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

[ArchAngel]

what happened with the weekly updates?

I got a reply today.

So Thursday is the day you bring them weekly food to your locked basement.

 

[Zombra]

This "week's" update is substantial!

Update #15

Jun 2 2017

Alpha Mission Date + Backer Portraits

Hi everyone!

Sorry about the delay from the last update, we had an illness that needed some curing before bunkering down with work. We wanted to get things started off with our countdown to the alpha build by getting some backer heads in the game and explaining what the style used for those will be.

First off, here are a couple of awesome tracks we recently received for the soundtrack from Kevin. Recommended listening for car chases with syndicate military grade vehicles or reading Kickstarter updates.



We plan on getting a good hour of custom music for the soundtrack, and have an enormous amounts of SFX that are adding to the atmosphere as well. With the addition of Caleb voicing the DM narration, the audio experience for Copper Dreams is looking top notch and we think you'll enjoy it all!

Alpha Mission Date
Our plan for an alpha release this summer is still on track. We’re at the most exciting time of development for us which allows content to start going from paper to the game very quickly. During gameplay iterations the past half-year we’ve gotten various systems, art and mechanics we wanted for the alpha completed to ~75%. In addition, they're all flexible with one another as we changed things around constantly, and now that everything is set we’re finally able to check them off one by one. We initially planned on showing individual systems off in these updates, but decided to clump a lot of these finalized things to show you a more comprehensive look at gameplay features together. But about that alpha — Alpha backers, you’ll be getting the alpha-mission to test July 27th! That entire month is devoted to bug and content polish, so we'll let you know how things are progressing and show additional parts of it off.

We have some very exciting things to show off before that, including the final iteration on the core system, which details how all the systems converged into the final version you'll be getting in the game, as well as showcasing the beginning of the alpha. A brief overview of that below.

Progress
Our core systems have had one last pass, and this is really the culmination of the best we've innovated with for the gameplay. Simulation-based systems are a lot of fun on paper, but in practice and through our iterations it's been a constant flux of how much of it is filtered through the ruleset and gameplay to make it more playable, and more importantly, fun for the player.

The main systems (not including the very GURPS oriented ruleset):

• Height-based world
• Party based gameplay
• In-world combat
• Actions take a time element
• Characters able to react to other actions in-combat, instead of actions being performed in a bubble

Creating an abstraction for time to bring more clarity ended up being the answer we needed for everything. Time is represented by modular ‘ticks’ now (representing a quarter second each), and is much easier to visually analyze and react to. Every action of anyone in the game happens on a tick, sort of like tiles for movement, but for time. Tiles for moving are again visually playing a bigger role to make that more concise and are the primary 'target' to click or attack. Between these two, all actions, movement, or trajectories can be predictable at-a-glance.

So for instance in some p&p rulesets, a 'round' for a turn is sometimes considered a representation of roughly 6 seconds. While there aren't static round durations, you can now see the amount of time an action will take in a timeline and compare it to others — each of your characters and any nearby NPCs doing something have a small timeline feed (sort of like a set of keyframes in a video editor). This is persistent in and out of combat and replaces the old combat bar.

It should look and feel both familiar and completely new, somewhere between the original Kickstarter video and the most recent updates, in a very bullet-proof design. In the end, with the ease of ‘ticks’ representing time for actions and now tiles being involved again, the gameplay is theoretically now translatable to pen and paper, to elaborate on how solid the core is. We're very happy and confident with it all, and we'll be showing that off in detail soon.

Character Models
In the meantime, we wanted to show how character models are looking in-game and the process we used to make them! For those tiers applicable to send in portraits, you should be seeing an email from us shortly with additional details. If you didn’t, or our email went to spam, feel free to email us or we’ll harass you about that later so don’t worry about it.

All character's quick items they have equipped are visible and targetable. Everyone in the game can have 3 items and an unarmed action(s), just like your player characters. So weapons can be shot off onto the ground or if you want to turn up the heat, grenades can turn your target into a quick campfire.

Our final style for the game wasn’t all too dissimilar than our original one in the art-pipeline, we just made content with more polygons and higher-resolution textures. We wanted to make the world have a very cohesive texture style, and allow a little bit of player imagination in a 3D world. While it isn't actual pixel art anymore, the abstract blotchiness allows you to fill in some blanks.

Part of the change to the sort of splotchy painted style was scaling up pixel-sized textures. This keeps color block sizes within a texture consistent, and is overall just about as cheap and quick as we were doing before with some added magic to the end of the pipeline. The models themselves are very chunky as well, so between that and the painted style the visual is similar to modeling actual miniature figurines, with the end result being cohesively chunky and cozy in-game.

The design goal for these characters is to block in colors to make the character style notable at-a-glance from the perspective we’re in, so that includes exaggerating features or making just black outlines around parts of the texture as needed. Not going for realism as much as clarity.

Portraits
The concept of drawing the 1 texture per model is also the same as when we were using just pixel art. This is the only way we know how to do it, so we’ll also call that a really good method. We magic enhance this to be a little larger, which allows the texture to be higher resolution and still makes it super cheap and easy to animate faces, since small changes can be made for the effects needed.

So if we zoom into the guy while interacting with him in-game he can blink and talk by flipping between areas of his image or different images synced with him. This is a more appropriate use for computing power than actually modeling eyelids and mouth stuff and animating that mesh since the game is largely so zoomed out you’d hardly see the benefits.

Characters seen in the alpha will have as many backer faces as we’re able to collect and implement by then. Portraits were a favorite part of our Serpent Kickstarter backer collusion and we think these will add even more personality by making them actual 3d models. The Serpent portraits really made the atmosphere unique and grounded:

Most all of these portraits are from folks who helped make the game!
While the avatar of Necholai is up to the player, our personal favorite for canon (and default for the expansion and going forward) are both backers for the male and female versions. Copper Dreams will feature heads for PC options, merchants, interesting NPCs, and any boss agents. We have more basic ones setup for civilians.

Like in tabletop, this roleplaying experience should be a collaboration by the players at the table, so this is super important to us to have you all influence the campaign on a visual and atmospheric level as well as your feedback for gameplay when we get there. We're very happy to have a good amount of backer portraits getting in.

So for an example here’s Joe’s mug and in-game equivalent:

getting that Lebanese honker juuuust right
Followed by:

We use main features to stand out in the modeling itself and have the rest of the face from the photo as more of a guideline for the positions of bones, jaw, etc. We redraw the face to make it symmetrical and then re-add asymmetry to the texture so it looks appropriate.

For those applicable tiers of the Kickstarter, an email is coming from us detailing what to do with all that. We’ll also ask everyone if they’d be ok being featured in some of these updates as a before/after, so all the backers can keep up with how characters are progressing. Next update will have something for everyone in the community to contribute to, so be on the lookout!

Until next time!

Cheers

Joe & Hannah

 

[grimace]

All character's quick items they have equipped are visible and targetable.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Oh man, those screen shots.

 

[Lacrymas]

Let's hope they don't cell-shade it too much, the first screenshot is already too cell-shady. Otherwise, cool update.

 

[J_C]

Oh man, those screen shots.

Yeah, they look like shit, don't they?

 

[Merlkir]

 

[crakkie]

What happened to Joe?

 

[Merlkir]

Are they in the US, they are right? Are they fucked for money now, owing an arm and a leg to the hospital?

 

[Alienman]

So what could have happened to be strapped to all those things. I thought it was something minor like a nasty cold

 

[gaussgunner]

Pretty sure they're in the US, yeah. They probably qualify for free healthcare if their income is basically only what they raised on kickstarter. The bureaucracy will probably put them in a mental institution though.

A couple weeks ago I was tempted to joke that maybe we need to find Joe a kidney or something, so he doesn't die on us like the developer of Dex.


I hope it's not that bad!

 

[HoboForEternity]

what happened?

 

[The Fish]

Sensuki probably put something in his food, he'll be fine after a stomach pump or two.

 

[Sam Ecorners]

This would be a great time to bump up your pledge via PayPal

 

[Fenix]

Sound disturbing...

 

[Alienman]

Sounds latin.

 

[hell bovine]

Has there been any news?

 

[gaussgunner]

Spoiler

Sorry.

 

[Grotesque]

why is this place silent like a crypt?

 

[veevoir]

why is this place silent like a crypt?

That is not dead which can eternal lie.


We're simply awaiting the strange eons.

 

[Sykar]

Some news would be nice though, even if they would come from beyond the grave.

 

[Grumpy Grognard]

Hope all's well, Whalenought.

 

[The Fish]

Some news would be nice though, even if they would come from beyond the grave.

Really showing your sympathetic side there. You heard him whalenought, how many weekly updates have you missed? Get it together!

 

[ArchAngel]

Some news would be nice though, even if they would come from beyond the grave.

Really showing your sympathetic side there. You heard him whalenought, how many weekly updates have you missed? Get it together!

If this was Japan, Whalenought would be expected to kill themselves for missing all the updates

 

[Lyre Mors]

Joe got very sick. Cut them a break. It's only two of them after all.