Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Game News Copper Dreams Kickstarter Update #14: Dialogue System, New UI

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Tags: Copper Dreams; Whalenought Studios

Joe and Hannah have come through and published a new Copper Dreams Kickstarter update less than two weeks after the previous one. As promised, the topic of the update is the game's dialogue, which will feature an extensive NPC disposition system that determines what they're willing to tell you. Tim Cain would approve! Here's an excerpt:

Disposition

NPCs react to you in 1 of 3 ways, or what we call Disposition levels (DL), ranging from giving you no tags to ask about (Closed), some (Wary), or all they have (Open). DL table is pretty simple:

Closed: no tags to ask about
  • DL 1 - 8
Wary: a select amount of tags from their total
  • DL 9 - 16
Open: all available tags and situational check tags
  • DL 17 - 24
DL is a combination of NPC and PC personality modifiers, so both player characters and NPCs can dislike or like each other automatically. Which is to say if you make or find an unsavory character, they will be the ones lowering DL when talking to NPCs. Adversely if an NPC has poor social modifiers or background advantages/disadvantages they’ll be influencing the poor DL. So in this way the player is always trying to mitigate a low DL regardless of the one causing it, as they’re the ones trying to get information.

Modifiers for Disposition Level:
  • +/- Advantages
  • +/- Disadvantages
  • Character Sex
  • Character Ethnicity Group (in our alternative world just East-Asian or Mix)
  • Logic similarities
Creating the DL is sort of Superficial: the game! Importantly, it allows us to have pre set ‘randomized’ NPCs in the game that the player can always understand how to react to with the rules in place.

Disposition Example

So for a simple conversation example the player tries talking to a non-hostile thug stationed near a dilapidated building.

A Closed DL would have the thug tell the player to shove off.

A Wary DL would present a piece of dialogue with limited tags, like [building] and [gang] to then be able to ask about.

An Open DL would give the player full access to the NPC tags, like [building], [gang], [trouble] and [missing], maybe allowing him to give the player warning that there is another gang nearby who is planning another raid on the area, and a few of the other guards went missing after patrolling through the building nearby. An easy cue for the player to venture into the dilapidated building with a little bit more caution.

In this situation, to give the player a voice, you could explore the building and head back to the thug, showing him a CiWar dog-tag of a gang member found in it to initiate the idea that you checked it out.

From outside combat you can use the same ‘SHOW’ action for an item to anyone to initiate dialogue about the item if they know anything about it or will react to it. For instance inconspicuously navigating a hostile base under cover and showing fake identification to every guard you see for good measure. You can also initiate a conversation with any of the other rolls we talk bout below, or new ones you can train for.
Also in the update is a look at the game's new main UI, which now allows you to control all characters without having to switch between tabbed interfaces. It was supposed to include some combat as well, but that's been postponed until the next update. Hopefully it'll come out as quickly as this one did.
 

sstacks

Arcane
Joined
Jan 30, 2014
Messages
1,151
I can't speak directly for Whalenaught, but a lot of futuristic games have more of a blended race to represent the intermingling of the races over time with worldwide travel being so prevalant starting in the 20th century, etc.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Having everybody on the streets be East Asian specifically is a very cyberpunk thing:

 

Kem0sabe

Arcane
Joined
Mar 7, 2011
Messages
13,076
Location
Azores Islands
I can't speak directly for Whalenaught, but a lot of futuristic games have more of a blended race to represent the intermingling of the races over time with worldwide travel being so prevalant starting in the 20th century, etc.

Then everyone would just be mixed, instead of east asian and mixed.

Unless this game world had a cataclysm that destroyed white civilizations.

Miscegenation is not a forgone conclusion to human mobility, you just need to look at the US or Europe, both are populated by a majority white population, despite the millions of non white individuals that have coexisted within them for periods of hundreds of years, from native americans, to african slaves, to moors, huns, turks, arabs.

Being the future, doesnt change the basic human drive to mate with their own. Thats why migrants tend to concentrate with their own when outside their country.
 

Bakunin

Novice
Joined
Oct 18, 2016
Messages
9
I'm looking forward to learning more about how that inventory system works - it looks sexy as hell.
 

sstacks

Arcane
Joined
Jan 30, 2014
Messages
1,151
I can't speak directly for Whalenaught, but a lot of futuristic games have more of a blended race to represent the intermingling of the races over time with worldwide travel being so prevalant starting in the 20th century, etc.

Then everyone would just be mixed, instead of east asian and mixed.

Unless this game world had a cataclysm that destroyed white civilizations.

Miscegenation is not a forgone conclusion to human mobility, you just need to look at the US or Europe, both are populated by a majority white population, despite the millions of non white individuals that have coexisted within them for periods of hundreds of years, from native americans, to african slaves, to moors, huns, turks, arabs.

Being the future, doesnt change the basic human drive to mate with their own. Thats why migrants tend to concentrate with their own when outside their country.

It's a game with a setting for flavor. As Infinitron pointed out having a lot of Asian influence is very Cyberpunk from way back in the 80s when Cyberpunk really took off.

But ultimately I don't know for sure... You'd need to ask Whalenought_Joe
 

MrBuzzKill

Arcane
Joined
Aug 31, 2013
Messages
650
my face when I read this update

7089ac3823de4fdab9262c1d39fc7ffd.jpeg
 
Self-Ejected

Excidium II

Self-Ejected
Joined
Jun 21, 2015
Messages
1,866,227
Location
Third World
CYOA style text options in a gameplay focused RPG is the equivalent of quicktime events to an action game. There's often a contradiction in design for RPGs where they give players an immense amount of tools and ways of completing tasks, but then in a conversation or cinematic players are often shoehorned into a situation where they can only access a fraction of those tools in story contextual ways. No amount of choice and consequence can make up for the fact that the DM took away the rules and tools you were relying on up to that point to be cinematic or story heavy for their own agenda, taking away from your experience.
wcukni.gif
 

Zed

Codex Staff
Patron
Staff Member
Joined
Oct 21, 2002
Messages
17,068
Codex USB, 2014
WHY ARE ALL THE NPCS YELLING? IT'S STRAINING TO READ IN SAME-SIZE ALL-CAPS. IT MAKES IT HARDER TO GLANCE-READ NAMES AND STUFF.

HOWEVER ALL CAPS WORK FINE IF YOU KINDA CAPITALIZE FIRST LETTERS FOR SOME REASON. I THINK IT'S PSYCHOLOGICAL (SEE IT ALSO DISTINGUISHES NAMES IN A SENTENCE). STAGLANDS WAS UNPLAYABLE CUZ OF POOR FONT/TEXT CHOICE. PLEASE NOT AGAIN. HEED MY PRO TIPS.
 

Whalenought_Joe

Whalenought Studios
Developer
Joined
Apr 11, 2014
Messages
215
Location
Nosgoth
WHY ARE ALL THE NPCS YELLING? IT'S STRAINING TO READ IN SAME-SIZE ALL-CAPS. IT MAKES IT HARDER TO GLANCE-READ NAMES AND STUFF.

HOWEVER ALL CAPS WORK FINE IF YOU KINDA CAPITALIZE FIRST LETTERS FOR SOME REASON. I THINK IT'S PSYCHOLOGICAL (SEE IT ALSO DISTINGUISHES NAMES IN A SENTENCE). STAGLANDS WAS UNPLAYABLE CUZ OF POOR FONT/TEXT CHOICE. PLEASE NOT AGAIN. HEED MY PRO TIPS.

PRO TIPS HEEDED, THANK YOU. WILL CHANGE IMMINENTLY.
 

Kev Inkline

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Nov 17, 2015
Messages
5,072
A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Just east Asian or mixed? Why does this world hate white people?

We'll work on changing the game world to be much more inclusive. :greatjob:

I hope so, or at least release a white skin character creation DLC, dont want to be mistaken for a new Bioware.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/blade-runner
Even more strikingly, African-Americans seem to be almost entirely absent from the future LA of Blade Runner. The filmmakers reimagined the street-level city as a multicultural bazaar of Asian and Middle Eastern influences, mirroring then-current American anxieties about growing economic rivals to the East – wrongly in the case of Japan, but prophetically in the case of China. Edward James Olmos, who plays Deckard’s mercurial police minder Gaff, also came up with a polyglot ‘cityspeak’ slang, combining elements of Hungarian, German, Japanese and other languages. The melting-pot notion of America permeates every scene.

Which only makes the lack of black faces on screen all the more baffling. And yet, on an metaphorical level at least, the renegade androids are clearly following in the footsteps of runaway slaves. “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?” Batty muses as he dangles Deckard high over the city’s streets. “That’s what it is to be a slave.”

In his 2008 book Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, Adilifu Nama argues that the androids in Blade Runner are “symbolically black” figures in a futuristic allegory of the past. “As escaped slaves from an off-world site, replicants share the same socioeconomic status as that of enslaved Africans during America’s period of legalised slavery,” Nama writes. “Blade Runner blatantly references America’s racially exploitative past and imagines a return of the repressed.”
:mlady:
 

Nazrim Eldrak

Scholar
Joined
Oct 2, 2015
Messages
270
Location
My heart
It is not an unrealistic possibilty that in the future surface bilogical features can be altered to improve charisma stats.
Of course it includes the skin color, so actually where is my RGB skin color?

Think about the following situation:
You are an agent where nobody knows your look
and to infiltrate a racist organisation you alter your genes.

Yes, bilogical features are just an equipment - and clothes make man.
 

crakkie

Arcane
Joined
Nov 20, 2004
Messages
1,608
Location
Louisiana
I'm looking forward to learning more about how that inventory system works - it looks sexy as hell.
I don't think I've ever seen/heard of a physics based inventory. Will we have to fight with the zipper if we put too much stuff in the bag?
 
Joined
Sep 7, 2013
Messages
6,165
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Serpent in the Staglands Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
I can't speak directly for Whalenaught, but a lot of futuristic games have more of a blended race to represent the intermingling of the races over time with worldwide travel being so prevalant starting in the 20th century, etc.

Then everyone would just be mixed, instead of east asian and mixed.

Unless this game world had a cataclysm that destroyed white civilizations.

Miscegenation is not a forgone conclusion to human mobility, you just need to look at the US or Europe, both are populated by a majority white population, despite the millions of non white individuals that have coexisted within them for periods of hundreds of years, from native americans, to african slaves, to moors, huns, turks, arabs.

Being the future, doesnt change the basic human drive to mate with their own. Thats why migrants tend to concentrate with their own when outside their country.

Generally, the intelligent animals (primates, dolphins, etc) traffic a lot between groups and try to avoid mating with their own. The dumber animals don't care, which isn't surprising, because inbreeding is part of what keeps them dumb. The drive humans face to "mate with their own" is mostly due to external pressures, like a lord forcing his peasants to stay on the manor lands, or "unintended complications" like language barriers.
 
Last edited:

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom