Young Joe vs Old Joe
Through playing GearHead-1 I’ve come to realize something many of you probably already know: my twentysomething self was a bit of an arse.
I mean, in many ways he was also quite brilliant, but when my lancemates die of poisoning on the bus to downtown Snake Lake, despite the fact that they had plenty of quick fix pills and first aid packs, I want to pull Young Joe aside and punch him. Same deal when my lance, which includes an expert repairman, discovers Omega-1004 stuck in a cave and is unable to revive him because the character with the repair skills is not the leader of the group.
I seem to recall that I had reasons for these design decisions. I can’t remember what they were. So, I’ve decided to fix them.
Starting from the latest git commit, status effects will have no effect while the PC is jumping forward in time and cannot react to them. The skills menu will allow use of skills known by all lancemates. I’m sure there are still lots of arbitrary unfairness and interface shenanigans- so far I’ve lost two mecha from entering combat overburdened after forgetting about autopillaged loot- but hopefully this is a step towards making sure that all your future deaths are the result of human error rather than machine contrariness.
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Great to see what you are doing to the game. Still one of my top three rogue-like game in the world!
Wait, wait! Gearhead 1 improvements? I thought this game was forfeited already. A pity that the wiki is gone.
Author
Finished, not forfeited. Admittedly, GearHead is the sort of game that could remain in development forever. There’d always be something else to add or improve upon. And I think people could disagree with the state I chose to call finished- certainly, Joe in 2016 is amazed/annoyed at some of the easy things that Joe in 2008 could have done to improve the game but didn’t.
We’ll see where it goes. And you’re right, it’s a shame about the wiki.
Oh god, does it mean the scepter quest may finally be finished? :Oc
Author
It may be, but I won’t make any promise just yet. As I may have mentioned a few thousand times the GH1 scripting language is terrible.
I actually found it quite intuitive while spoiling my ways through certain events in the game [bad me, bad] – though I never went through the effort of making own event myself, thus my experiences could’ve varied wildly.