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
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
Round 3
Round 4
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
