Copper Dreams Updates #3-4, $27,387 and Counting

The last two updates for the Copper Dreams Kickstarter campaign delve into the grimy cyberpunk setting for the game, the first by offering us a glimpse into the syndicates that rule its streets and the second by explaining the dialogue and quest systems through which we’ll interact with it. An excerpt on the keyword-based dialogue:

Dialogue

From a role playing perspective, keywords give you the freedom to choose dialogue choices without an authored tone of the conversation guiding you. From a mechanics perspective, keywords turn dialogue into a puzzle. While sometimes your conversations are trivial, asking directions or reporting results of a mission, at other times you’ll be trying to gather much needed information and can use items or saved keywords to open up new conversations paths.

If there is a rogue agent that needs intel and you would like to help him, dragging confidential data diskettes into the dialogue screen (literally handing them over) will turn the flow of your current conversation. NPCs retain their personality and character to drive the conversation.

In a nutshell, a keyword-based dialogue system will involve conducting conversation through keyword prompts while the person you are talking to is discussing in detail their responses or questions. There are mid-conversation keywords that adapt to the conversation at hand, and also global keywords that are stored which you can ask different people about (more on that below). If you’re having a conversation about Agro-Fax with another agent and he says something along the lines of (Agro-Fax supply routes are something we’re gunning after,” (supply routes) would be a keyword that would appear to continue the conversation in that direction.

This system works by always making the keywords generated in tangible ways, not just being somewhere or watching something happen. Instead you need physical evidence or spoken evidence to generate those keywords to be used.