KickStarter Mechajammer (formerly Copper Dreams) - cyberpunk RPG from Whalenought Studios

[cyborgboy95]

 

[grimace]

mechajammer update log 7.21 notes

• September 13, 2021 at 2:23 am
  Hannah
  
  
  Gameplay
  Added: when someone wants to talk to you, pause game and have them walk forward
  Fixed: enemies don’t overshoot position when moving to melee attack
  Fixed: Improved shadow consistancy to world visual
  Fixed: Fixed bug with companions not dying
  Fixed: NPC AI friendly fire
  Start demo with a conversation with you and pelican with more details
  Fixed: MFI policemen have less ammo, will use combat melee and range attacks
  Fixed: doors disappearing
  Fixed: hovering over doors
  Fixed: sometimes people in shadow disappear
  Street police scanners shoot down lines to see radius
  Fixed: scanner tendrils stay in place
  Fixed: don’t start scanners when you hit breakables in car
  Fixed: main menu music and arbitration music
  
  UX Updates
  Pathfinding as movement method
  Stop pathfinding with right click
  Removed auto jump, added jump with parabola visual
  Implemented path to target visual
  Character Creation has help instructions
  Merchant and hacking screen prompt
  Jump uses space bar, skip has button
  
  UI
  Fixed: Rations and healing kits not working
  Fixed: dialogue words no longer overlapping
  Added: shadow hover state
  Added: move to breakables on right click
  Fixed: removed C to crouch and streamlined sneak controls with Shift key
  Added: sheen on interactive objects
  Added: NPCs in cover have striped cutout effect to indicate cover status on hover
  Added: combat portraits
  Fixed: Merchant convo allows player to say “bye” instead of “ok”
  Added: selection circles have wall stencil effect
  Added: Button to open companion menu
  Added: hotkey list on options menu
  Fixed: Broken hovers on character sheet
  Fixed: selection circles cut off

https://whalenoughtstudios.com/community/forums/topic/mechajammer-update-log-7-21-notes/

Spoiler

Testing at 720P resolution on a low spec laptop.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/485400/view/5322681655654171530

Gangs of Calitana - Quinton Industries​

Join us for a regular installment where we check out different factions in the game

Calitana is technically a free market, and in theory, any enterprising gang can become a major player in the economy of the city, but Quinton Industries has a large force of well-armed thugs that are very persuasive.

Quinton, the most profitable syndicate on the colony city of Calitana, runs the western half of the main city grid and is the number one exporter of technological goods, wetware, vehicles and computational drives within the city. They’re number one not because they’re the best, in fact, their goods are often referred to as “single-use” due to their shoddy quality, but because they have completely destroyed any whiff of competition.

In the Ci-War, a war between Earth and its colony planets that's been running so long no one accurately remembers when it began, Quinton Industries plays an essential role in equipping armies and rakes in an oversize profit from the continuous fighting.

Quinton was one of the original founding syndicates of the city of Calitana. The petty thieves of the city insist that in the early days of the colony, the syndicate sought and collected numerous alien artifacts of staggering value, but the origin of these rumors are unknown, and if one of these artifacts has found its way to the dubious dealings of the black market, it has gone unremarked.

Follow us here for upcoming dives into the lore of Mechajammer.

Wishlist today!

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1649838104/copper-dreams/posts/3283301

Interview and Updates!

Hello!

Hope you are all well. Just wanted to share some recent updates:

We had a lovely interview on TheGamer where we gabbed about cyberpunk and other goofy stuff. Link: https://www.thegamer.com/mechajammer-interview-cyberpunk-pc/

Faction Overviews

We'll be featuring some concept art and setting tidbits on Steam detailing the syndicates and gangs you can push around.




First off is techno nerds at Quinton, a syndicate that is not friendly.

*
And just for you, a snippet from their music track, which blesses your ears if you enter their compound
*


More here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/485400/view/5322681655654171530

Kevin's soundtrack hit the 2 hour mark and is glorious. Thrilled to be making the vehicle for it.

Testing Demo update
New demo available tomorrow — featuring some quality of life improvements from some feedback we've gotten and a separate tutorial mode, a la deus ex or something, so you can hit the ground running in the normal game.

October is about to get a whole lot of the whole game map for testing, so if you're averse to spoiling the experience, note that, but we will be hunting some of you down to request your expertise. We have your addresses, so be ready.

Swag

Have our last miniature test heading our way, and then we'll be ready to ship out. We have some various styles, the leading contender is the figurines focused + base, with highlighted spray primer. We also have a printed color test of those. Alternatively we have a couple tests with mini-vignettes around the base and smaller figurines within. These are going to be with colored plastic. We'll snap some pics and have you lot decide what you like best.

Other printed materials coming next month as well.

UX: aim for the face, easier!

The wounding shot menu was sort of clunky to get to and we'd like to fix that, as popping legs or heads is pretty handy for slowing down combatants physically and mentally.

We'll be utilizing the benefit of easy to select characters on the screen and just add some nuance to clicking on them, instead of going into a menu in some way every time, this will hopefully encourage more strategy during swarmed attacks as to where to try to execute stopping power vs slowing down.

We did this before in a previous iteration, but the wire-y 3d models made it challenging to get the right body part, so you'd rotate the camera and it was a whole thing. Yuck. Now they are super easy to at-a-glance, the size and shape are more static, and the camera is fixed. You can click on the type of body part you'd like to attack — head, torso, legs, or their weapon, and each will get highlights on hover, with the same varying difficulties added for each one as they have now. Our initial tests were easy and fun, so we think it should be a hit. There's pun in there for chance to hit or something, please fill that in your head.

As always, hope you're all safe and well

j&h

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.thegamer.com/mechajammer-interview-cyberpunk-pc/

Mechajammer Interview: Cyberpunk Is Dirtier Than Neon

Mechajammer is an upcoming cyberpunk game where cyberpunk is more of a warning than a shiny aesthetic.

“We tried to think of a beginning as a DM, saying: you're escaping this war you were drafted into and you were brainwashed the whole time - who did you want to be back on Earth?”

Developed by indie duo Joseph and Hannah Williams at Whalenought Studios, Mechajammer is a tactical cyberpunk RPG set in an offworld jungle colony. As Joseph explains above - I’m referring to them by their first names on account of the couple sharing a surname and job title as joint-lead designers - this setting is as opportunistic as it is detrimental. While gluttonous billionaires pillage the galaxy and dilate the class divide at the heart of societal injustice, you and those courageous enough to rebel can find freedom in isolation from the corporate ideological corruption left to fester on Earth.

This dynamic is essential to Mechajammer from the second you decide to boot it up. The game intentionally eschews a rigid narrative for a more creative approach to storytelling. Your main objective is to simply survive in this hostile and oppressive world, which means a lot of its best stories are the ones you write yourself - the fact the game is heavily inspired by tabletop should come as a surprise to no one.

The plight for survival begins as soon as you create your character. For example, for every five years of your previous life, you choose a background job. While these choices flesh out your personality and identity, each job also comes with its own unique penalties that serve as negative modifiers to specific stats. By building your character up, you also actively knock them down, which indirectly accentuates how real and palpable they feel as your avatar in this hi-tech, low-brow universe.

Mechajammer is unique beyond this, though. As opposed to the typical sci-fi sheen we see in a lot of contemporary video games, it is sweaty, gritty, and extremely dirty. Whalenought specifically decided to juxtapose cyberpunk-esque digital cybernetics with more of a low-life, analogue world. Instead of science fiction spectacle like Mass Effect and similar games, with hover cars and skyscrapers and intergalactic councils, the events of Mechajammer transpire across slums, swamps, and jungles in a war-ravaged ex-mining colony. It’s this very distance that makes it so resonant.

“We don't really nail down a time period for when this takes place in the future, we keep that vague,” Joseph says. “But the whole idea is there's a collective government on Earth, and off in the colonies we've established all over the galaxy, there was a rebellion. People that now are the capitalists going into space obviously detach themselves from Earth, [and] that causes a big strike. It's a fascinating concept we're already beginning to [see] in 2021.”

“The seeds are being planted,” Hannah adds. “Our billionaires going into space could so easily be these syndicates we've set in these colonies in the future.” At its heart, Mechajammer is a thoughtful but damning vision of how poorly this future might turn out to be if we continue the way we’re going in the real world right now.

According to the devs at Whalenought, it’s difficult to make this kind of game without seeing how it relates to the world it was created in. In general, science fiction and fantasy have always been two of the most powerful allegories for paradoxically critiquing power structures in reality, although here, up in space colonies light years away from Earth-residing billionaire demagogues, said allegories are anything but subtle.

“The syndicates have a lot of workers, and the people on the street are ex-syndicate workers,” Hannah says. “They've been pulled up with cybernetics that are not functioning and their syndicates have abandoned them, so it's this culture of the rich versus the poor and how those two interact.”

“It's like the Amazon workers on the West Coast or in the warehouses today, where they're monitored,” Joseph adds. “The next step is you have to have certain bionics to be able to work effectively, and what happens when that goes wrong? [We were] taking that up to 11 and figuring out what happens to all these people when they're not employed on work colonies.”

Joseph and Hannah are both careful to state that Mechajammer is inherently fictional, and that even though there are parallels with modern society - which they address - they’re not necessarily trying to make largesse statements as much as they are providing you with a world you can write your own stories in and draw your own conclusions from. You’re mostly seeing the day-to-day failures of keeping up with the populace, and how these failures influence those who have been emphatically failed.

“You're stuck on this colony, you're these misfits in society, and you're trying to get out,” Joseph says. “It's a pretty simple concept, but you're surrounded by other people that are also stuck. It's a fun backdrop being in that shadow of the high, glossy syndicates that you're always surrounded by. It's like Jeff Bezos creating his giant jungle domes in downtown Seattle. We lived there when he built that. There'd be people in tents outside of it. It's just like, ‘Oh, no, what’s happening? I feel like I'm watching RoboCop from my window.’”

Speaking of RoboCop, Mechajammer takes massive inspiration from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 classic. However, it is also extremely interested in games, particularly older ones like Deus Ex and the early Elder Scrolls titles, hearkening back to Joseph and Hannah’s shared love for tabletop-inspired experiences like Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate.

“Not holding the player's hand is something we're not seeing a lot of [anymore],” Joseph says. “I'm in my 30s at this point, but I miss that in games. In Deus Ex, your map was terrible. It was like an overhead shot from a drone, or a picture of the front of a building. And it was like, ‘Oh, this is stupid.’ But it was great, because then you get to figure out how to navigate around yourself. You go through apartment buildings and you're like, ‘Alright, that's the building.’ We wanted to build that whole system into this - giving the player less direction allows them to create their own stories. The biggest goal for us in a game like this is letting the player know what they have available, what's going to happen, and then letting them run loose with that knowledge.” Joseph cites Daggerfall as an example of this kind of design because the world was built around the player, as opposed to vice versa.

Spoiler

Still, Mechajammer’s main influences consist of movies like the aforementioned RoboCop, Escape from New York, Total Recall, Blade Runner, and Terminator. While these films had a clear impact on Mechajammer’s aesthetic, the game is also designed around similar themes. In fact, the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive from one another - when it comes to cyberpunk, aesthetic is one of the most powerful thematic modes you can work with.

“We tried a lot of art styles but we really wanted that grit, that sweaty ‘70s, ‘80s movie where they don't have a lot of makeup on and everybody's messy,” Joseph says. “It’s easy to make a slick looking sci-fi game with shiny surfaces on specular maps. We think cyberpunk and we think, ‘This is disgusting.’ It should be horrible looking. And so all the streets, there's just trash and grit everywhere.”

“The pixel art definitely helps with that gradient,” Hannah adds. “It seems like a match made in heaven.”

“It keeps it abstract, you know?” Joseph says. “What is this surface general metal? I don't know. It's 500 colours of pixels that look weird. I'll make it up in my head - and it's like a tabletop game, so you should.”

All of this combines to create a solid cyberpunk setting with a legitimate cyberpunk message. After discussing Blade Runner 2049’s hazy, acidic smoke and the film’s spontaneous shift to the desert, Joseph cites iconic anime Ghost in the Shell’s jungles as an inspiration for Mechajammer’s overgrown mining colony, and explains why so much of the cyberpunk we see never quite gets what the genre is supposed to be.

“There's always that sheen and gloss in sci-fi,” Joseph tells me. “Cyberpunk just isn't a great use for that. It's too shiny and happy for what should be a warning. It's dystopian, it should be sad looking. And you kind of get that in a more realistic, trashy, sweaty, analogue world.”

“When I picture what the future looks like, the cyberpunk ways it's going - I picture it looking dirty and gritty,” Hannah says. “We live in Chicago. When you walk around downtown Chicago, it's not shiny. It's pretty trashy, and grey and brown and kind of smelly, and everyone's sweaty. It looks more like our game than something from Cyberpunk 2077, which isn't how I picture the future of cities looking in any way. How would you keep it so shiny? You're barely surviving. Metal corrodes and asphalt gets cracked and everything gets dirty and there's no time or resources to clean things up.

“Part of that feeling of being forgotten - the lower classes and workers not being taken care of and the rich-poor stratification… You don’t have the resources to take care of your streets and shiny things. You're using used cybernetics that have already started corroding and rusting. I don't know, it seems like the vision of the future, at least in our heads. Hopefully that is not our future.”

Mechajammer doesn’t pull its punches when commenting on these ideas. Although the entire game is set on an offworld jungle colony, there’s more nuance to its topography than tons of trees. Throughout the jungle itself, tubes snake their way through the grass, indicating that the jungle wasn’t always so dense and that an older city is buried beneath it. When you burrow your way down, you’ll come across haunted syndicates and unspeakable horrors, although their significance is deliberately left ambiguous.

“A lot of it is best left to the imagination,” Joseph says. “We enjoy that restraint of not saying, ‘And this is the history of this area.’ There's definitely hard facts of what these things are, but from the player’s perspective, they can kind of try to piece that together on their own.”

“We've talked about this game being inspired by Escape from New York, and I think that movie is built on restraint,” Hannah adds. “I know it was built on a small budget, which kind of led to that restraint. But there's so much of that movie where you just don't know what the other streets of New York City look like. You're also walking through green fog and you don't have a lot of backstories, but all of those question marks just make it more mysterious unless you fill in the blanks in your head.”

“Even like Blade Runner, the main lead you're following, they don't say a lot,” Joseph explains. “Would it be better if they did? No, it would be terrible. Leave it up to the imagination. As an audiovisual interactive medium, I think relying on a lot of text is often the laziest thing a developer can do. I think a lot of people enjoy visual novel games or visual novel-like RPGs. Those have, of course, become popular. But there's such an interesting story to tell with all the other aspects of the game. You’d hope that it becomes popular again.”

This is a major point of conversation throughout our chat about Mechajammer - that desire for studios to return to the kind of ambitious games that lean heavily into their identity as being emphatically that: games. Mechajammer is, in and of itself, the type of game that Hannah and Joseph Williams wish other developers would make today. As Hannah says, “It would be hard to work on a game we didn’t want to play.”

“Hopefully, other people enjoy it too,” Joseph adds. “Hopefully there are more games that are more laid back and casual. We think of something like Morrowind - not a perfect game by any means, but you really got that immersive, ‘I'm in an alien world here - what do I do?’ The story was okay, but the game was great. Everybody remembers that.”

As for how Mechajammer goes about integrating all of these ambitious ideas into one cohesive game… Well, it’s not out yet. That being said, some of the game’s ideas include: stealing from syndicates and allying with gangs; betraying said gangs and having assassins sent after you; collecting rumours in order to bribe people; deciphering alien languages or paying locals to translate them for you; investigating ancient occult groups buried deep beneath the jungle tubes, and much, much more. Depending on your origin, there are a variety of different ways to explore and exploit this world, where cyberpunk meets Orwell in a dirty, gritty dystopian future as surveillance trounces knowledge and only the truly rebellious are capable of escape.

All of that said, this is - as Joseph stated earlier and in true cyberpunk fashion - a warning. Unlike other modern games, you’re not the brave hero who stamps out evil and uplifts the oppressed. You are a broken, discarded syndicate pawn who is clawing their way not so much towards a better life as you are to life itself.

“It would be just too unrealistic for your player character to upend society and save this colony of its evils,” Hannah says. “We really try to imply that you will be forgotten. This colony is not able to be saved. The galaxy can't be saved.

“There's no world to save, it's already lost. Humanity's at the end of the road. Maybe you and your friends make it.”

Mechajammer is coming soon for PC. You can wishlist it on Steam.

 

[grimace]

Did you find this track preview?

Spoiler

https://whalenoughtstudios.com/comm...ntent/uploads/2021/09/QuintonTrackPreview.mp3

Kevin's soundtrack hit the 2 hour mark and is glorious. Thrilled to be making the vehicle for it.

This is Kevin:

https://kevinbalke.bandcamp.com/album/serpent-in-the-staglands-ost

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[Fluent]

This is gonna be a cool game for me.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm just wondering why they didn't stick with Copper Dreams.

Mechatranner is more fitting

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[The Wall]

Agh, graphics are again getting shittier...

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[geno]

I see, now they change the demo instead of the art.

 

[Alienman]

You never step into the same river.

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[grimace]

Since wer're sharing tweets and not describing them

Spoiler

seriously, what happens when the embeds are gone and all that remains is the rpg codex server backup in a bunker?

https://twitter.com/kerissakti/status/1443576751255212039

Spoiler

That's not mechajammer but looks like a game with the title mechajammer.

Agh, graphics are again getting shittier...

The gifs are cropped image of the screen and blown up to show pixel details, probably.


An updated Mechajammer demo will be part of Steam Next Fest from October 1st to 7th.

 

[Infinitron]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/485400/view/2870472278459432354

Mechajammer has a brand new demo for Steam Next Fest
Play it today to familiarize yourself with the core mechanics of the game

Steam Next Fest has arrived and so have we with a new tutorial demo for you to get to grips with in preparation for when the full game is released. It should give you a taste of the different tactic styles you can deploy in order to traverse the grungy deadly sectors of Calitana.

Let's look at the features of this demo:

Stealth mechanics:

You can choose to tackle obstacles (both alive and dead) head-on but it may benefit you to be aware of how you can use stealth to heighten your advantage of survival.

Sneaking past enemies, using the surrounding environment to escape hostile situations, and finding different ways to break into secret syndicate bases are just some of the options that lay before you.

Enemy targeting:

Plan and prep your attack. Multiple modes of attack and weapons' to use depending on the situation.

Companions:

You control your character, as well as up to 4 squads of companions, who are controlled by AI but can be given instructions.

Squad commands:

This demo will show you how to organize, and direct your party.

Once you've completed this demo you should be able to begin the full game with some confidence in what lies ahead of you and how to play, but remember there will be much more to discover when your adventure into the murky underbelly of this dystopian world begins.

We hope you enjoy this demo and feel free to leave us feedback. If you'd like to join the Mechajammer community over on Discord you are more than welcome to:

 

[geno]

No, I won't give any context.

 

[Endemic]

Motion captured animations?

 

[Abu Antar]

Motion captured animations?

 

[grimace]

"If these people would just play the game they'd get a lot more out of life."

Spoiler

Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" 1985 opening scene.

 

[buffalo bill]

They've made it so when you mouse-click to move, it moves you all the way to where you clicked, even through a bunch of enemy bullets. This was fixed in some recent iteration by making mouse-click movement only move you one space while in turn-based mode. Was also way better when they had keyboard-based movement controls (though they were sort of shitty tbh, because most iterations could only move in the cardinal directions). I died in the demo only when I clicked to move and would walk through a bunch of bullets. Rather frustrating. Bad design.

Stealth is in real-time, which is annoying. As I've said before, would be better for players to be able to toggle turn-based mode whenever they want. Or, better, always have the game in turn-based mode.

Combat is overall worse than it was like a year and a half or so ago. Feels clunkier and less tactical.

It's like the devs simultaneously want to make a game that appeals to everyone, casuals included, as well as to the hardcore RPG players who like classic games. But they can't do both if they want to produce a good game (I'd also say that no one can make a game with broad lowest-common-denominator appeal and produce a good game, but that's just my opinion).

 

[vorvek]

Every few months I check this game for progress and every single time I wish I hadn't.