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[Moobabe]

Worrying now.

I can't stomach another KS failure

 

[Purkake4]

Hope they're doing a final reddit, press, social media push in the end.

 

[Mr. Tibbs]

Matt Chat had Joe and Hannah of Whalenought Studios on to talk about Copper Dreams.

 

[Burt]

Thanks for the bump, forgot about this. Just backed.

 

[Chev]

Backed it too. I like the vagrant story-like look of the characters.

 

[More_Badass]

Just about 90% with 4 days to go. This is definitely going to make it. Now I can shift my worry to Fabular

 

[More_Badass]

Less than $3k left, and it hasn't even hit the 48 hour mark.

Either way, it's been a success compared to their last campaign. Serpent only made $28k (their goal was only $10k), while this is closing in on $40k

 

[Moobabe]

Less than $3k left, and it hasn't even hit the 48 hour mark.

We got this man.

 

[More_Badass]

We got this man.

I was reading through the page, and updates, and it's so exciting. Like when you look at the individual elements, it doesn't even seem like a cRPG at times.

Just consider the saving system, which you do with your radio

Radio calls have their quirks that any good agent should be privy to — you'll need open air to reach the towers, so you won't be able to make a call five floors below ground in a bunker. Using a radio can be intercepted and heard from short distances. Opposing syndicates will consider this a threat and either investigate or call for backup (depending on their alert level)

Or last-known positions

Or the fact that corpses will attract enemies and can be used as distractions

That's more stealthy and in-depth than most stealth games. In an RPG.

 

[Moobabe]

I was reading through the page, and updates, and it's so exciting. Like when you look at the individual elements, it doesn't even seem like a cRPG at times.

Just consider the saving system, which you do with your radio

Or last-known positions

Or the fact that corpses will attract enemies and can be used as distractions

That's more stealthy and in-depth than most stealth games. In an RPG.

That's pretty cool - so no saving out of radio signal? I really need to sit and read through the updates.

 

[orthodoxy1095]

You all seem excited about this, so I just threw $15 in.

 

[Moobabe]

You all seem excited about this, so I just threw $15 in.

You're a good egg.

 

[Atenhaus]

I'm a sucker for cyberpunk games, so I pledged $15.

 

[Moobabe]

I'm a sucker for cyberpunk games, so I pledged $15.

We're gonna make it!

 

[Mejilan]

Ohhhhh, timely bump and reminder. In it for $35.

 

[More_Badass]

That's pretty cool - so no saving out of radio signal? I really need to sit and read through the updates.

Cause I got nothing better to do:

- An isometric 3d world, where every floor in every building can be seamlessly entered, from basement to rooftops
- Utilitarian black-market augmentations like chainsaw or harpoon arms, coiled legs, cloaking rigs, mobile scouting eyes
- Melee weapons and fully-customizable weapons, ranging from stocks and silencers to emp or incendiary rounds
- A deep complex stealth system that takes into account: line of sight and vision cones, noise, shadows, distance, height, crouching, cover, enemy patrols, distractions, hiding spots, last known position, alert levels, taking out lights and cameras, disabling/hacking security systems
- Turn-based combat with abstracted time (ie a thrown grenade takes time to travel its arc)
- Hands-off quest design revolving around intrigue and corporate espionage
- Day/night cycle and passage of time, which influences guard patrols, if you have time to rest, where a mission target will be, etc.
- A keyword-based dialogue system that dynamically creates queries based on information you know and items in your inventory
- Progression system that completely removes XP for actions, instead revolving around mission milestones, finding/buying better hardware, equipment, and cybernetics, and learning new skills from trainers
- A health system with no HP, instead using a combination of Lesser, Greater, and Mortal injuries (bullet graze, melted femur, pierced lung, etc.) that affect your stats, movement, and status of individual body parts

Given how committed they are to simulating and abstracting things, and giving you freedom to play how you want, I'd argue this might be more akin to an isometric immersive sim than a straight cRPG

 

[Nikodemos]

Juust a bit more!

 

[Sensuki]

I did an interview with Joe and Hannah yesterday. I didn't think that they were going to get on Matt Chat which was one of the reasons I did one, but I guess no harm in some overlap. Part 1 is mostly general stuff, Part 2 is the good bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfTLosJ_zls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giXbno0vn-0

 

[Great Poster]

Thanks for the reminder, in for $25

 

[More_Badass]

Less than $1k now

 

[NoblesseOblige]

Hope it makes it. I'd pledge more if I weren't int he process of moving and saving to buy a home.

 

[Moobabe]

So close now guys. I CAN TASTE IT!

 

[gngf123]

Under $500 to go, this will probably be funded in the next few hours.

I put in $15. Seems interesting.

 

[More_Badass]

100% funded, at long last

 

[Purkake4]

We did it, Reddit!

 

[Arulan]

That's a relief.

 

[gngf123]

Awesome to see this funded!

I wonder, with 2 days to go, if there is any chance of this hitting $50k. An extended soundtrack would be really good.

 

[Sinatar]

100% funded, at long last

Good shit.

 

[orthodoxy1095]

Glad to be part of that last push.

 

[gngf123]

Update #10 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1649838104/copper-dreams/posts/1599579

Talks about being funded, additional goals, modular reward purchases and alpha/beta testing.

 

[More_Badass]

And there it is. My most anticipated game is now getting made!

Seriously, the 24 hours or so before it was funded was like watching something teetering on the edge of a cliff. It would go up for a few dozen, then drop a hundred, and then go back up again, all while the game was at 99% funded.

 

[Purkake4]

This kind of experimental niche genre stuff also feels perfect for kickstarter. No huge series revival, million dollar concepts, just interesting thought out ideas with actual content to back them up.

 

[Purkake4]

Hey, it's up to 42.5k and there's still 8h to go.

 

[epmode]

I backed this. Felt bad about missing Serpent in the Staglands.

 

[More_Badass]

About 90 minutes to left

Here are many interesting details gleaned from the comments

On the game's open world

The game is designed to be quite open world. The island city is separated into district maps you can enter at will, some run by other syndicates, and any building within one of these maps needs to follow the framework setup for all of them — to be enterable and scalable. There are some areas on the island that are disconnected from the city proper that you can explore as well. The districts themselves sort of act as hubs with their own NPCs, structures and areas of interest, though your primary one is Wolffz Bay.

The extended world we have planned (thanks to the kickstarter!) has a lot of content planned; you’ll be getting a dense, full RPG experience. While some districts are hostile to Syndicate operatives (opposing Syndicates), you can travel anywhere you want. Anything from robbing estates, mission locations in factories, to chatting up (or again, robbing) the slums in the central districts. Resting, menial jobs and training can be done during rests, similar to something like Darklands where you choose activities for your adventure group in towns.

On the action time bar

When a character hits the action bar, they do need to choose an action (or skip), though there's a few ways you could stall that. We have mini-actions setup right now to progress you through to execute, and then pop the character back up to action to do another turn. This happens for things like opening your bag or crouching/standing. The alternative to that is a half-time on the wait timeline so you'd get there faster, which largely works the same but is more consistent with trajectory on that bar. We're playing with what will work best, but same outcome on those.

On flanking and enemies

Enemies will certainly react to grenades they see being thrown nearby, so as long as it's their turn and they can move in time before they explode. Enemies only know of what player characters they can see, so flanking them is optimal.

On gameplay length and character creation

The length of the campaign is dependent on how this Kickstarter turns out, but you could ballpark a very content heavy 20 hours at minimum. During character creation you'll be able to chose your sex, your face, three background jobs that influence your virtues (stats) and skills, and put points into virtues.

On the gameplay and story structure

I would describe the game as heavy on exploration. You could think of it as a combination of replicating p&p-like combat and the different tools and ways you can interact with the world and environment in a point and click adventure game (which is also meant to give you that p&p freedom). There’s a story weaving through the game, and how you’ll be able to influence it is pretty open ended.

Our goal is to give you a hands-off experience to discover conspiracies and hidden agendas to influence your syndicate completely on your own, and give you a character that has the means of doing that. Event-based jobs give structure to the gameplay, but there is a larger game being played by the syndicates and how you discover and influence that is the real story.

On armor and wounds

Armor types change a character's appearance. Each potential party member you can get has a unique character model that changes with different armors. That said ,we have a very open ended inventory system that doesn't have slots and allows you to equip most items without limitations. Various smaller equipment won’t necessarily have appearance changes, or would be too small to have a visual.

As for wounds, your party members don't actually lose limbs, (unless they have a robotic arm that currently is unequipped), but enemy deaths will visualize that. If you've rolled a high ailment amount of damage, or crit, whatever body part is hit will be blown off visually, and we have character models with separated limbs just for that reason. That's two things to hide though! If your characters are heavily wounded we will have various slower walk/limping animations, as well ones for being overloaded with gear. This has character movement speed hindrances as well, of course.

On biohacking and telekinesis

You can train you character in Biohacking, which will allow you to mind control enemies during their turns and outside of combat.You'll also be able to put points in Mental Stability during character creation which will keep the same from happening to you, and increasing your will and mental fortitude. Telekinesis is something we've discussed and would be one of those additions we'd love to add in if the Kickstarter is successful! Mechanically it would work really well with our physics-based items.

On cybernetic augmentations

You'll be able to replace your legs, torso, arms, and head, so by the end you could be mostly machine! Your left arm can be completely removed and exchanged for devices like the harpoon. Replacement of a character's whole head is rare, and leads to some repercussions like loss of speech or other senses. Cranium additions like an eye or sonar or plating are more common.

On the Copper Faces

Unfortunately for the guards chosen, their human brain (and head) are an unnecessary use of space for what the Mayflower Initiative purpose them for, and are much more optimized with it decapitated. This is highly expensive and cutting edge cybernetics — besides maybe Agro-Fax, the other syndicates can't come close to replicating this.

Replacing that is essentially a copper dome of sensors that relay to scout bots they keep in their inventory. These are deployed when they are searching for targets, and allows them to scout an entire area very quickly (unlike a normal guard who can only possess their own sight to determine target location).

While blind, Copper Faces have audio sensors and a primitive sonar reader, so they can still roughly detect targets without their bots but would be heavily crippled with their sensor dome fried.

Designing these guys were one of our early tests on how we could use stealth, environmental abilities, and NPC sensory AI to make for engaging, simulation based encounters with even just 1 enemy.

 

[Labadal]

Game was funded. $43,038. I liked SitS and I hope that I will enjoy this, too. It will be interesting to see how they implement one more axis in an isometric game. Grandia inspired combat and more.

 

[More_Badass]

Game was funded. $43,038. I liked SitS and I hope that I will enjoy this, too. It will be interesting to see how they implement one more axis in an isometric game. Grandia inspired combat and more.

It's pretty impressive that even though Copper Dreams and Serpent had around the same number of backers, this campaign gathered almost twice as much funding. $43,038 with 1,074 backers vs $28,058 with 1,092 backers

 

[More_Badass]

On Twitter, devs say there will be a big update "featuring mechanics, systems and art upgrades" coming very soon

 

[Purkake4]

On Twitter, devs say there will be a big update "featuring mechanics, systems and art upgrades" coming very soon

Good, I was starting to get a bit worried. I'm very exited to hear more about this.

 

[gngf123]

Big update just went live: https://www.kickstarter.com/project...reams/posts/1716283?ref=backer_project_update

 

[Labadal]

Big update just went live: https://www.kickstarter.com/project...reams/posts/1716283?ref=backer_project_update

Very nice. Will read now.

 

[Purkake4]

Big update just went live: https://www.kickstarter.com/project...reams/posts/1716283?ref=backer_project_update

Looking forward to the alpha. Not sure how I feel about the logo, but that's not the important thing.

 

[More_Badass]

Was going to ask on Twitter how development was coming along, and saw this from last week

Working on a massive Kickstarter update — might need to split it up. Smoother UI, better combat and some of the new GURPSy ruleset tables!

 

[Purkake4]

Was going to ask on Twitter how development was coming along, and saw this from last week

Glad to hear that it's moving along.

 

[whalenought_joe]

Hey! I just remembered my forum access was granted recently. I wanted to let you know our next update will be Monday, having a new combat overview as well as detailing some of the finalized game designs coming to the alpha. If you have any questions just let us know!

 

[Purkake4]

Nice, looking forward to it.

 

[KonradLaw]

Can't wait for this. Staglands were one of my favorite RPGs of last decade, right up there with Witcher 3. Such an underrated gem.

 

[More_Badass]

Big new update, with a lot of lovely talk about abstracting physical and personality traits as stats, plus combat improvements and new GIFs
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1649838104/copper-dreams/posts/1856072

Improved visuals and line of sight
https://ksr-video.imgix.net/assets/016/223/458/d90614e96f1ab68aa887503dcdefc9e8_h264_high.mp4

Combat changes and improvements
https://ksr-video.imgix.net/assets/016/223/366/51adfba6b8c687e5b381f245d15bf609_h264_high.mp4

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:

 

[Purkake4]

Really looking forward to this, there's never too many indie CRPGs.

 

[More_Badass]

Another new update, that explores the dialogue system
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1649838104/copper-dreams/posts/1867065

Our goal was to make dialogue another tool in the player's belt. Dialogue doesn't take away player agency, and is instead something that's either strictly for the player to get information from NPCs or playful banter — usually somewhere in-between. For Copper Dreams we came up with a few guidelines for dialogue:

- Never author events in dialogue that the player could use gameplay to actually play through. Limiting the large amount of tools we've given the player for gameplay to push some story/dialogue/cinematic would be insulting to the player and systems, and ultimately make a bad DM experience. Players need to be able to respond to dialogue or cinematic situations with ALL their tools and gameplay mechanics normally available.
- The player isn't important or destined for greatness, conversations need to reflect that. It's a dungeon crawl where you play as cyborg monsters, you're not sitting down for tea, so NPCs shouldn't be to open to a stranger like yourself.
- Allow player agency by making dialogue events predictable by making the tools at your disposal during conversation very consistent in their application. If you try to bribe one person, you can try to bribe them all, whenever you want during a dialogue.

Disposition Example

So for a simple conversation example the player tries talking to a non-hostile thug stationed near a dilapidated building.

A Closed DL [Disposition Level] would have the thug tell the player to shove off.

A Wary DL would present a piece of dialogue with limited tags, like [building] and [gang] to then be able to ask about.

An Open DL would give the player full access to the NPC tags, like [building], [gang], [trouble] and [missing], maybe allowing him to give the player warning that there is another gang nearby who is planning another raid on the area, and a few of the other guards went missing after patrolling through the building nearby. An easy cue for the player to venture into the dilapidated building with a little bit more caution.

In this situation, to give the player a voice, you could explore the building and head back to the thug, showing him a CiWar dog-tag of a gang member found in it to initiate the idea that you checked it out.

From outside combat you can use the same ‘SHOW' action for an item to anyone to initiate dialogue about the item if they know anything about it or will react to it. For instance inconspicuously navigating a hostile base under cover and showing fake identification to every guard you see for good measure. You can also initiate a conversation with any of the other rolls we talk bout below, or new ones you can train for.