Greetings!
Wanted to let you all catch up on news since the last update in one place!
Office Contagions Squelched
Unfortunately we have a short delay on that alpha, something to do with living and working in a studio apartment all day every day means if someone picks something up, things can travel quick. Amplified with Seattle’s overwhelming amount of smoke this last week thanks to California being an inferno, what should have been a small sickness knocked us out pretty hard. Our usual temperate weather turned something more Mordor-like, but we’re catching up now and it should only be a week or so out. We’ll be able to get that with a proper trailer in the next week too.
The Great Eye somewhere beyond the smoke
Community Page
We’ve had some updates on our design goals for the game on our community page, and are going to continue to through the alpha and beta. We’re happy we can show these in action now, you can hopefully get a sense of what we’re trying to achieve through the remainder of development, which you can help shape when we get testing!
Stay Tuned this weekend for a video we have and should be done editing with some more playthrough and mechanics shaping up very nicely for you. We'll also have our first poll which we'll be doing regularly where you guys can choose which of the sub-milestones we have for the alpha -> beta timeline you'd like to see in the game to test first.
Grass Tiles
Some greenery contain bug ailments that latch onto you for a few rounds or until you shake them off. Nature is wonderful!
Grass tiles have been implemented for an obstacle modifier, so you can authentically role-play the Predator. Grass-like tiles (usually mushrooms, algae, or other weird, alien substances) usually only shows up underground or around the water Blocks, though you'll also get the bonus for creeping in an office shrubbery.
Previous Posts: Low Battery
Had a short post on your cybernetics yelling at you when they are low on battery for some technology atmosphere + gameplay.
Low battery post
Universal Text Bar
You can do lots of different types of actions for movements, weapons, or other skills, and having them icon based was getting a little abstract, to say the least. We've instead created a multi-field text bar with contextual buttons based on the action being used. Moving gives you rotational and different movement types, while a weapon skill will provide you with options for all the different uses of it.
When the DM chimes in another bar pops in on top, it's where you can type things to chat, and contains any other information that's helpful with actions, like your tile to tick number when moving or any modifiers to attacks and the number you're trying to roll under. It's been a lot easier, and keeps a smooth skill operation to quickly change and use actions.
Bar displaying Move action options. Right Clicking toggles move or last chosen action
Along with showing ground items as text in your immediate area you can click on to pick up or put down, as well as characters or objects, we've gotten rid of a lot of the pixel-hunting that existed and makes gameplay very simple.
Micro-Tiles with less corners
Since moving to micro-tiles, the larger hex shapes required for the volumetric LOS and therefore the environment, began to be obsolete. While larger squares are stupid for navigating, having micro squares makes it so it doesn't really matter. Importantly, it makes navigating obstacles a little more obvious, as the hexes made for some confusion in tighter environments (determining what was 'behind' a small pillar or box that was hexagon shaped is less obvious at a glance than squares). Fortunately all the maps were already fairly squared off, we just arranged some of the tile-sets to remove the unnecessary angles, and things are looking good.
Characters can be made up of a variety of sizes, children, bugs, rats or tiny robots being one, and the usual being the 5 size. For 5 sized characters we have basic orientations for determining directional attacks (like shots to people from behind add to hit chance). Front, two flanks, and back. We haven't coordinated these with medical yet, but it's a possibility to determine which arm gets hit depending on the orientation of a character. The way we have it in the ruleset right now is pretty nice feeling, with misses falling on nearby limbs in order of proximity before missing completely, but it's an interesting concept we could look into later. We'd be curious to see what you think when you start playing.
The actual pathfinding grid is now made up of 9 tiles for every LOS / environment tile, which fits nice and easily. We're using a d&d method that was used at some point for diagonal tile movement, or the dementia is kicking in early and we're misremembering. Every two diagonal tiles is an extra tick for movement. Things flow smoothly and
predictably, so we're happy with it.
Patience Meter
For a Social skill, we wanted to make social actions have actual agency, where a player would have tangible results and rolls they can foresee and be used as effectively as any other skill like pistols or chemistry. The result was very simple, but only made possible by having robust systemic behaviors of NPCs, patrols, and AI for enemies where they can react to successful or fail rolls with fun results.
Most guards you come across aren’t going to shoot-to-kill unprovoked. Cybermutants or kill-patrol robots sure, but your average rent-a-cop isn't going to start with warning shots right at your face. They yell at you and what we call the patience meter pops up above them, like any other ticks for an action. If the timer runs out, or you piss them off early, then they’ll start attacking you.
Mechanics for this are designed with two types of NPC Patience Meters, an Unwanted Patience meter accounting for locations you aren’t wanted, and a Hostile Patience Meter for places you most certainly aren’t supposed to be. These meters for now are 20 and 10 ticks, respectively, enough time to talk to the NPC or move away from the situation.
Unwanted
You’re told to scram, with three outcomes:
- Leave line of sight and meter ends
- Don’t leave and turn into a hostile patience meter
- Aggravate NPC and start combat
Hostile
Three outcomes:
- Thwart NPC in some way
- Player gets stunned thrown in a dumpster outside or in Jail, depending on the NPC group they are in.
- Don’t do as told, or aggravate NPC in some other way, and start combat
Other mechanics for Hostile: * If you’re armed, you are asked to drop your weapon on the ground. * If not armed, skip to a warning text and the NPC immediately starting toward you to begin a stunning action. * Moving away from their line of sight alerts them and makes them hostile, marking your last known position as usual. * Dropping your weapon will make them walk toward you to start stunning action at close-range, which you can also use to your advantage
So how do you end some of these scenarios? If you’re a combat character, starting to aim at an NPC will just start their combat routine, so that’s easy, but if you want some more subtly or keep things quiet you have a lot of other (quieter) options. If your character has Unarmed skills you can take advantage of that stunning action and use a Grapple action to suplex them into the ground and knock them out. For the sake of this update, you can also walk up to them and roll Social to talk them down. If you do need to get rid of the NPC, besides, It’s easier when they aren’t shooting back anyway.
Skill: Social
We wrote a more in-depth post on the community site detailing what we want to do with the skill, and now we wanted to show that in-action. If you missed it the post is below and also goes into detail where disposition comes from within the character sheet.
In Copper Dreams characters are pretty squishy, and you have some player-advantage things in play like not being limited to vision cones and being invisible in shadow if standing still. Though NPCs also get the latter if they are sneaking themselves, so get that spot-check ready. Because you find yourself in situations where NPCs usually don’t want you around or want to eat or kill you, gameplay focuses on you creeping around like a horror movie monster where you are picking off enemies one-by-one. And that is how a lot of builds are suited to play, but we wanted to add to that with something more subtle, for espionage and stealth, and also because killing people can be loud and there can be other quiet ways of clearing a building. To this end we used the gun of the face — your words.
Social builds in games typically have the least agency, you are bound to whatever few choices the designer lets you choose from at that moment. Agency requires a degree of foresight into application of your skills, but for dialogue thats usually just at the whim of whatever conversational or story context the designer has in mind. Players often want to tell an NPC something that the designer didn't add to their dialogue, so why not actually let them say tags to anyone they want, whenever they want?
Social actions are commands you can attempt to tell NPCs, with failure and success rates like any roll where you'll roll 3d8 under your skill number (+challenge mods). A whole slew of things make up that challenge number, which in this case is the degree of difficulty of what you're asking them and your disposition to one another.
Changing from a regular Social Action to a bribe, still no success.
For example you could tell a guard to go home for the night if they encounter you, and if successful they have some contextual things they can mutter, "sure, good, idea, I think I left the oven on". This is to be interpreted as if the Terminator or Snake Plissken is
tellingsomeone, not asking. The NPC knows you're trouble, so it's you rolling to just convince them they don't want to make things worse by not listening.
A successful roll!
If you have a low roll odds, you have some options for additive modifiers. Bribe, which gives them cigarettes if you have them, is an easy one at the expense of bartering goods. Threaten is more potent, allowing you to choose a weapon, but makes them hostile if you fail, so higher risk. Weapons have a lethal number, so choosing the meanest thing you got is the way to go for this, but is also based on how well your skill is with whatever the weapon is designed for, so you don't fumble.
Failing to threaten with a 2 handed laser repeater rifle being met in kind.
Dialogue in Copper Dreams is somewhat detached from the Social skill — it remains tag-based, you can inquire about certain text strings to get more information, branch into things depending on backgrounds or character-sheet stats, or show an NPC something from your inventory.
NPCs talk to you or each other, and you can inquire, is how that mainly works. It's for branching story and narrative quests, which the player chooses for their character through actions in-game and at the start of the game during character creation — more on that in the disposition post linked below.
Orchid is optimized for pistols and social, so you can have a good go at the alpha with just sneaking and rolling to convince your way through. She’s also equipped with an eyepatch cybernetic that induces a pretty solid social boost on humans specifically with some hypnotizing-like lights that pop on and off to daze someone.
Disposition Recap Post
Previous Post is here, talking more in-depth about how we grab and use Character Disposition:
Social Skill Disposition Post
