Copper Dreams - Schedule for September Beta

Alpha-End improvements

We're eager to show all this off in a video update but want to fine tune some combat visuals first, and figure we'd do it all at once for you guys.

Optimization improvements have been a focus. The game now cleanly runs on this junker laptop we got that I think they forgot to put a video card in. Hannah took a chunk of the summer up with revising a lot of the older code we've been slowly duct-tapping iterations on for a while now for characters, combat and other heavy systems and we're very satisfied with results. We can get loads of enemies on screen at once without taking a hit, so we've designed some enemies to be weaker so we can instead swarm them as needed.

You know what's not fun? Camera management and seeing how world structures are pieces together. Hannah solved these age-old problems by creating a terrific updated line of sight projection that allows you to see your characters line of sight at any given time, without any 3d-object collapsing (like a roof) or dissolve holes or something. It's uses the character line of sight to clip and dither away geometry that the player can't see, so it's seamless with those visuals. It's real slick, we love it, and now we don't have to worry as much as how overlapping world meshes work. To flex we've also lowered the tilt of the camera.

Characters now have swappable armor pieces to protect individual body parts -- head, torso, and individually for arms and legs. Since your character is equipping new armor pieces frequently, as they get shot up and destroyed, we thought it would be worthwhile to show those visual updates on your character. There's a lot of variety there.

Tiles with effects on them have a new generation method where we can fill the screen with them without any cost, we're still tweaking the visuals for them, but you get the idea.

Tile light data is visualized by how dense the hatchlines are, a neat setup we came up with for both dynamic and baked lighting values.



Effect Tiles for the beta include:

Fire

• burn damage

Smoke

• visual modifier
• coughing ailment

Ooze

• roll to not slide while moving
• noise when moving through

Water

• slipping ailment
• noise when moving through
• single tiles that continue to drip for 10 steps and can be tracked by NPCs

Blood

• slipping ailment
• noise when moving through
• single tiles that continue to drip for 10 steps and can be tracked by NPCs

Grass

• burnable with fire tile
• cover for hiding

Electricity

• stun -- immobilized temporarily

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