This week I’ve been updating some of the plots from the early days of GearHead development. Many of them have serious problems- they don’t scale difficulty to renown properly, lack email or memos, and deal poorly when the player character goes off-script. The easiest way to update missions, or at least the way that will …
Category: Development
Jun 15
GearHead Caramel Engine Installed
I’ve made a new commit to GearHead Caramel; the low level UI stuff from Dungeon Monkey Eternal has been added as the engine module. The screen is dynamically resizable, just like in the current version of GearHead-1. The next step will be the scenes module. There still isn’t much to get excited about, but I …
Jun 10
Expanding the Blueprints
Engine or Game? One of the eternal debates in amateur gamedev is the distinction between a game and an engine. After making RPGs for twenty years, I’ve come to the conclusion that I do have an engine, it’s just not very engine-y. If you take a look through every game I’ve ever made, you’ll find …
Jun 09
Building a New Foundation
I’ve just submitted my final thesis packet, and have a few weeks to breathe before heading to San Francisco in July for the last part of my MFA program. So, obviously, I’ve been thinking about the new GearHead game. Most of the parts are going to be taken from Dungeon Monkey Eternal, plus some improvements …
Apr 20
Plain Walls and GH2 Thoughts
There’s a wall type in GearHead that is described simply as “Wall”, and now it has a fancy new sprite. Well, maybe not fancy, but what do you expect for the most generic wall in the game? I’ve been thinking about the improvements to GH1 that I need to port to GH2. I think my …
Apr 16
Dungeon Monkey Campaign Idea
As I’ve mentioned before, Dungeon Monkey Eternal was created to help me learn Python and to try out some new systems that I hope to include in a new GearHead game. Unfortunately, because DME creates short static adventures rather than a large dynamic world, it isn’t really a good test for some of those systems. …
Apr 09
Young Joe is lucky I don’t have a time machine
Going through the mission scripts, I found something so weird and bad that I can’t believe it hasn’t been noticed before. Apparently at some point in time I decided that faction missions shouldn’t scale by the PC’s renown; instead, each faction has an independent difficulty counter that increases each time the faction loads a new …
Apr 07
Standardizing Missions
One problem in GH1 is that there is no rhyme or reason to the mission rewards. The cash prizes and other bonuses don’t strongly correlate with the risks and requirements of the job. As I’ve said before, I was just making things up as I went along. Here’s what I think should be the new …