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Game News Copper Dreams Kickstarter Update #22: Visual and Interface Improvements, Death Events

Infinitron

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Tags: Copper Dreams; Whalenought Studios

It feels like the Copper Dreams alpha has been perpetually a week away for the last six months. According to the new Kickstarter update, Joe and Hannah intended to release it last weekend but were distracted by their work on the beta (which consists of the game's main campaign rather than a limited test scenario). In the meantime, they've continued to refine the visual style and have implemented a host of interface quality-of-life improvements, which you can see in the update's accompanying video:



Joe and Hannah also have some interesting ideas about how to handle player death. They'd like the game to work a bit like a roguelike, with an autosave slot that updates after every non-combat action, so if your party gets wiped you can return to the moment just before the battle started. However, at least in some cases there will also be an option to keep on playing, with your party whisked off to the local clinic by robots, imprisoned by the authorities, or finding themselves in other, more unusual predicaments. I quote:

Play it Out

We wanted to design something around the concept of what we do when players might be incapacitated in a tabletop game and the DM doesn't want to make everyone re-roll. There are some fun narratives that can occur that we wanted to explore as a part of normal gameplay, and thought that was worth experimenting with for the main campaign. As the nature of the previous option, choosing to Play it Out saves immediately after, so when they are available it can be more or less of a gamble given the situation/location.

1. Clinic

Your agent in the alpha and main campaign have wicked good health insurance, thanks to your plum job. Playing it Out in a location that isn't heavily fortified or a dungeon lets your HealthInsurance Body-Bots come find you and fly you off to the nearest clinic location. The randomized city is divided up into blocks, and with a few exceptions every one of those has a clinic, so you'll never be far from where you fell.

At the clinic, a half-day passes (! this important for events), and you can choose to stay longer and heal or get back to it. Clinics are automated and will automatically bill you, or if you fail to have the funds bill your Syndicate which will keep a tab on you and make you pay for lunch.

2. Jail

If you fell due to or near by MFI, the city overlords, you'll be tossed into a procedural jail. Like the clinic, every city block usually has an (otherwise inaccessible) jail attached, and depending on your method of breakout you'll be outputted back into the block you were at. These jail maps are relatively small, isolation cubes for the city riff-raff, but will always have your equipment stored in an office that you'll want to loot before leaving. Maybe you can steal other inmates stuff!

3. Event

These can be a gamble for a session. Events occur when you fall in an atypical location, like surrounded by cyber-mutants, in a Syndicate compound, in a sewer system with monsters, or other unfortunate places. Syndicates will throw you in the sewer drain which will put you in a different location, maybe to get help after, or maybe some other problems. At worst you might come out of these situations with a permanent disfiguration or ailment before a Body-Bot finds you, maybe mutants spread a mutation to you before throwing you out, or maybe you have a limb eaten off before you're found.

On the flip side there are potentially rewards and secrets to be found. Those sewer drains might throw you out into an otherwise inaccessible location where you are healed and able to discover cyber-quests, treasure, or other secrets. Some mutants are friendly and you could be rescued with augmented with beneficial mutations.
Right now the plan is to announce a new release date for the Copper Dreams alpha by the end of the week. The update will apparently be released "shortly thereafter" alongside a new trailer, so I guess it's not far off. Then again, we've heard that before.
 
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It frankly looks hideous.
So far I dislike everything about it: the art style, the models, the UI, the animations, the colors...
EDIT: almost forgot the overabundance of shitty post-processing, too.

I'm sure someone will run to its rescue and scold me because commenting on the aesthetic is "shallow and for dumb graphic whores", but that doesn't change the truth.
Still, wait and see approach to learn if it will have something good under the hood.
 
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Deleted Member 22431

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It frankly looks hideous. So far I dislike everything about it: the art style, the models, the UI, the animations, the colors...
"But muh colours! The game was too bleak. We need to embrace our inner irrationalist artsy". Fucking bullshit.
 
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Infinitron

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I'm sure someone will run to its rescue and scold me because commenting on the aesthetic is "shallow and for dumb graphic whores", but that doesn't change the truth.

Nah it's a legit opinion. I am going to acknowledge your agenda of always being the first to say this about every game, though. :P
 
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I thought the gameplay looked pretty cool. I don't really mind the shift in art-style it just takes a bit of getting used to since this wasn't really what we were sold on in the KS. But w/e.
 

aratuk

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The "play it out" death system sounds like it would make ironman mode a lot more appealing. It could be pretty interesting, in fact, if that were the only option to play the game.

A system that encourages continuity (without necessarily starting over) and disallows save-scumming could be a lot more fun.

(And I still like the new art style.)
 
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It's like superhot, but not an fps

Nah, they are only similar in their presentation, the systems themselves couldn't be more different. Superhot pauses the game every time you stop moving which can be utilized to cut time into little segments that are more easily manageable. It's literally RTwP applied to an FPS.

In Copper Dreams time isn't fluid but abstracted, since it consists of already defined time segments, the "ticks". It's actually much closer to roguelikes than something like superhot.
 

Diggfinger

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Sounds/looks awesome. Need the alpha now to see it in action.

I have the impression the beta and subsequently entire game is scheduled quite soon-ish after alpha release, i.e. final game by end this year/early next year.
We'll see how that pans out.
 
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Zakhad

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It does look pretty ugly in this video

I mean graphics aren't everything, but if I'm gonna stare at something for hours of my life I'd prefer if it's at least moderately appealing.
 

Zer0wing

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This art-style over low poly meshes and darkened lighting used before? It doesn't really look cyberpunk now.:decline:
 

agentorange

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Looks great. Glad they didn't go with the original low poly look because that seems to be the latest indie hipster trash fad. The look they have now is quite distinct. And thank god at least one developer chooses to have a UI that is consistent with the general style of the game, rather than going with that "minimalist" Skyrim UI that every single game seems to now have.
 

Tigranes

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I don't like either their old look or the new one, but I can get with it since the gameplay looks so promising.

It's easy for this kind of style to be really cluttered and tiring to play, but they've clearly put a lot of effort into embedding a ton of useful feedback onto the screen while avoiding that.
 

DeepOcean

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Im really missing some cyberpunk vibes on this, cyberpunk is High tech, low life showing how machines are threatening to destroy the humanity on human. If it wasn't for the lasers, I wouldn't notice they are making a cyberpunk RPG. I know you are supposedly to walk alot on the shit hole parts of the town but they need to make that high tech contrasting with the low life and I see you hobo hiking on ruins and factories, yes those are slightly "futuristic" factories and shit holes but they look boring.

They had the perfect choice of colors on the kickstarter pitch, I don't mind the Playstation 1 graphix but the art design is really disappointing on those last videos. Where are my moody, neon streets and cybered punks roaming the streets? Corporate advertisements contrasting with the dirty streets? This is what like on cyberpunk.

If they plan having you moving through interchangeable slightly futuristic factories,interchangeable slightly futuristic shit holes,interchangeable slightly futuristic concrete ruins, it would be boring without an art style that really makes that cyberpunk impression strike home.

I still hope their best, wanna play a good game but I hope they are aware of the "aesthetics" that can be done even on playstation graphix.

Take Ruiner, make a low poly non-popamole version of that but with the same art style with that oppressive cyberpunk feeling, that is pretty important.
 

agentorange

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"Take Ruiner, make a low poly non-popamole version of that but with the same art style with that oppressive cyberpunk feeling, that is pretty important."

This is what we've gotten this entire past decade. Shallow, uninspired retreads of the same cyberpunk style that was popular in the 80s and 90s. It baffles me that someone would look at the current Copper Dreams style and want them to make it look more like everything else. Let me break out my dictionary of cyberpunk imagery and mandate that every game that falls into the broad cyberpunk category share at least a dozen stylistic similarities. This is why so many games have shitty art direction, because people feel they have to adhere to some kind of default or standard look in order that it be immediately recognizable, like the awesome button equivalent of visuals.
 
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