Most commented posts
- GearHead 1 v1.300 — 23 Comments
- New Idea: The Story So Far — 17 Comments
- GearHead-1 v1.201: The Inevitable Bugfix — 16 Comments
- Full Screen Map Working — 16 Comments
- Lancemate Switching from Backpack — 16 Comments
Joseph Hewitt
Author's posts
Mar 10
Knowledge is Power
One of the big problems with GearHead1 is that the game just doesn’t provide all the information that the player needs. Even when information is provided, it’s not always in a useful form. As Powerglide says, knowing is half the battle. The next interface that I need to work on is the inventory/equipment menu. I’ll …
Mar 09
Character Generator Arranged
I’ve updated the character generator with DynamicRect objects that reposition themselves according to the size of the window. I also fixed some of the problems and inconsistencies in the character generation process. For instance, the “Select Job” menu now shows the skill bonuses and staring cash of each job. Please note that at this stage …
Mar 08
The Ugly Part of Refactoring
Today’s commit of GearHead-1 is at that ugly stage of refactoring where everything compiles but nothing works properly. The TSDL_Rect records which previously defined the positions of various bits are being replaced with DynamicRect objects that update their position based on the screen dimensions. My next step is to rearrange all of the needed zones …
Mar 07
Full Screen Map Working
Two tasks complete- the game screen is resizable, and the map display takes up the entire screen. The next big challenge is to decide how I’m going to arrange the UI components. The Original Layout This is what we’re starting with. Much of the screen is filled with blank space. The map takes up a …
Mar 06
Scarn the Cyberdoc
Mar 05
GH1 World Map Encounters
Someone recently asked me about how world map encounters work in GH1. I wrote the following explanation, which hopefully makes sense of some of the spaghetti in ADV_FederatedTerritories.txt. Read on if you dare.
Mar 04
Graphic Weirdness
I’ve started work on updating GearHead’s graphics. The first step is to clean up some of the weirdness inherent in the source, which honestly is a whole lot of weirdness. Today’s big accomplishment: the game window can be resized, and the dialog console reacts to the size. It’s the only part that does react but …
Mar 03
Things Dungeon Monkey Eternal can learn from GearHead 1
Continuing from yesterday’s post, there are also a lot of things that DME could take from GH1. Goals require meaningful choices One of the great things about GearHead is that there are a lot of paths for the player to take, each with their own risks and rewards. Many of these paths require particular skill …
Mar 03
GearHead-1 v1.201: The Inevitable Bugfix
I’ve just uploaded a bugfix release of GearHead-1 to GitHub. It fixes a crash that occurs at the conclusion of the kidnapping story. You can download it from here: https://github.com/jwvhewitt/gearhead-1/releases/tag/v1.201 This version also includes several of Michael Deutschmann’s patches and fixes some minor scripting problems. Important note for Windows users: I’ve moved the gharena save+cfg …
Mar 02
Lessons GH1 can learn from Dungeon Monkey Eternal
Over the past few years I haven’t been able to do much programming, but I did cobble together a new entry in the Dungeon Monkey series, Dungeon Monkey Eternal. It’s a fun tactics RPG which is played in short coffeebreaklike adventures. This was my first major project in Python, and a big motivation behind its …