Copper Dreams Update #19 – Tile Effects

The previous update for Whalenought Studios’ upcoming cyberpunk RPG Copper Dreams brought news of the game’s transition from square to hexagonal tiles. The current one follows up on that and describes the robust tile effects that will be occupying those hexagons. Vision-obscuring smoke, trail-leaving blood and water, stunning electricity, and burning flames are all present and accounted for, and you can read all about them in the update. A few snippets:

Tiles in Copper Dreams are part of the active simulation in and out of combat, and one of the last big systems we needed for the alpha to add to the sandbox of rules and systems for the player to abuse.

All the tiles on a map can have quite a few variables that change during gameplay:

• Occupied/Unoccupied
• Lit / unlit / shadow
• Sound emission
• Light color
• Line-of-sight hidden or visible
• Projectile or Damage range traveling through

And now featuring state effects like:

• fire
• blood
• water
• smoke
• electricity

There was a lot of reactive parts to these effects to work into the wide variety of other sensory systems, not just medical ailments but sound emission and enemy AI paths so they can track effects like dripping water or unusual noises.

[…]

Causality

Tile effects are automatically caused by some weapons. Like displayed in the previous update, shooting a gun causes tiles around you to light up for a light mod, as well as cause the sound of the gun, and lastly firing some bullet. Adding to those systems, weapons like flamethrowers can pour fire down hallways and leave fire tiles on the ground, and smoke grenades fill a room with smoke tiles.

Since the Burning Candle ruleset leans simulationist, there’s no balance needed for things like this, but there are some odd ways we can allow to deter it. For the alpha we’ll have fire extinguishers for clearing fire tiles or dousing yourself. For tactical drying action, keep a one-time-use hanky or towel on hand to pat your butt dry.

If you’ve caught on fire, you can use your roll action (if you have the Grace for it) or our very own implementation of stop-drop-and-roll to extinguish flames by crawling/crouch and standing in sequence. Each of those stance changes take a tick, and burning damage procs frequently, so you’ll want to exclusively and quickly do a dance like that or extinguish yourself other ways if you want to keep yourself from getting too well-done.

Stacking Tile Effects

At the moment tiles are tiered to only have one per tile, like you can’t have fire tiles on water. After the alpha is released we’ll work on the final step for them which is just augmenting them together — fire on water tiles converts the two to vapor (which will just dissipate), an electrical attack on a water tile can travel to all other touching water tiles, and so on. It isn’t a design focus nor are we trying to make this into chemistry class, but there is room for some puzzles and fun gameplay for that, so we’ll be getting to it later.

BACKPACK

We also added the backpack into the main HUD on the right side. This allows the player to instantly swap active items without needing to go into the backpack first and equip them into quickslots. You’ve also got all the tools your character does at your disposal up front and center now in a full, glorious frame.