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

[mediocrepoet]

Can anyone sum up why this game sucks?

Unfinished? Bugs? Not fun?

Search the thread for Dhaze posts and read those. Otherwise, all of the above?

 

[Dhaze]

Can anyone sum up why this game sucks?

Unfinished? Bugs? Not fun?

Well there's the unrealised potential. There's also the definite 'unfinished' feeling. And many other things.

But the gargantuous amount of bugs and jank are the proverbial nails in the coffin. Honestly, it's multiple games' worth of bugs crammed into a single one; almost everything that can go wrong will go wrong, provided you play long enough. I'm a very positive guy when it comes to video games and finding the good in even the worst of them, but this being said I would strongly advise against playing this particular one.

If you have the inclination to read through about 10 pages of trauma, my first post can be found here, and I tried to write a synopsis of the story in this post.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Soundtrack is great tho.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Sounds great. I am confused about the 'time-based resolution' bit though. What does that mean?

Sounds to me like it's either:

1) Some sort of high granularity turn-based system where actions can take more than one turn (so like, while you're preparing your plasma rifle to fire, the enemy can get off two shots with his laser pistol)

2) Not actually turn-based but something like Frozen Synapse.

so how did this end up working in practice?

 

[CyberWhale]

Like everything else in this game, barely.

 

[Infinitron]

Sounds great. I am confused about the 'time-based resolution' bit though. What does that mean?

Sounds to me like it's either:

1) Some sort of high granularity turn-based system where actions can take more than one turn (so like, while you're preparing your plasma rifle to fire, the enemy can get off two shots with his laser pistol)

2) Not actually turn-based but something like Frozen Synapse.

so how did this end up working in practice?

Neither. The game switched to a standard roguelike turn system.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Sounds great. I am confused about the 'time-based resolution' bit though. What does that mean?

Sounds to me like it's either:

1) Some sort of high granularity turn-based system where actions can take more than one turn (so like, while you're preparing your plasma rifle to fire, the enemy can get off two shots with his laser pistol)

2) Not actually turn-based but something like Frozen Synapse.

so how did this end up working in practice?

Neither. The game switched to a standard roguelike turn system.

Was there a reason given for this? Didn't work out in practice?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

sigh, guess I'll have to read all 158 pages...

 

[ERYFKRAD]

sigh, guess I'll have to read all 158 pages...

Don't. Just read what Dhaze wrote.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

But if you do read the whole thing, count up the artstyles would ya.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

sigh, guess I'll have to read all 158 pages...

Don't. Just read what Dhaze wrote.

yeah but I get to make fun of people who backed it

 

[luj1]

Really liked how combat looked, kinda like NOX but TB

RIP

 

[Modron]

count up the artstyles would ya.

Ain't nobody got no time for that.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

did this get cut?

Having too low of Logic or being illiterate means all text in the game is garbled. We made all the text in the game dynamic so far as to make this full-stop:

 

[Infinitron]

sigh, guess I'll have to read all 158 pages...

There's this update from 2017, although the final combat was pretty different from what you see here as well: https://rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=10704

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Can anyone sum up why this game sucks?

It crashes a lot. Seemed like it could be fun but just way too crashy.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Still curious how they went from something that seemed to be cool to whatever they ended up with. My reading continues!

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Worth posting the whole thing in the thread I think.

16
Ticks, Tiles, and Dodging Bullets
Posted by Whalenought Studios (Creator)

Hey guys, we wanted to let you know about a small schedule change since the last update, as well as some more info on gameplay upgrades! In the next couple weeks we’ll have a video overview of the alpha level and gameplay so everyone can get a look at it prior to when alpha testers jump in.

As some of you've heard, Joe decided to waste a ton of time with an unexpected stay at the hospital. Thankfully he’s all recovered and we’re back to work. That did delay our alpha date, and we’ll just be pushing that to next month to make up that lost time.

Meanwhile Hannah frantically rummages for glowing, spinning medkits in the hallway.
We've received some excellent portraits coming in from backers since the last update, so thank you everyone who’s sent them thus far! We’ll show off some new character models and heads in the upcoming video. Lots of great options for everything from player characters to enemy super-agents, loving what we've received!

We wanted to explain in a bit more detail the ticks and tiles implementation we briefly mentioned in the last update. While this will be easier to see in-action with the video, the mechanics it has added are pretty neat, so we have some images and gifs below so you can get an idea of how it works.

It's been around a year since the initial Kickstarter pitch and concept, and we're extremely happy with where we've gotten it to. There's been a lot of frustration and successes with various designs, but we haven't had to make any compromises to the design or ruleset for what should be a very fun romp through the cyberpunk city. And we managed to get a wish-list item in: swimming! So put some points in Stamina or risk rolling to start drowning every few tiles.

Overview of Ticks and Tiles

As we mentioned in the last update, the gameplay wasn't feeling as impactful towards the goal of being able to react to enemy turns on the fly. There also wasn't a way to clearly visualize these elements. It was competent on paper and execution — turns for players/NPCs just take a variable amount of time on the combat bar to execute, however, wait times, lack of clarity of predicting enemy turns and not wanting to get stuck in a long turn during combat was hampering player actions, encouraging you to play too carefully. There was the promise of reactivity in turns, but gameplay and use of time just wasn't allowing it. Ticks, tiles and shorter phases allow the player to have the intel to make more calculated and reactive decisions.

The ruleset we had described in our original Kickstarter pitch has been a difficult one to find just the right gameplay for. The original idea had the essential premise of the turn-based model with just staggering turn order. Players and NPCs took turns when they were able to, and these took various amounts of time to perform and recover from, and could be temporarily interrupted. These actions were all displayed on a single timeline.

What we've implemented instead is a solution that replaces the general idea of ‘time’ with chunks of time for actions we call ticks. We also brought back tiles to quantify distance, in the pursuit of clarity.

Ticks are represented by a quarter second of gameplay, but are abstract in that longer animations can play-out during these, or multiple hits shown off individually. So behind the scene, these play out like regular turns where gameplay they appear as more linear time.

Importantly, on a bar with other combatants these are super easy to compare. If an enemy is targeting you with a pistol and takes 3 ticks to aim, and 4 to recover from, you have the insight to know to start running and to attack after their bullet is airborne, as it obviously won't follow you. So with ticks, you can quantify how long your action will take compared to your enemy’s actions, allowing you to plan your moves and have the payoff of dodging and taking cover.

In Turn Mode, which can be toggled whenever you want and is automatically turned on in combat, after any action you take recovers, the world pauses for you to take another turn. We’ve somewhat reformatted the UI to make this snappier, and there’s no longer a confirm button for using an action. Once selected, your actions cannot be interrupted or changed, so gameplay is quite a bit quicker.

The new layout also makes it simple to assess when and where bullets and thrown objects are headed. When it’s your turn you can see what direction they’ll be flying at and start to get the feel for how fast they travel.

With these changes the gameplay really has hit its stride, and we’re very happy with it. We hope you enjoy the flow of combat and all intense roll-under action during the alpha.

Alpha map and some other updated features

You’ll be playing some of the intro maps during the alpha, starting with your very safe shuttle landing. These maps start on the outskirts of the city but take you inside in various directions, depending on your mode of entry.

A few of the other gameplay features that we’ve recently implemented and will be cleaning up for the alpha for these maps:

• Kill-cam during ticks. For confirming decapitations
• Swimming. When you want to infiltrate while getting really wet. Create wet tiles to slip on!
• Cruising the grid. Your civilian grade vehicle options are a combination of an 80’s sci-fi vehicle and the Peel P50, really adorable for the cyborg agents stealing them to get around on. You can drive onto the electro-magnetic powered freeway grid to navigate to new city maps quickly.
• Shadow. We have shadows working really well, where you turn largely ‘invisible’ if you are sneaking in a dark part of the environment. These can be removed with lighting, or by taking out lighting. Being ‘hidden’ is boolean, and trumps a line-of sight from the enemy.
• Interior Line of Sight. If your character is obstructed by a building, then that building gets sliced away down to the level height of your character (so you don’t have to spin the camera like a maniac to navigate the maps). We now have a blacked area inside that building so you can’t see inside. If you get near doors and windows however, your characters can peek inside via a line of sight cone.
• Computer Hacking. Roll-under to see how well you perform or how well you block yourself from further use of the computer!
• Chemistry. Find icky and fun glowing substances and put them in jars. You can fill these mixtures in 1/4 increments, with increased potency the more you the fill, or seal it off and then utilize it as a thrown chemical agent. It’s like canning fruit, but instead using radiation and chemical waste.

There’s quite a bit more in there, but those are some of the recent highlights.

Medical
Character ailments haven’t gone through many iterations since the initial design, boiling down to damage taken equates to various ailments received. How that’s distributed to body parts and subcategories have changes since, as well as determining how many ailments a character receives until they drop unconscious or die.

The balance at play was:

• Damage severity and how much players/NPCs strive to avoid it
• Forgiving damage allowing players to take fun risks and allow NPCs to be more brazen

The death penalty also challenged that balance. We didn’t hear a great reception from that last update, and we hear you. Gameplay continuity aside, we wanted to improve that by changing the focus away from always avoiding danger so you wouldn’t be stuck with your failures. We’re keeping the perpetual auto-saving for roleplaying aspects, but instead of death penalties, it just results in a re-load of the last safe-place you were in. Of course if you were instead knocked unconscious, you may get something stolen and thrown into the gutter to wake up later a bit worse for wear. The gameplay and combat focus should still keep you wary, but allow the familiar challenge of letting you do some trial and error without worrying about dire consequence.

Damage and Life
Prior to this, ‘death’ was the result of accruing a certain number of ‘Mortal’ and ‘Greater’ ailments based on a character’s Virtue and Stamina mod, and allowing characters to get any number of Lesser ailments. This model had a problem where an enemy could have 3/4 Greater ailments filled, but then take on a score of Lesser and then a Mortal. While we liked the idea of having death associated with the ailment categories, it was arbitrarily gamey to try to just fill a particular one and frustrating to mix them, so we’ve removed how those tally separately, and instead just gave ailments the potential to have a “Life” reduction value.

The Life meter has 3 variable states:

1. Max Life

2. Flux Life

3. Lost Life

• 1. The Max life is again dictated from character stats, factors coming from Stamina, Age, and particular Background Points fields chosen at character generation. Max health can be artificially raised through stimpacks and drugs, or permanently through cybernetics (until disabled).
• 2. Flux Life. If a character is hit with an attack that also has a chance to inflict Life damage, they’ll receive whatever ailments associated with the attack as well as a reduction to the Life meter. This Life count is in a state of flux until the character is hit again, which results in the last Flux amount transitioning to just Lost Life. If a character doesn’t get hit again, that Flux life remains in Flux until stabilized with a healing item needed for the type of attack received. If the remaining Life meter is in flux, your character will go unconscious.

Stabilized means you regain that Life back. We have an option available we aren't using at the moment, but could instantiate during the alpha and see what you guys think. Your medical sheet can tally some of the more crippling wounds from ailments and keep a lesser form of them even when you stabilize Life, which would be healed back at a clinic. For instance putting a splint on a broken leg broken stabilizes the limb by giving you back the Life as well as taking a character component that’s turned off like being able to jump, but you'd instead have a lingering issue of having longer recovery until you rest up. Might add some fun punch to these wounds, but might be too tedious or confusing as well which is why it's currently off.

• ! Numerous hits on a tick

Numerous actions can simultaneously resolve in the same tick, and if numerous types of damage are taken, we currently have each being recorded in Flux. This allows you to recover from any damage taken in that one tick, so if you get shot a few times by different enemies all at once, you could suture/disinfect those wounds individually and recover those three chunks of Life. This is a bit gamey, but we’ll see what player’s think of it during the alpha.

• 3. Lost Life. Life that is lost has to be restored by medical means, a clinic or equivalent. Losing all Life results in character death.

Selecting Damage
Healing damage is very easy to do, there's a handful of general damage categories (they are grouped together from the list below) that have healing items associated with them. You can disinfect and suture all bullet/projectile wounds, and to do so would just open the medical menu and select the body part and ailment. A list of medical supplies from your bag appears and you can use the appropriate items to stabilize them.

Taking damage is a bit more in-depth as it can alter anything on your character sheet or gameplay. In our ailment sheets we currently have 47 attributes of your poor character that can be hampered, ranging from stats to mechanics, being forced to crawl to lessening their weight allowance. Our Mortal and Greater ailments from before essentially just have a potential Life value addition to also be rolled against.

So a standard .38 S round from a handgun might slow down recovery to movement if you’re hit in a leg, and the severity of it might deplete up to 3 Life.

These damage and medical tables probably deserved their own update, as it's fairly robust, but we'll go through the basic steps since we've talked about damage. During gameplay these tables will be viewable in-full within the Burning Candle ruleset menu.

1. Damage Table

First we grab the table from whatever type of attack hits a character.

Some attacks can stack some special prefixes from another table, like if using a hollow-point round of ammunition it will have some extra interrupt power or if a melee weapon has a live current going through it it'll output additional electrical ailments. These tables are:

2. Severity

Like before we need to grab how impactful the attack is to stats, so we categorize these into Mortal, Greater and Lesser based on the damage roll, which is a roll of 3d8 like everything else.

Crit fail: 3

Lesser: 4-10

Greater: 11-18

Mortal: 19-24

3. Prefix.

Within those categories are 4 unique naming prefixes each, which also scale severity of the attack within the category, and this is chosen randomly next.

For instance the Edge Light Thrust Lesser attack has:

• Negligible stab
• Grazed
• Hairline slice
• Shallow incision

Greater is assigned:

• Slashed
• Pierced
• Lacerated
• Punctured

These have smaller differences, but instead of just have 3 versions of severity per table we can have 12.

4. Body part

This is gathered a few different ways, depending on if it was an aimed attack and was successful or could be a random roll if it came from somewhere non targeted. Based on the roll-under, here is the current deviation table:

The body part defines what types of stats or gameplay mechanics are going to be affected, ranging from brain power, ability to carry two handed weapons, reload times, to recovery times for various types of actions. These are meant to stack, so individually they aren't so debilitating that they should stop you in your tracks, but some will certainly kick your character's performance down a notch.

5. Body part Specific

This category is more focused on the damage table itself for variance, but does allow for some ailment diversity within a body part. Depending on the Wound Category there are different names as well, though this is mostly cosmetic. For instance getting hit in the head with one of the Edge damage tables with a Lesser category has:

• Front of face
• Right side of face
• Left side of face
• Jaw

The Greater has:

• Temple
• Eye R
• Eye L
• Mouth
• Neck

And Mortal starts to get a bit more dire:

• Eye R
• Eye L
• Throat
• Ear R
• Ear L
• Brain

For Impact weapons and larger rounds of ammunition, these are more focused on bones rather than bleeding or more immediate stopping power (interrupt time) than slowing you down in general (recovery).

Most Chem agents just damage the Torso/Lungs/Head, and the rest can target all body parts.

6. Reduction

The target failed to dodge or completely block the attack, but they can still mitigate damage. Since you can get hit in various body parts, it's appropriate that you can outfit types or armor to those body parts. There aren't a wild amount of armors planned for the game, but there are some diversities planned for categories of damage. Different types or armor focus on different parts of the body and types of attacks. Hazmat gear won't absorb bullets, but will fully block chemical weapons, where leather armor focused on the chest will keep your vitals in check while leaving arms and legs exposed. Better armors gives you some full body protection from a couple types of damage.

Reduction is a flat number which lowers the damage roll itself per body part, so that could lessen the ailments or knock it down from a Mortal to Greater state.

We haven't implemented the art/number visuals for that yet in the character sheet, but that will be a grid of damage types and body parts located on the bottom right here:

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

So there’s a bit of info of where we are with changes. Working on tweaking the alpha level to get that ready for you guys. Let us know if you have any questions. Next update we'll also be asking backers for some fake advertising plugs to put in the game. So get your creative hats on.

Drink your Barto Brew!
Cheers!

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

this has some broken images, here's the original link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1649838104/copper-dreams/posts/1940200

 

[rusty_shackleford]

So your main reason you dislike them and probably won't give them another chance is because the end of their first major game was shit? How many games - let alone RPGs - have you finished that have good endings?

I've said this before, this is a specious argument. The lack of quality in other games doesn't excuse the lack of quality in any specific game. The existence of even one "good ending" invalidates the argument, which is why this always turns into a shitfest of disqualifying each other's examples. Since the answer is definitely more than zero, how many non-shit endings do I have to name to satisfy this metric? 10? 100? Just looking for a ballpark.

I don't think my standards are very high. I don't expect every game to have a brilliant story. I'm actually fine with little to no story at all. But SitS's was such an infuriating, hectoring, smarmy torrent of garbage; why should I give them my limited gaming time ever again, when there's so many other choices out there? I don't enjoy paying money for a game to tell me what a horrible person I am just for daring to play it; it's a pretty odd way to build a commercial entertainment product. It's the same problem I had with Spec Ops: The line.

I agree it's unfair to judge a game for what it's not trying to be. SitS wasn't trying to be a big budget AAA title so I won't fault it for say, not having voice acting. But it most definitely was trying to be a player-driven story-based roleplaying game with clear attempts to emulate the tabletop PnP experience, and on those grounds I think it's a disaster. If I ran a D&D campaign like Whalenought apparently does, I'd lose every one of my players forever.

good post

 

[rusty_shackleford]

this was pretty decent looking
I'm currently at the 5th art style btw

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm not sure what got revamped more, the artstyle or the combat.

On the 9th style change btw.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1649838104/copper-dreams/posts/2617566

A Summary of Summer & Schedule for the September Beta

Greetings backers!

Agent Pelican's nest - your main hideout during your adventure

Schedule
Over the summer we finished implementing the remaining systems and code we designated for the alpha at this point. We’ve been doing some Alpha updates throughout the past few months and are posting the last combat testing map soon with a lot of new stuff that we'll be balancing and improving until the beta. So if you're an alpha backer check it out!

We wanted to do a preview of more gameplay but packed up and moved out of Seattle abruptly after we did that last update. We’re drifting somewhere in the wastelands of dairy farms and corn in the middle of the US at the moment, but will be hanging out in Austin soon! Fortunately we've had ample time to finish all this stuff and decided to show off more beta material when it was done. That's this month!

There will be an gameplay walkthrough video soon with a lot of these updates from an area early in the game, and we'll be releasing the Beta by the end of the month.

A part of the summer upgrades was a new pathing/streaming system — the city map is being welded together to be seamless — that's indoor, outdoor, city towers, underground and underwater are all linked together without map changes. This provides a more immersive city experience where you get a feel of scope and direction, and shows off a lot of the gang patrol and loose in&out of combat scenarios. And you can grand-theft-auto (and boat?) your way around quickly.

Plus we can advertise No LoAd TiMeS! like sweet games from the 90s where they streamed levels in while opening doors.

We'll showcase parts of the map as we finalize the art in them. The beta takes place on the south-eastern outer wall of the city where you "land", near a fishing wharf and an Ellis Island-esque inspection station turned gang hideout you need something from. The map location that has been most exciting to make is the block you do shopping and civilian shoulder ramming — a floating market near the middle of the city. The Calitana mining station turned city is sort of cobbled together via various platform-rigs on top of the water, and a floating market was a really fun cyberpunk visual for encapsulating slummin' in a high-tech world.

Unfortunately this area takes the most fine-tuning with civilian AI, driving, and Arms Guild, gang, and MFI patrols throughout. Getting from A to B throughout the game involves going through the market in some capacity, so it's receiving the most attention early on as we seam the other factory and spelunking maps. We'll post update pictures as we get through it.

Alpha-End improvements
We're eager to show all this off in a video update but want to fine tune some combat visuals first, and figure we'd do it all at once for you guys.

Optimization improvements have been a focus. The game now cleanly runs on this junker laptop we got that I think they forgot to put a video card in. Hannah took a chunk of the summer up with revising a lot of the older code we’ve been slowly duct-tapping iterations on for a while now for characters, combat and other heavy systems and we’re very satisfied with results. We can get loads of enemies on screen at once without taking a hit, so we've designed some enemies to be weaker so we can instead swarm them as needed.

You know what's not fun? Camera management and seeing how world structures are pieces together. Hannah solved these age-old problems by creating a terrific updated line of sight projection that allows you to see your characters line of sight at any given time, without any 3d-object collapsing (like a roof) or dissolve holes or something. It's uses the character line of sight to clip and dither away geometry that the player can't see, so it's seamless with those visuals. It’s real slick, we love it, and now we don't have to worry as much as how overlapping world meshes work. To flex we've also lowered the tilt of the camera.

Characters now have swappable armor pieces to protect individual body parts — head, torso, and individually for arms and legs. Since your character is equipping new armor pieces frequently, as they get shot up and destroyed, we thought it would be worthwhile to show those visual updates on your character. There's a lot of variety there.

Tiles with effects on them have a new generation method where we can fill the screen with them without any cost, we're still tweaking the visuals for them, but you get the idea.

Tile light data is visualized by how dense the hatchlines are, a neat setup we came up with for both dynamic and baked lighting values.

Effect Tiles for the beta include:

Fire

• burn damage

Smoke

• visual modifier
• coughing ailment

Ooze

• roll to not slide while moving
• noise when moving through

Water

• slipping ailment
• noise when moving through
• single tiles that continue to drip for 10 steps and can be tracked by NPCs

Blood

• slipping ailment
• noise when moving through
• single tiles that continue to drip for 10 steps and can be tracked by NPCs

Grass

• burnable with fire tile
• cover for hiding

Electricity

• stun — immobilized temporarily

More Action Choices
Oh yeah, dual wielding! We probably should have led with that. Most of the design philosophy for Copper Dreams and the ruleset comes from trying to accommodate what a player would like to reasonably roll to do in any situation, anytime. The player asking to hold two weapons at once is kind of an obvious ask, so we created an extra row of actions, one for the right and one for the left hand. The off-hand item is the item your character will use to defend/parry with if it exists, and there's a small negative balance modifier for having two out that will influence aiming, so there's a trade-off.

You get the unique actions of each weapon, so you can have some interesting combinations. For instance a throwing javelin in one hand for melee reach and an SMG to burst spray in the other. There are combo attacks you can do with items of similar types, like two knives, two pistols, two clubs, etc where you can attack back-to-back with no prep time for the second attack.

Companions

Through the alpha, Turn-a-Tile movement and combat plays essentially like a fast-paced roguelike — and that always left companions pretty open ended as to how they could work. We initially had companions as AI you could give directives to, like an RTS, but that wasn't as fun as we wanted it to be. Backers playing the alpha saw a couple other implementations we tested. We really wanted to keep the easy to play, fast paced, simultaneous, and loose flow of combat while also using companions for an environmentally strategic element. Our solution was keeping what we have because it was working so well, and dividing companion play in combat via round groups and combat risk.

Round Groups

When combat starts, characters involved are sorted into 4 different rounds via an initiative roll. You can have one party member per round. NPCs roll to be sorted and weighted into the 4 rounds as well. Each round can hold any number of enemies. Every character (PC and NPC) play like usual inside a round simultaneously turn-by-turn until they all finish, then recover through the next 3 rounds. Rounds without a character just play out NPC turns.

For example:

Round 1

• PC 1
• Enemy 1
• Enemy 2
• Enemy 3

Round 2

• Enemy 4
• Enemy 5

Round 3

• PC 2
• Enemy 6

Round 4

• Enemy 7

Round 1 in this case is pretty action heavy where PC 1 might want to deter the other active opponents, mitigate risk from Round 2 enemies, or focus on enemies near PC 2 who won't start until Round 3. This added a lot of team strategy a net gain for strategy in our combat system, and despite being a completely new type of combat model is very intuitive to play and learn. Rounds also let combat flow quickly by being simultaneous — a Round with 12 active NPCs will move just as fast with a Round with 1, you'll probably want to pay a bit more attention though.

Combat RISK

PCs and NPCs can do whatever they want during their turns in a round, in an order, like usual. Every action is a 3d8 roll, and every action nets a unique amount of fatigue which adds a negative modifier to the skill you are rolling for attempted thereafter. This resets when the round ends.

The RISK meter shows your (increasing) chance of critically failing or fumbling, which ends your round automatically, as well as whatever negative consequence from the crit fail roll. So if you try running too far you'll eventually trip and face-plant, or using a melee weapon with too much fatigue will crit fail a miss that hits yourself or drops the item.

We like to think of it as a really chill combat-turn system. It's fun to gamble an action and beat the odds of failing, and trying to attempt that third pistol shot and having it backfire and hit your toe or jam is worth it for the times it doesn't.

Defend-End-Turn

You want to end that turn early though to net some added defense mod in your off-rounds, depending on your fatigue during your round. After every turn (unless you've crit failed or fumbled) you can rotate to a stationary direction or character NPC to defend against, parry or evade. This adds additional strategy of needing to move behind opponents shield defenses, which depending on their blocking level may be impenetrable from a defended direction. Phalanxes and all that.

Next

We'll showcase some of that sweet stuff in the coming video in the beta area. Thanks for your patience everyone, we're eager to get the beta part of the game out later this month, we've given it our all and think it's been well worth the wait and think you will too.

Cheers

I believe this is where they dropped the asynchronous combat.
(11th art-style change)

 

[rusty_shackleford]

"can we have a game to play?"
"no, here's animated dice"

excellent post, correctly predicted that codexers vastly prefer style over substance until they get their hands on the product and realize it's shit

13 art styles, for the record.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

14 art style changes.

I'm not sure if I entirely understand the combat system they went with. It still has simultaneous execution I think? But actions are no longer linked to time and instead abstracted away? Hard to tell without playing.

Infinitron
Is anyone aware of RPGs with a combat system similar to what they originally described?

 

[Infinitron]

Infinitron
Is anyone aware of RPGs with a combat system similar to what they originally described?

As the developers themselves have stated, Grandia.