you will have to destroy one of your own Gugs. If it requires 3 targets to be selected, but there are only 2 possible choices, you might get softlocked (sometimes you are able to select the same target multiple times).

Prompt/ask/input/choose

When this effect is triggered it will make a window pop up. This can be a new input window where you can insert text,

or it could give you multiple choices to choose from.

Opposing

Opposing usually means an enemy on the battlefield in the same lane.

Adjacent/Nearby

Adjacent usually means spots to the left and right of the triggering gug. This effect seems to be able to wrap around as well, meaning if the gug with the effect is on the very left spot, the very right spot will be affected as well, and vice versa.

Attack/Health/Stats

The effect will influence the statline of a Gug.

Coins

Effects with this keyword will generate Glug for you.

Revive

Can bring back dead gugs. If not otherwise specified these will be at max health and still be permanent. Usually does not work on This Destroy triggers.

Traits

Wimp, Ugly, Body Purist, Slothful, Depressive

When playing Gug, you will eventually run into a Gug which will give traits. These will be symbolized by small circles with numbers around your Gug, and a more descriptive sign when mousing over the Gug.

Traits by themselves mostly do not do anything. However, they can be used by effects. In the above example, we could use a Gug which heals all birds to heal the Gug.

Pulling it together

Being reminded of SMSing in the worst ways

As we know, prompts for transcension can only be 20 symbols long. The more specific we are with what we want, the more likely it is that the generator will give it to us. So, in order to fit more description into the prompt, we turn to small tricks to shorten our input.

Symbols

A quick and easy way is to get rid of certain words and replace them with symbols.

+ and & are obvious candidates to replace “and”.
Numbers spelled out can be replaced by their numerals.
$ instead of coins.
“Not” can be replaced by a minus (or an exclamation mark, for the more programming inclined).

If you think a word can be replaced by a symbol - try it! Certain symbols may not show up properly in the prompt window (see below), but they CAN be interpreted by the generator.

Abbreviations & Disemvoweling

Abbreviations are shortened versions of a word or phrase. Ubiquitous in gaming are the abbreviations “hp” for “health points”, “atk” for “attack”, or “dmg” for ”damage”. Another facet of abbreviations are simply omitting the latter parts of a word. For instance, I have used both “cool” in place of “cooldown”, and “phas” instead of “phase” in Gug prompts, with the generator still giving me exactly what I wanted. In GUG we can use abbreviations wherever possible to save on letters in our prompt.

In a similar vein, we can remove vowels (sometimes consonants as well) from words, and still make the generator understand what we want. For example we can write “nmy” instead of “enemy”, “strt” instead of “start”, or “cmbt” instead of “combat”.

Words with double consonants, like “trigger”, are also good candidates for shortening by removing one of the duplicate letters.

The death of space

Another trick is to remove spaces. The prompt “heal when ally attacks” is 22 symbols, so too long, but the generator is able to distinguish between the words in “healwhenallyattacks”.

With all these tricks, just be sure to read your new prompt back to yourself. If you have a lot of Gugs with a summon trait and want them all to attack, then a prompt like “summons hit” might make sense. But if you remove the space, then it could be interpreted quite differently…

Languages

The true purpose of those AI translators is to feed the Gug machine

The language model behind generating Gugs CAN work with different languages, and even with different alphabets or emojis.

On the left we see the Gug generated with the prompt “kuchen” (german for cake), on the right the Gug generated by 蛋糕 (chinese for cake). As we can see, the prompt has been correctly understood. Note that, like discussed in the section about symbols, certain languages’ writing systems may not show up properly in the input window, but they can be interpreted.

Corresponding to the previous section, these tricks may not work as intended as well. “Gift” means poison in german, but even with other german words in the prompt, the model seems to prefer the english meaning.

Testing

Push it live. It’s a Friday evening. What could go wrong?

Just because the effect on a Gug says something does not mean the effect will actually work as you think it does. As an example, what do you think the following Gug will do:

If you said ‘Traps all enemy Gugs in their pool, makes them farm coins, and at the end of the encounter makes them join my team’, then I am very impressed.

If you are planning a run with specific Gugs you created in the amniotic pool, it is always useful to do a quick test for each with a new run. Just to make sure they don’t blow up your own team. Some things to look out for when judging what an effect actually does:

Some effects may only apply to gugs in the same field (battlefield/pool) the triggering gug is in, some may only apply to one field. Some apply to all gugs currently in the encounter, some may apply only to specific lanes.
Sometimes the trigger is not correct. If the effect says something happens during a specific phase, but the phase in the trigger is different, it may work during the phase mentioned in the effect instead (or in addition)
Some effects do not naturally happen during the specified trigger. For example, if an effect checks for an attack, but the trigger is start round phase, then there is a good chance the effect will not work, since no attacks are happening at the start of the round.

On the other hand, GUG is made with chaos in mind. Do what you enjoy.

Aliases

ll = ls -alF

A non-exhaustive list of desired effects, and possible alternative words to get that effect. If one prompt didn’t work, just try another one.

Dealing Damage

Dmg

Hit

Damage

Affecting Allies

Own

Ally

Friend

Friendly

Affecting Enemies

Foe

Enemy

Getting Tokens

Copy

Clone

Create

Summon

Getting Coins

Coin

Money

Converting Enemies

Turn

Steal

Charm

Convert

Make ally

Directly Destroying Enemies

Kill

Destroy

Set hp 0

Asking for Player Input

Ask

Input

Choose

Working with the Pool

Pool

Hand

Bench