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

[Zombra]

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

Does anyone remember what they originally described? I vaguely recall it was similar to a phase-based system? How about a quote?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

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

Does anyone remember what they originally described? I vaguely recall it was similar to a phase-based system? How about a quote?

Jim the Dinosaur I saw your post in the shoutbox from last week. The game will be turn-based, but with simultaneous real-time resolution. It's slightly different from phase-based where everyone acts at the same time. It's this weird middle ground between turn-based, phase-based and real-time xD

Units will roll for initiative and be placed in a turn order, each turn will be separated by a discrete unit of time.

When the game comes to a player unit's turn, the game will stop and wait for player input. When the player issues a command to their unit, the game will play out the unit's issued command in real-time until the next player unit turn where the game will stop and wait for player input again. When a unit has completed their turn, they will go back into the wait queue.

It's still a turn-based game because each unit will have their own discrete turn and the game stops and waits for a player's input on their turn. The game is bereft of the time-critical element that many people dislike about RT/wP combat. The staggered simultaneous real-time resolution of unit actions is different though and one of the things I've been focusing my feedback on is helping to make sure that the game takes advantage of the strengths of this unique combat system.

Recently in another thread I gave an example of how the use of grenades will likely differ from straight turn-based (or phase-based). In turn-based games usually you select a grenade, click where you want to throw it and the animation plays and you deal some damage to targets in the area of effect. In Copper Dreams, grenades will take time to throw and time to explode, so if you just throw a grenade at some enemies, they might move out of the AoE explosion radius if their turn is coming up soon - so you will have to use strategy, tactics, movement and positioning to make your grenade throws count.

Sensuki, I hope you understand that if this game system lead by you fails we will force you to apologize to Sawyer

It's not led by me. I did not create the system at all. Hannah and Joe did. I really like the system they came up with and have made an effort to understand how it works, to provide useful feedback.

Can you queue actions? That's required to maximize your efficiency when using actions that take less than the space of a turn. Probably too complex to design the UI for it though.

The system is designed so that a unit can perform one action per turn. Some actions include an optional short move but I believe if they don't take it, they'll go back into the wait queue faster than other characters.

How I think these 'combined' actions will work (from what Joe and I discussed) is that if the player wants to move a unit first they'll click the action(button or hotkey) that allows a short move and place a dummy/ghost avatar of the unit where they want to move it and then click an enemy to attack with the action they've selected. That unit will then first move to the position selected and make the attack from that position. If they want to move after - they'll select the action(button/hotkey) click the enemy with the action they've selected and then place the dummy avatar and the unit will perform the attack animation and then move to the designated location. Placing the dummy avatar in the same location makes you not move (I think).

Hopefully that sounds intuitive and simple to perform but obviously there will need to be some designation somewhere in the UI itself - most likely in a hover tooltip - as to which actions include a short move, and also somewhere that explains how they work.

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?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

also, this KS update is a revamped version but still(I think) has the spirit of the original design, with gifs to showcase
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1649838104/copper-dreams/posts/1940200

 

[Zombra]

Sounds a lot like Final Fantasy VI "Active Time Battle" system.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Sounds a lot like Final Fantasy VI "Active Time Battle" system.

There's quite a few JRPGs and blobbers with this sort of combat system but it's much easier to implement when you're using more of a theater of the mind style combat rather than tactical grid.

 

[Zombra]

Also sounds like any TB game where turns are queued based on unit speed, not just "you go then I go". Wasteland 2 comes to mind.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Also sounds like any TB game where turns are queued based on unit speed, not just "you go then I go". Wasteland 2 comes to mind.

Unless I'm not remembering correctly, Wasteland 2 actions aren't asynchronous.

His action is he fires the bullet(this does not happen immediately), time then begins ticking, the gun fires, the bullet begins traveling, and then the game pauses for his turn again while the bullet is mid-flight.

This deceptively looks a lot like RTwP to the viewer, but it's turn-based.

 

[Zombra]

By 'asynchronous', you mean that actions aren't resolved instantly (i.e. grenades hang around for a sec, bullets take time to travel etc.)? I don't think any turn-based game does that; I suspect not even Grandia (which I never played). There have certainly been games where say a bomb will wait to go off until next turn but I've never seen them have their own initiative score.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

By 'asynchronous', you mean that actions aren't resolved instantly (i.e. grenades hang around for a sec, bullets take time to travel etc.)?

Yes.

I don't think any turn-based game does that;

There are some like Frozen Synapse. Not aware of any RPGs, which is why I was interested.

 

[Zombra]

By 'asynchronous', you mean that actions aren't resolved instantly (i.e. grenades hang around for a sec, bullets take time to travel etc.)?

Yes.

Cool. FYI, I believe the term 'asynchronous games' generally refers to multiplayer games where turns are submitted when the other players are not necessarily present, instead of all players having to be online at once (hence 'asynchronous' as gameplay does not have to occur at the same (synchronized) time for everyone). A simple example is postal chess. So I got confused when you used that term in a different context.

I don't think any turn-based game does that;

There are some like Frozen Synapse. Not aware of any RPGs, which is why I was interested.

Another terminology lesson - I believe the correct term for FS is "phase-based", where all unit moves are planned at once, and then all executed simultaneously. This is distinct from "turn-based" where units take, well, turns; which occur separately and are resolved in order.

 

[Lyre Mors]

You can tell when rusty is really bored because he starts digging through ancient pages of threads and quoting 5 year old posts.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

By 'asynchronous', you mean that actions aren't resolved instantly (i.e. grenades hang around for a sec, bullets take time to travel etc.)?

Yes.

Cool. FYI, I believe the term 'asynchronous games' generally refers to multiplayer games where turns are submitted at different times, instead of all players having to be online at once (hence 'asynchronous' as gameplay does not have to occur at the same (synchronized) time for everyone). So I got confused. A simple example is postal chess.

I don't think any turn-based game does that;

There are some like Frozen Synapse. Not aware of any RPGs, which is why I was interested.

Another terminology lesson - I believe the correct term for FS is "phase-based", where all unit moves are planned at once, and then all executed simultaneously. This is distinct from "turn-based" where units take, well, turns; which occur separately and are resolved in order.

I don't think there's any good terminology to refer to this type of game(as was originally envisioned) because there's no good examples of it.

This does exist in a form in tabletop RPGs, the mechanic is typically referred to as a 'shot clock'. Aces and Eights & Feng Shui are two games I'm aware of that use this, there's probably others. I'm not aware of any RPGs using grid-based combat using such a system though.
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/11573/how-is-the-shot-clock-used-in-aces-and-eights

 

[Mortmal]

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

Better be backer and have hope than sitting on your ass complain all day and not get anything done. Not much money was lost at least we tried to encourage... something.

 

[mediocrepoet]

You can tell when rusty is really bored because he starts digging through ancient pages of threads and quoting 5 year old posts.

It's like twisting the knife in this case. Like: Hey, remember when this looked like it was going to be good?

Yeah! Thanks for kicking me in the balls again, pal!

 

[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

Better be backer and have hope than sitting on your ass complain all day and not get anything done. Not much money was lost at least we tried to encourage... something.

My philosophy is that if you aren't willing to subsist off tumeric and ginger roots you aren't gonna make it.

 

[Tyranicon]

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

Better be backer and have hope than sitting on your ass complain all day and not get anything done. Not much money was lost at least we tried to encourage... something.

My philosophy is that if you aren't willing to subsist off tumeric and ginger roots you aren't gonna make it.

I dunno, to my knowledge, Pierre didn't sell his house to fund his game like these guys supposedly did.

Benefit of hindsight and all that, but they should've stuck to the original kickstarter vision. It was what their backers wanted.

 

[Dhaze]

Soundtrack is great tho.

I've said it multiple times before, and I'll say it again: the soundtrack is fantastic. What pain that it's attached to such a broken game, what pain...

If tomorrow I'm diagnosed with terminal cancer and get to enter into some sort of make-a-wish deal, like they have for kids, I'll be spending that wish by forcing Harebrained Scheme to create another Shadowrun game, this time with Kevin Balke working on the soundtrack.

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:

That concept made it into the game. If you don't invest enough in your Learning attribute, various texts are indeed garbled to varying degrees. But during my playthrough this seemed true only for non-essential text, i.e. flavor text or road signs. Every bit of crucial text was clearly readable no matter what.

Unfortunately, I suspect the devs painted themselves into a corner, as it's a neat idea but one that requires a lot of thought and planning to be executed properly. For example there's a point where you need a key to enter the Temple Of The Faith, and if I remember correctly said key is being held by Sora, whose location—an unhackable code-locked appartment—you can only learn by reading a piece of paper. In the game as it is now, if your character couldn't read that information, you could not progress further unless you're willing to brute-force every code or puzzle in the game.

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.

It's damnably late and I can't sleep and I've a jackhammer-like headache that's working overtime, so apologies if what follows isn't clear enough.

The short of it is: think of Grandia with a couple of tweaks.

The longer version is that, basically, every actor in a fight—including you of course—has his own time-based turn. Also, various actions take various amount of time to execute, and projectiles like bullets take time to travel. All that is somewhat centered around your own turn. So what happens is that when combat is initiated everyone rolls for initiative, and time/combat freezes only when comes your turn to act. You announce your action, then time resumes its flow and so everyone—again, including you—resumes their asynchronous actions.

It's... a bit chaotic. Like most everything in Mechajammer, the idea is neat but suffers from bad implementation.

It could be interesting; if I could tell, clearly tell, that an enemy is raising his arm to throw a grenade, I could decide to run out of the way. But between the muddy graphics, the weird models, and the poor animations, it's often impossible to tell whether an ennemy is walking or readying some action or even what action they're currently undertaking. Add terrible balance and the almost complete absence of things like crowd control, and you end up with a weird mess in which straigth damage wins everytime.

Now on a related subject, this bit you quoted

Recently in another thread I gave an example of how the use of grenades will likely differ from straight turn-based (or phase-based). In turn-based games usually you select a grenade, click where you want to throw it and the animation plays and you deal some damage to targets in the area of effect. In Copper Dreams, grenades will take time to throw and time to explode, so if you just throw a grenade at some enemies, they might move out of the AoE explosion radius if their turn is coming up soon - so you will have to use strategy, tactics, movement and positioning to make your grenade throws count.

is painful, painful indeed. Putting aside the usual confounding-cum-conflation of the words 'strategy' and 'tactics', and the fact that 'movement and positioning' is 'tactics', well, there's none of that whatsoever when it comes to grenades.

Because if you throw a grenade on the ground, it explodes fine and well. But if you throw a grenade straight into an enemy's face, intending to douse him in flaming chemicals... the grenade doesn't explode. Instead it acts as if a thrown rock in that it inflicts something like 1d6 damage. So even if the combat was backed by clear visuals, it would still be crippled by stupid bugs like this one—which I reported, before noticing that others had already done so on the Discord channel, months prior.

 

[Sensuki]

I dunno, to my knowledge, Pierre didn't sell his house to fund his game like these guys supposedly did.

Benefit of hindsight and all that, but they should've stuck to the original kickstarter vision. It was what their backers wanted.

From memory they invested in buying a house (possibly using the KS money?), and 'flipped' it for a profit after a few years.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

That concept made it into the game. If you don't invest enough in your Learning attribute, various texts are indeed garbled to varying degrees. But during my playthrough this seemed true only for non-essential text, i.e. flavor text or road signs. Every bit of crucial text was clearly readable no matter what.

Unfortunately, I suspect the devs painted themselves into a corner, as it's a neat idea but one that requires a lot of thought and planning to be executed properly. For example there's a point where you need a key to enter the Temple Of The Faith, and if I remember correctly said key is being held by Sora, whose location—an unhackable code-locked appartment—you can only learn by reading a piece of paper. In the game as it is now, if your character couldn't read that information, you could not progress further unless you're willing to brute-force every code or puzzle in the game.

The issue seems to me that they designed not being able to read as a bane, instead of being able to read as a boon.
Contrast e.g., being able to speak Spanish in Fallout Sonora. Not required to complete the game, but there are NPCs who can only speak Spanish.

 

[True Ukrainian]

An illiterate protagonist is fine, you could play KCD as a complete illiterate and still solve the main quest line. But you need to give the player alternate routes to get the same information, like interrogating captives. And you need to be willing to let players outright fail certain side quests because their character can't read.

 

[Tyranicon]

I dunno, to my knowledge, Pierre didn't sell his house to fund his game like these guys supposedly did.

Benefit of hindsight and all that, but they should've stuck to the original kickstarter vision. It was what their backers wanted.

From memory they invested in buying a house (possibly using the KS money?), and 'flipped' it for a profit after a few years.

Oh, that's not too bad. The way they worded it, and coinciding with their own move back to seattle, made it sound like they sold the house they were living in.

 

[Dhaze]

The issue seems to me that they designed not being able to read as a bane, instead of being able to read as a boon.
Contrast e.g., being able to speak Spanish in Fallout Sonora. Not required to complete the game, but there are NPCs who can only speak Spanish.

That's a good point; I had not considered it.

Plus it would have made sense in the setting of Calitana, a city whose inhabitants are, more likely than not, uneducated.

 

[True Ukrainian]

The issue seems to me that they designed not being able to read as a bane, instead of being able to read as a boon.
Contrast e.g., being able to speak Spanish in Fallout Sonora. Not required to complete the game, but there are NPCs who can only speak Spanish.

That's a good point; I had not considered it.

Plus it would have made sense in the setting of Calitana, a city whose inhabitants are, more likely than not, uneducated.

But it doesn't make sense for the player character who is an off worlder.

 

[Dhaze]

I wanted to elaborate on that, but I was fuzzy on some details thus my post was sort of an incomplete thought. Shouldn't have posted, but oh well.

It's true the main character is an off-worlder, a deserter from the Earth Collective, but the game tells us almost nothing anent said Collective and its hiring policies regarding such things as literacy. It seems to me entirely plausible that while the Earth Collective obviously requires some highly-educated troops, other soldiers might well be dumb, illiterate muscle.

More, the game offers a wide variety of backgrounds during character creation, and while some directly imply good education, others go the opossite way;

– Homeless: "Government wellfare funds dried up during the first year of the Ci-War, as millions of refugees poured into the safe walls of the cities. You were one of the many fighting for shelter in alleys and tent cities."

– Pickpocket: "Forced to the streets without the right birth kit and right bank account, you turned to petty theft to fill your stomach."

– Looter: "Like a rat, you rummaged in the hills of trash surrounding the city walls. Competition was fierce, but you usually managed to gather enough to sell or eat."

– Dock Worker: "Syndicates ship goods across the oceans on hulking ships stuffed with expensive cargo. You'd never been quick of wit, but you knew your way around a forklift."

– Street Doctor: "You never had a formal education, but you knew the basics of first aid and could stitch up a knife wound or remove a bullet with the same keen hand as a syndicate doctor."

And on top of that, we know through Pelican that your character and companions were "serving time", i.e. they probably did not come into the Earth Collective's folds out of their own volition.

Meaning that in the end, your character might be a 20-year-old almost uneducated guy or gall, forcibly hired as cannon fodder by the Earth Collective, who saw no benefit in furthering what little education you might have, as they only cared about your ability to fight. In fact now that I think about it some more, a 'dumb muscle' main character fits neatly into the narrative framework, since Pelican tells you that "You've always been best at field work." (I know field work doesn't necessarily mean bashing heads in without a thought, but you understand what I mean)

 

[ERYFKRAD]

know field work doesn't necessarily mean bashing heads in without a thought

Yeah I usually think for a brief moment and then proceed to bashing heads in.