Copper Dreams Update #24 – Alpha Progress Update

Whalenought Studios continues to work on their upcoming cyberpunk RPG Copper Dreams, and the latest Kickstarter update for the game shares a fairly detailed alpha progress report. We get plenty of screenshots and animations, along with a closer look at a number of recently changed and adjusted systems. The update is quite massive, so be sure to check it out, but here’s a quick excerpt:

Greetings everyone! We wanted to do a quick dive into some of the stuff we’ve been putting into alpha builds since we started having folks test them the past few months! Next week we’ll be doing a play-through of a testing arena map to give you a better look at gameplay in action, but figure it could use a primer first.

The remainder of the alpha builds will be these various arena death-match maps to continue testing combat and companions, as well as the remaining milestone features we’ll be hitting this month before the beta!

Since launching the alpha, integrating companion gameplay with the step-by-step turns had begun to be the primary focus, and a lot of these changes will be stemming from that.

Skill UI Change from Feedback

One of the early things some of the alpha players found clunky was the action selection, so that has been streamlined. All actions for an item are now clumped together in the action button area, instead of filtering them through individual skills. These are located in the middle of your action bar, with non-item skills located on the left and some formation stuff on the right.

Skills on the left, when selected, repopulate the middle area with actions for them, so no further in-game world space is taken up.

Friends

Fully controllable companions have been added into the tick-tile system, as most of this update will pertain to. We’ve added their health, medical snapshot, and inventory to to the HUD. We’ve also integrated nested bags, so if characters are hoarding they have a place to put their garbage!

Micro-sized Line of Sight

We’ve integrated the line of sight visual into the micro-tiles, getting a much smoother and easier to understand line-of-sight. This occurs per-character, who additively overlap sight visuals. As before, your characters can still hear NPCs outside the line of sight range (represented by footprints).

We’ve also integrated the Followship™. This design was meant to convey the feeling of safety exploring as a group. Copper Dreams, the actual campaign, is a dungeon crawler where you’ll be creeping around a war-torn city filled with lots of other things that are creeping around trying to kill you. The Line-of-sight visual has always been the backbone of the visual identity in creating that tension. To add to that, characters exploring on their own have a personal sized vision radius. However, when selected together and worming around as a group, the radius is combined and larger, focused on whoever is lead.