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

[mediocrepoet]

1) If anything, I'm persistent;
2) My tolerance for jank is exagerately high;
3) My poverty-begotten ability to find gold while rumaging through shit can be quite handy;
4) I paid for it, and fucking hell I'm gonna have my way with it.

as soon as you embrace the dogma "you must finish a game 7 times before being elegible to talk about it" (an old running gag, but originated from someone whose name i can't recall who apparently believed in it for real) you'll fit here perfectly with the local autism.

Skyway (aka MetalCraze)

Also, you know when you play a new video game—especially RPGs and eurojank—and little by little in the middle of your first playthrough you slowly come to conceive how you'll manage your second playthrough in order to avoid all the little things that nag at you, that bring the overall experience down?

nope, not, never. i'm old, bitter and prone to fits of rage, it takes a very very truly excellent game for me not to ragequit and throw the discs into the blender

If you mean literally, please post a video of that. You could probably start a Patreon or something.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

If you mean literally, please post a video of that. You could probably start a Patreon or something.

that'd be nothing new, i've seen it multiple times with last of us 2 already. but they were all asians with a smile on their faces.

 

[Diggfinger]

Oh and welcome to the forum

Thanks, fellow belgian. Reading that review, it truly looks like an entirely different game. Impressive—in a bad way—how much the end product differs from what once was.

Don't hesitate to tell me if nobody gives a shit about this game and if I should stop spamming this thread, but I'm having one hell of a weirdly fun week-end with Mechajammer. I hate this game; yet in a loving fashion.
Ever had a girlfriend who is not really pretty, nor really smart, nor even really interesting or funny, but she's possessed of a certain je ne sais quoi? Mostly you wonder why you're with her (and your friends wonder, too), but then you catch her in a somewhat dim, flattering light and angle, doing or saying something that tickles a cord in you, and so you think to yourself, "Oh yeah, that's why." Well, that's Mechajammer for me, sort of.
.

Yes, its called 'anal-sex'.

Either that or she swallows EVERYtime




Glad you carry on the torch.
the game changed so much I would have to start all over to understand it

 

[Dhaze]

nope, not, never. i'm old, bitter and prone to fits of rage, it takes a very very truly excellent game for me not to ragequit and throw the discs into the blender when i face stupid bugs or, even worse, issues which would have been avoided with just a pinch of common sense. last one i forgave for its sins must have been bloodlines.

To this day I remain of two minds on that.

On one hand, exact same as you, save the 'prone to fits of rage' part. I can't stand bugs and absurd design decisions that should have been respectively corrected and modified on day 1. Some stuff I can't believe makes it to the release version when every play- or beta-tester has decried it for months or years; only for the devs to realise the extent of their mistake one month after the botched launch of their game—oft times irrecuperable launch, as is the case here. I simply don't get it, and I don't want to waste time on that.

On the other hand, for every game I've instantly considered as bordering on impeccably irreproachable (Myth & Myth 2; Marathon: Durandal; HeXen: Beyond Heretic; Tengai Makyo Zero; Nioh 2; things like that), I know of dozens upon dozens of games I've come to appreciate or sometimes outright love only through what can be qualified as tenacity, if not outright stubbornness. Unlimited SaGa took me what? 12 or 15 tries before it clicked. Even E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy took me multiple tries before finding a coign to grab hold of—said coign being hearing the sound made by the Croon HS010 when fired on its fuller-than-full auto mode, whereupon I decided that no, guys who can make their guns sound like a violent machine-god can't have created a game I won't love.

I think I quite like Mechajammer. It's not a good game. Not by a long shot. In all seriousness, I would advise against playing it. It's fecund with warts and pus, and it reeks like a hellish midden, and the failure of its launch and post-launch is, perhaps cruelly, deserved; too many bad decisions taken in incessant succession for too long a development time. But there's something to it. I can see the good ideas and the talent marred by the dreadful execution and failure to plan. I think the devs would have benefited greatly from a good publisher to slap them across the face and force them to pick a lane and stick to it for longer than an afternoon.

If anything, Mechajammer might be the poster child in the pushback against the idea that devs being unbound by the evil pressures applied by the evil publishers and/or backers is absolutely always a good thing.

The general motivation you're displaying reminds me of why I played through Deus Ex: Invisible War. Just stunningly bad.

See, Invisible War I don't dare try. I've heard the tales, but I love the original Deus Ex, I do not regret in the least my playthroughs of Human Revolution and Content Divided, and I'm really afraid that Invisible War would stain the whole series if I played it.

Yes, its called 'anal-sex'.

Hey! We dated the same girl!

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I think I quite like Mechajammer. It's not a good game.

i know the feeling, i loved plenty of shit. but in the last 20 years, and getting worse and worse, it seems like that people can't distinguish between personal taste and objective value, not "i like it because it's good" but "it's good because i like it", and behind it there's pretty much always "and i like it because journos told me so". one of those places i've been more than happy to leave behind because i had been told "this is the fallout 4 thread, if you want to speak ill of it open your own one". i met the codex one day, as an inexperienced journo myself, i was drowning in insults and death threats (not joking) because apparently i was the only one in the world thrashing oblivion, and i wanted to check if i truly was the only one.
it's been love at first sight.

See, Invisible War I don't dare try.

lucky fella.

 

[Gradenmayer]

I give this 3 artstyle swaps out of 10.

 

[Dhaze]

I think I quite like Mechajammer. It's not a good game.

i know the feeling, i loved plenty of shit. but in the last 20 years, and getting worse and worse, it seems like that people can't distinguish between personal taste and objective value, not "i like it because it's good" but "it's good because i like it", and behind it there's pretty much always "and i like it because journos told me so".

For better and for worse, video games have been heavily democratised in that span of time. And a lot of people irremediably tie their intrinsic self-worth to what they like or love; thus what they like or love must be good, otherwise they themselves are not. Shitty fourteen-year-old logic some people never outgrow.

I think the last constructive and healthily dispassionate discussion I held online about the flaws of a very good video game were anent Salt & Sanctuary, in the days immediately following its publication in 2016. Meaning before the game gained a certain traction, and its own set of fanboys who could not suffer a slight to their newfound love. Weird stuff, that.

The Nioh community on Reddit was also—and I think still remains—surprisingly healthy. Conceivably a strange effect of Nioh having long been considered a 'shitty japanese-set Souls clone'. The fans didn't care, loved the game for what it was and no more, and trolls were left unanswered. Nice sub, for Reddit.

On topic: I found a potentially interesting Hacking Taser.

Perhaps a unique item. Now to find some robots to hack! Of course I had just recently wiped a whole warehouse full of them, and these don't seem to respawn... Oh well, with a bit of luck, my brain-damaged, asocial farmer of a character will soon have robot followers on top of a dozen of gun drones. There might be some mecha in this jammer after all.

 

[Darkwind]

By the way, I re-skimmed through this thread, and the development cycle of this game is worse than I remembered. On page 71 there are a couple of images and a .gif. Relatively clear and precise artstyle; awesome portrait of that blonde woman with an eyepatch; ability to rotate camera; some measure of wall transparency/ghosting. Where did all that go? Almost seems like a different game.

That is utterly insane. It truly does look like a different game. They went from that which showed great potential to this blurry pixel art mess. I guess the budget was spent 'elsewhere' but damn, what could have been...

 

[mediocrepoet]

By the way, I re-skimmed through this thread, and the development cycle of this game is worse than I remembered. On page 71 there are a couple of images and a .gif. Relatively clear and precise artstyle; awesome portrait of that blonde woman with an eyepatch; ability to rotate camera; some measure of wall transparency/ghosting. Where did all that go? Almost seems like a different game.

That is utterly insane. It truly does look like a different game. They went from that which showed great potential to this blurry pixel art mess. I guess the budget was spent 'elsewhere' but damn, what could have been...

Years of faffing about designing like 14 different games before randomly stopping and releasing what they had at that time. It's like the game dev version of musical chairs.

 

[grimace]

Out of spite and sheer stupidity, I'm almost compelled to wade through the nauseating bog of bugs this game is just to finish it, because at this point I seriously doubt anyone has or ever will.

I briefly entertained similar thoughts but there is a very good chance the game is not completable under any circumstances. And even if it is possible, it would be very hard to tell whether you're making progress or whether you've done something wrong that has doomed your game to fail.

I politely request that Joe and Hannah play thru the game and vocalize so we can hear them speak to us as they play thru the game to completion.

Give us a running commentary, how to play tutorial, and leveling up and advancing all the way to completion.

 

[grimace]

Ultimately, the romances were removed in the end. No love for this.

 

[Tyranicon]

I'm obviously biased, but I don't personally see the need to rake Joe and Hannah over the coals for this. At least it wasn't a kickstarter scam, and they delivered a final product. Sure, the game itself is probably bad, but that's not something that devs with the best intentions can entirely control. Sometimes shit happens, and people with great ideas aren't always good at executing on them. In fact, it's kinda rare.

Also, they sold their house for and spent/wasted close to 7 years on this game, which is WTF territory.

Out of all the projects that have come here to the codex, this is probably one of the better ones, which really tells you that you should stay the hell away from gamedev. You'll go crazy and broke.

 

[Dhaze]

The worst part being, I think, that without the unbelievable galore of bugs and glitches, Mechajammer would most likely have done all right at launch. Forget the lack of common-sense, quality-of-life stuff such as being able to move with WASD or by holding down mouse, rather than having to click click click click click click click. Forget even the unresponsiveness, and all the little nags of a like nature.

Just no bugs. That would not erase all the other stuff, but could serve to make it palatable and less confusing. Truly it's the constant—and I mean constant, to the point of making me anxious—bugs that mar the game the most.

 

[grimace]

I'm obviously biased, but I don't personally see the need to rake Joe and Hannah over the coals for this.

Whalenought has created an ambitious art project with interesting and unique designs.

They have delivered a project to Modern Wolf who rushed them to deliver something too early to Steam that wasn't released as EARLY ACCESS.

Gamedev and art are passions of Joe and Hannah and copperdreams/mechajammer is a passion project. I am very interested in hearing the story of this project from them with all the warts and blemishes and struggles and dramas. That post mortem may be a few years away.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I'm obviously biased, but I don't personally see the need to rake Joe and Hannah over the coals for this.

If that's how any of my posts come across, that's actually not my intention. I'm irritated the project didn't turn out, but I have no doubt that they had sincerely good intentions but fell down on the project/business management side of things. It sucks, but whatever. Hopefully they'll learn from it and move on to something better, whether still independently or working with/for someone else.

Contrast this with my thoughts about say... Chaos Chronicles. hobgoblin can burn in hell.

 

[Dhaze]

Right, so, I think I've found a particularly good series of event to show how everything might go wrong at any time.

There is a faction, a syndicate, called Fastlane. Basically they're delivery guys with bikes and guns. For a reason I fail to grasp, at some point in my game they became hostile towards me, and death squads of their drivers would spawn seemingly at random. So I thought I'd destroy them and do away with that annoyance.

I went to their base, but got my ass handed to me. There are dozens and dozens of them, many on bikes who ran me over repeatedly, and I found it difficult to sneak about due to the sheer numbers of them and not many shadowy places. So I retreated outside their base, went GTA on a passerby and his vehicle, then came back crashing my way through the gate, running over the Fastlane guys that were on foot, all the while swerving left and right to avoid shots fired at me by many guys on their bikes, trying to find the boss as quickly as I could.

That was good, god's-honest fun.

Earlier I mentionned having found a Hacking Gun; well guess what I found near the back of the Fastlane base?

Great! Since the Fastlane boss is near, now is as good a time as any to add Bots to my small contingent of drones. So I equip the Hacking Gun, and fire away.

Hack Robot Roll Succeeded! 13 vs 10 — Rolled [3] [3] [1] [1] (Mod: +5 Pip) | nota bene: for some reason her my pips are mentionned in the log, when most of the time they're not...
Great stuff; it works!

Well no. Actually it doesn't work. As you can see from the number in the upper-right corner, a few turns have passed since the previous screenshot, and I keep succeeding at the Hacking roll, and the Secure Bot keeps attacking me. So, what the hell is supposed to happen? No clue.

So, fuck it says I, if cunning won't work, I'll to resort to the basest violence there is: shoving a sharp piece of metal into the faces of the Fastlane guys and their boss. Here he his, surrounded by his retinue:

But before I could actually sweep his feet with my spear to knock him down (I supposed he had a lot of HPs, and I wouldn't be able to kill him in one hit; that's happened before with other bosses), he blasted what seemed to be a volley of flack ammo from a slug rifle, and cleanly one-shotted me. Shit. But wait!

Fuck yeah! Gun Drone to the rescue with the successful roll to revive me. I love these little guys, seriously. So I'm revived.

Wait... what the hell? First of all, no wonder I died; I have 50 hits points, and look at that damage in the log. But of greater import: somehow 112 turns have elapsed and why in God's name are we now in a completely different part of the Fastline base? Also, note how the hexagons at the enemies' and my drones' feet are devoid of coloring? Yeah, that's because for some reason, none but my character is actually engaged in the fight. This is confirmed with the following:

Check the log. I used my Laser Spear to sweep the boss' legs, and succeeded. I have 2 dices in the Quietness attributes, which nets me x2 damage against unaware enemies, and indeed my damage against the boss—who stood right in front of me in plain light!—was doubled.
Gang destroyed; boss defeated; and all his goons instantly despawned.

But the brokenness doesn't stop here. See, each syndicate boss possesses his own unique key. This key is used either as proof-of-kill to convince a rival syndicate that you indeed did what you might have been tasked to do, or is used to open the vault of that syndicate you've just eradicated.
So, knowing that some shit went wrong, I reloaded an earlier save and this time one-shotted the Fastline boss.

Ok, now the game fully acknowledges I killed the boss. Better.

And on the ground is the Fastline Vault Key, dropped by the boss, as I know is intended.

So there you have it. This game is the embodiment and very quintessence of Murphy's law; everything that might go wrong goes wrong. And it's like that a every single step I take. Maddening stuff.

 

[PEACH]

They have delivered a project to Modern Wolf who rushed them to deliver something too early

Too what?

 

[Ninjerk]

Dhaze you sure know how to spin a yarn

 

[mediocrepoet]

Dhaze almost makes this sound fun, except that the jank exceeds my tolerance level by at least an order of magnitude. Well, shit.

 

[Dhaze]

Too what?

Too early... during the first phase of the 27th visual overhaul.

Dhaze you sure know how to spin a yarn

Oh, there's a Spinner Of Nightmares or Nightmare Weaver joke in there.

Dhaze almost makes this sound fun, except that the jank exceeds my tolerance level by at least an order of magnitude. Well, shit.

That's why I say that were it not for the plethora of bugs, there would be some good fun to be had in Mechajammer.
There's the 'natural' fun, so to speak; the fun the game should naturally provide with its art, ideas and mechanics. But despite being not so rarely found, it is ever short-lived because as soon as you near the next corner of gameplay, you can hear a group of rapacious bugs and glitches prowling in the nearby shadows, waiting to rape you into buyer's remorse.
But sadly there is, mostly, the meta fun. The fun you experience by peeking through the cracks that web the very foundation on which the game rests, and by gawking pervertedly at how badly said foundation has been laid.

Here's some more stuff.

I made my way to the Cyberfreaks part of the map, intending to strike a bargain with their boss as I had done by happenstance in my first playthrough. Though I mostly wanted to check if a certain bug I had experienced would reoccur (spoiler: it did).

In this video you'll see my character in the middle of a conversation with the boss—and see how deep into the dialogue tree I had to dig in order to convince him to ally with me and mine... Between 0:10 and 0:20, looking right next and bellow my character, you can also see how some enemies tend to simply bug out and freeze forever into shadowed or two-tones versions of themselves.

But moreover pay attention to the log in the bottom right of the corner. After the alliance has been concluced, I'm awarded 1000xp as recompense for my shrewd diplomatic skills. Then I talk to the boss a second time, because why not see what he might say; and receive another 1000xp. A third time; and 1000xp. And again and again and again.



You can do it as many times as you want. When I started this, my character had less than 20,000xp. I reached level 31 at 65,000xp, and the character sheet indicated the next level situated at 100,000. Some concentrated autism later (I'm currently re-painting my apartment, so literally waiting for paint to dry), I was nearing that sum, and given the big numbers involved suspected that 32 would be the level cap.

Then I hit 100,000xp, with some overflow.

Yup. No level 32. Instead of locking itself in one way or another once the level cap of 31 has been attained, the xp bar leads you to believe that for the modest sum of 55% of your total xp at that time there's another level in reach. Now that's just nasty trolling bait, as far as I'm concerned.

 

[AdolfSatan]

Best LP ever. Please don't stop the madness, I wanna know if the game is even finishable at all.

 

[Dhaze]

If it's finishable, I'll do it.

Amongst my greatest fears are that, at some point, the game might simply break or stop functionning. I installed the game on a M.2 SSD, and my computer is spotless and has no trouble running anything else, but the simple act of launching the game is already touch-and-go, as mechajammer.exe devours nearly all my RAM for a solid two minutes, slowing itself and my computer before finally settling to a much more reasonable 2Go of RAM used. At times while I play the average fps briefly plummets, and the whole game stutters massively while simultaneously every in-game sounds crackles as if I was listening to some mid-90's german power noise.

Quick question for those who might know: I periodically create backups of my saves in case they get corrupted, but even that seems weird, as each save is apparently 671 .es3 files. Has anyone ever seen that high a number of files for a single save?

 

[thesheeep]

Quick question for those who might know: I periodically create backups of my saves in case they get corrupted, but even that seems weird, as each save is apparently 671 .es3 files. Has anyone ever seen that high a number of files for a single save?

I can't know for certain, of course, but that sounds like each save for some absurd reason stores possibly every single area's state (or something else the game needs to have many instances of) in its own file.

I've definitely seen that approach used in other games - usually devs are competent enough to at least put everything into one archived file so that you don't have to open/close hundreds of files per save. I guess we are beyond the point of hoping for great programming competence from those two...

But sometimes you can see stuff like that in other games too.
600+ is a lot of areas, though - or whatever the game has 600+ things of.

They have delivered a project to Modern Wolf who rushed them to deliver something too early

Too what?

Rushed?!

 

[Dhaze]

Quick question for those who might know: I periodically create backups of my saves in case they get corrupted, but even that seems weird, as each save is apparently 671 .es3 files. Has anyone ever seen that high a number of files for a single save?

I can't know for certain, of course, but that sounds like each save for some absurd reason stores possibly every single area's state (or something else the game needs to have many instances of) in its own file.

I've definitely seen that approach used in other games - usually devs are competent enough to at least put everything into one archived file so that you don't have to open/close hundreds of files per save. I guess we are beyond the point of hoping for great programming competence from those two...

But sometimes you can see stuff like that in other games too.
600+ is a lot of areas, though - or whatever the game has 600+ things of.

Thanks for the answer. And I think you're right. Looking now as I played a bit more, the list of files in my most recent save has grown to 745 files, and looks like this:

But beyond that: excitement aplenty! Not kidding, I am genuinely excited by some of the developments in my playthrough.

I found my way into an estate, and given that I had to wander a bit in a dark, leafy maze full of guard dogs, I did not feel welcome. Then I activated some mechanism, a passage was revealed, and came that guy:

Well sorry sir, but I was actually sent here by a guy working at the Quinton's office, so, pretty sure that's gotta be a clerical error. Not my fault.

The "Ok" floored me. That right there is some classic JC Denton "What a shame..." attitude.

A few seconds later, I emerge from the labyrinth, and find myself facing a lot of good boys—some thirteen real angry puppers.

13 guard dogs vs. 7 drones. Always one to appreciate a spectacle, I decide to sit this one out and watch the carnage spread while wreathed in comfortable shadows.

Oh boy... I... Oh boy.

Further still into the estate I encounter an enemy drone.

We now know that my drones make a very nice, pulpy kind of paste with dogs, but what happens when they face another drone?

A surprising amount of blood is what happens. There has to be some wetware in those shells.

Further still, now into a building proper, I (the human player) guess the user name required to access a computer, then I (the in-game character) hack it because I don't know the password and don't like to search through people's drawers. Accessing and using this computer opens a huge reinforced door, behind which I'm greeted with a piece of paper. An infodump follows, and as much as I usually dislike these, for once I won't complain since this is the first real meaty bit of story I get to chew on.

That is a lot of information.

1) it mentions, "Agro-Fax latest biolab creations." I've seen that in my previous playthrough, and let's just say the Agro-Fax guys on that island are straight up not having a good time right now.

2) Atlantean catacombs. Ok, cool, I'm curious about that. I love me some catacombs-dwelling shenanigans.

3) Rumors the executives have decided to take a sabbatical on another colony. And I have learned, through the buying of a local newspaper, that right now these executives are probably located in the northernmost part of the map.

Still, worry gnaws at the back of my dumb-as-a-stump farmer mind. Indeed I have also find this here item:

And with all this talk of psionic forces, I am now worried that the definition of the Occult attribute—which mentions protecting the mind against strange forces—might well be more grounded than I had first thought. With naught a dice in Occult, what's gonna happen to me? Will I be mind-raped or -flayed? Hopefully my Laser Spear Of Sniping Death as well as my Drones can prove useful against any Atlantean Illithids slithering below Calitana.

Furthermore, I have now learned about the Quarrymen, who used a very gutteral(sic) language, and largely utilitized(sic) (seriously did nobody check for typos on what is so far the only text longer than two short sentences?) visual color cues when communicating. Holy shit I know what that is! In a previous post I mentionned having stumbled onto a sort of voice or tone puzzle in the game. Well, that puzzle also included colors, and guess what clue I just found?

Ah! I have a full-on, flexible-yet-potent chub right now. I know where to go next, and have an idea about what to do there. That is some actual, tangible, and seemingly bug-free progress.

But alas, alas, three times alas! misfortune has it that cruel tragedy doth strike us when at our happiest. For verily a dark development occurs:

Oh fuck you Barry. Fuck you. I was well on my way to progressing towards the end, unimpeded, and now I have to save your ugly ass; plus you're named Barry, and that alone sucks massively.

 

[thesheeep]

Who is Barry?

I kind of lost the story after the first hour of the game