Copper Dreams - Role-Playing & Keyword Dialogue

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Spaceman
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Copper Dreams has a new kickstarter update out about Role-Playing and the Keyword Dialogue system.

We wanted to talk a little bit about events and how they are organized, the branching paths of your syndicate, and the flexibility of dialogue.

Branching quests, extended replay value and event density make up what is largely meant to extend the game from our base game plan, and what most of the Kickstarter funds will be used for.

Quest Design Overview

Copper Dreams features a very open-ended campaign that is filled with intrigue, combat, puzzles and bureaucratic bookkeeping. (Minus the bookkeeping, your agent has the Operations Department take care of that.) As we've said in the main page, we are holding true to our philosophy behind Serpent in the Staglands to give you a very hands-off experience. We find that this is the most rewarding type of game to play, which means no quest markers or auto-populating journals to coach you into what to do. There is a joy to following street addresses to mysterious locations that just isn't the same with a pop-up patting you on the head for your orientation skills.

Copper Dreams is ripe with corporate espionage, conspiracies, and mysteries hidden throughout the city. Without a narrator or journal telling you what clues you found, you get the reward of actually piecing together the puzzle that is the city of Calitana and discern how you want to frame your findings.

Your reports influence how your syndicate operates, and the fate of the characters you meet will begin branching very early on and determine how Wolffz Bay plays the game of corporate warfare.
[...]

Dialogue

From a role playing perspective, keywords give you the freedom to choose dialogue choices without an authored tone of the conversation guiding you. From a mechanics perspective, keywords turn dialogue into a puzzle. While sometimes your conversations are trivial, asking directions or reporting results of a mission, at other times you'll be trying to gather much needed information and can use items or saved keywords to open up new conversations paths.

If there is a rogue agent that needs intel and you would like to help him, dragging confidential data diskettes into the dialogue screen (literally handing them over) will turn the flow of your current conversation. NPCs retain their personality and character to drive the conversation.

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More information.
 
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That sounds wonderfully creative. Love it! Do stuff that other RPGs and games DON'T do because many games feel the need to COPY mechanics and just slightly tweak them!

Serpent in the Staglands and now Copper Dreams. Whalenought Studios rocks! Creativity!! Love it. :)
 
So, they will use a text parser? Always a good feature to have.
 
I love how Whalenought just does their own, unique thing. Nearly all the systems in Serpent in the Staglands were foreign, not being used by any other games. I LOVE that.

Today, it seems all too common for games to just copy systems from other modern games rather than coming up with something new or even building on an older, good idea. Just think of all the modern X-Com clones that copied their new system. Or countless big budget RPGs taking systems from popular games like GTA or Skyrim.

These indie teams are the future of RPG development, in my opinion. They are my future, anyway, as I choose to focus on teams like Whalenought that don't seem to give a damn about what other games are doing.

Oh, and don't get me wrong. A LOT of indie games copy mechanics, too. Too many. But there are still these obscure teams here and there doing something different, and I love it.

More like Whalenought, please! :)
 
Thanks for the news post! :party:

Thanks Fluent! We tried to think from the ground up what best fits this type of game, the result should hopefully be something pretty unique. We learned a lot with what worked best with Serpent's story structure, and have focused a lot of our development of Copper Dreams on how to make that mesh really well with other mechanics and gameplay. The puzzle dialogue is a big part of that — and it being responsive based, it makes it quite a bit more manageable for us as well.
 
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So, they will use a text parser? Always a good feature to have.

This would be great, but unfortunately out of scope for our budget. The keywords will be used/collected in the various ways we mentioned in the post instead.
 
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I think I said this before about Whalenought's Serpents project and a few other Kickstarters I liked, and that is - If I had enough money, I would fund them all myself! Not only because I want the games to play, but I think some of these small teams are doing important work of keeping creativity alive, which I feel is just as important as teaching arts and music in schools, for example.

Good luck, Joe! I'll likely do a video or two for Copper Dreams in the future like I did for Serpents. I'm just out the video-making loop, right now. It will return, it always does. :)
 
This would be great, but unfortunately out of scope for our budget. The keywords will be used/collected in the various ways we mentioned in the post instead.

oh, still cool. Am I right to think of Ultima VII, then?
 
@Whalenought_Joe
Do you plan on having things like fall damage? If I push an enemy off a rooftop will the fall kill them?
 
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@Whalenought_Joe
Do you plan on having things like fall damage? If I push an enemy off a rooftop will the fall kill them?

Yes height damage will be an environmental hazard —*if one was jumping off a rooftop they'd aggregate mortal wounds for both legs, depending on the height. There is a cybernetic for dampening these kinds of falls.
 
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Joe, will there be keywords that work with every NPC?


I could come up with 3.
 
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