Copper Dreams Update #12: Mechanics and Art Style Iteration

A new post-funding Kickstarter update for Copper Dreams, Whalenought Studios’ upcoming project, covers some of the iterative work the developers have been going through since the funding of the campaign. Mechanics, controls and the art style received some significant changes, with the art style especially partly eschewing its lo-fi aesthetic to avoid some visual problems:

While the art is still in alpha, we’ve been adjusting it to look better from our higher-up perspective. We didn’t have a style in mind for Copper Dreams when we started with it, the ruleset began everything, but we knew we needed it to be 3d early on due to how combat functioned within the environment and how we wanted exploration to work.

We originally had 2d models on the 3d background which was neat but caused a visual ordering nightmare and looked out of place as we added more tangible lighting. We opted for what we knew and had a low texture pixel art style for the models. This is what we had shown during the Kickstarter campaign.

As we put more levels together we were finding the distance of the camera and the low-texture sizes wasn’t working well together. Due to the nature of the unfiltered textures, the distance caused jittery effects as the camera moved, which was disorienting and obnoxious. As a result we moved toward a slightly more smoothed out style that wouldn’t be a distraction on gameplay. The pixel art style was also hampering design decisions like how intricate models could be or how effects should look with it — it was essentially creating problems with where we were trying to take the art.

The new style allows us to have the sharp angular design of a more small-scale pixel art style, but soft enough to be easier on the eyes from the distance the game is at, allowing us to zoom and not have the associated graphical flaws. We actually still make all these textures in pixel art before a scaling process to make them look as they are now, which also means we didn’t lose any work that we had already completed. As before, this art style is quick for us to make, and also doesn’t utilize any intensive graphics to display it.

I recommend going at the link to check the screenshots and videos made available by the devs.