Copper Dreams Kickstarter Campaign Launched

Serpent in the Staglands was a very interesting real-time with pause CRPG released with the help of Kickstarter funding. While it didn’t set the charts on fire sales-wise, it did garner Whalenought Studios a small but dedicated cult following, and it’s that very same cult following that helped them raise $13,182 out of a $40,000 funding goal for their new Copper Dreams Kickstarter campaign, which was launched yesterday.

Copper Dream is, in the words of the developer duo, a “party-based, turn-based, pen-and-paper-inspired game” set in a cyberpunk setting with an isometric camera angle. A little bit more from the campaign page itself:

Copper Dreams emphasizes the adventures that happen between quests and narrative events, which can be just as fun, unexpected and dangerous. To enable this, the player will traverse a cyberpunk world while scaling buildings, taking part in turn-based combat between humans, robots and many other types of foes, all while managing their character’s health through a detailed system of physical ailments.

Players have many tools to help them succeed in their missions. The player can engage in espionage gathering, modifying and upgrading weapons and disabling or killing enemies by targeting specific body parts. To do this justice we’ve designed a ruleset from the ground up we call the Burning Candle to work with all these mechanics.

…

Copper Dreams is set on an off-world island colony called Calitana. Owned by the US government, Calitana is one of many interstellar bases, although it is notoriously the least enjoyable to live in.

At the start of our story, the US government has been forcibly sending its citizens to these off-world colonies to free up overcrowding in cities. You play as one of these unlucky draftees, starting your adventure as your pod crashes into the shores of your new home.

Calitana lives up to its reputation, seeing little in supplies or surveillance from the US over the past few decades, giving free rein to the corporations and syndicates that amassed power in the absence of any official rule.

Though you begin your journey as an Agent of Asset Inquiries for one of the bustling corporations in the slums district, your responsibilities, especially your task of gathering intel and spying on your competitors, lead you to discover secrets and mysteries that go beyond corporate warfare.

With a lo-fi graphical presentation, a turn-based combat system that takes action execution time into account, and a PnP-inspired health system that doesn’t use the industry-standard HP, Copper Dreams certainly looks like an ambitious but doable project for the devs.

Rewards range from the usual digital copy of the game, to access to the game’s beta, all the way to a physical collector’s box, which I have to admit is a bit surprising considering how low the funding goal is and how limited the resources of the developers are.

I’m going to conclude by quoting the risks and challenges section of the campaign page:

We like to think we’re decent planners, but development can always throw unexpected hurdles and we’ve worked in ample time in our schedule to account for that. Our previous game, Serpent in the Staglands, released on schedule, give or take a few months, and we’re confident we can keep to a tight schedule again this time around. We’ll be introducing a lot more players and testers early into our development cycle to aid with that.

We strive to keep our backers informed if anything changes and when we finally set a release date, and while we do have a current internal release timeline set, the Kickstarter goals and testing factors might alter that. We’d like to release the maiden voyage of the Burning Candle ruleset in action as bug-free as possible and take our time cleaning it up, so at this time we’re not committing to a release date. After the closed beta we will be able to announce a quarter to release it in.