Copper Dreams Update #20

The latest Kickstarter update for Whalenought Studios’ cyberpunk RPG Copper Dreams informs us that the game’s alpha will be getting a major update on August 25, 2018, directs us to the new official community page, and gives us a good look at the game’s new vibrant visual style that we had a glimpse of a while back. The update also shares some gameplay insights and tells us a bit about Copper Dreams’ vehicles, AI, cybernetics, and more. An excerpt:

The Palette

With some fancy tech on our side we are able to intuitively make some beautiful moving illustrations. Geometry can now be as dense as to whatever fidelity would be illustrated if it were 2D. This is the perfect palette we were looking for to keep things high resolution and enforcing a consistent fidelity to allow us to get every frame of the game exactly as we want it to look. On a scalability and abstract level it’s intuitive to us, our modern pixel art.

There’s a lot of technical/artistic techniques to make that look, breathe, and animate the way it needs to that we’re still pursuing, but we’re finally locked into a style going into the beta, so we can start showing more off of the later areas of the game now.

More granular gameplay simulation with smaller hex tiles

We’ve taken the hexes we showed before and divided them to get more nuance in orientation and positioning of characters and effects. With our very GURPSy, simulation based rolls and environment interactions we wanted to get a little more out of the per-character sized hex tiles we were using.

Over June, Hannah got our content-dense tile tech working with roughly a ba-gazillion more tiles. More variety of noise and sight ranges, bullet travel lines (and misses), and increased tile-per-tick movement options.

Where before characters moved just a tile a tick and were stalled on that if sneaking, crawling or slowed for various amounts, it can now have a nice variety to move smoothly and intuitively around.

Bullets now stream through the world lass abstractly, and maneuvering with stealth and noise radiuses is less chess-like in scale and more natural of a simulation. It’s worth more than the blip on this post to talk about, but should speak for itself when you’re playing.

The line-of-sight being that small was overkill though, so we instead used more large triangular parts of the hexes to visualize the seen world. We also have settled on making outdoor tiles always visible whether in-sight or not (with a visual indicator showing you they are actually out-of-sight of your character), and interiors having them completely blacked out like usual. Visualizing and hearing NPCs outside a field of view works the same for both, they show up as little footsteps.

Vehicles and Driving

Speaking of more varied movement speeds, manual vehicle travel was sort of a no-brainer to want to fit into Copper Dreams and our medieval games. We can setup larger areas to explore with boats, horses, wagons or hovering motorbikes and piloted walking robots.

System

Overpopulation is a part of the setting of this campaign, and we already have our pedestrian system set up, where NPC denizens make you feel more isolated by being a part of the problem and setting off alarms in certain zones to your presence if there is trouble.

We have a post about how they influence gameplay being prepped so we’ll go into more detail further then.

We have some starting AI setup where they avoid running over other civilians and you unless they are fleeing making civilians get some pep in their step to get moving. If you attack a driving civilian, they’ll kindly give up their vehicle for you. If enemies are after you and you get on a vehicle, they’ll try to commandeer one themselves to give chase.

Character’s can’t both drive and shoot weapons, but if they have sentient cybernetics attached to them (extra arms) or orbiting robots, these can attack as if the character weren’t moving, at the expense of some negative mental stability using them. Common vehicles have 3 hits they can take before exploding, be it from gunfire, other vehicles, or walls, and these hits absorb damage from player. Functionally vehicles are meant to get you from A to B through Calitana streets, add to the atmosphere of state of manufacturing, and continue to provide interesting gameplay options between target locations.

Tiles and Moving

Zipping around is still a matter of X tiles a tick, so driving remains thoroughly grounded in the movement and tile system. You can block entrances the same as with any other character or object, or climb on top of roof tiles.

Unlike other objects, vehicles specifically have a two-way relationship with tiles. While pathfinding they coordinate which tiles they will be on during each tick, but thereafter can be pushed around with physics and gather closest tiles after. We use this system for some other things more subtly for cheaper calculates when checking tiles, but for a movement system this does lead to some interesting options that we can get your feedback on.