Mar 04
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 at least that’s a start.
Mar 03
Continuing from yesterday’s post, there are also a lot of things that DME could take from GH1.
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 sets; if you want to recover the Argoseyer, you had better be really good at personal scale combat. The player will make different choices depending on whether they want money, experience, reputation, gear, or to practice a particular skill. This allows long term planning and anticipation.
In Dungeon Monkey Eternal, on the other hand, every adventure is pretty much like the adventure before it. Due to random generation some might offer more experience, others more gold, but that is beyond the player’s ability to control.
The first time Xiap walked into Snake Lake, he was attacked by an assassin that he had no chance of defeating. During the fight he ran into a mall and bought a gun. With the help of some nearby guardians, the assassin was defeated. It was awesome.
At the moment, DME scales adventures to exactly match the level of the party. This can feel uncomfortably safe.
One of the most important things the PC should do in GearHead is to make connections with NPCs. You need people to ask for rumours, people to give you missions, and lancemates to join your party. The act of making alliances with certain NPCs is likely to make enemies of other NPCs. Every NPC is potentially important.
In DME, on the other hand, most NPCs are just scenery. The few NPCs that are important are usually only important once, and once their part in the quest is over you will never need to see them again. I think adding dynamic plots and a GH style chatting system would help out here.
Another advantage that GH1 NPCs have over DME NPCs is portraits. Having a recognizable face, even if it’s a face shared by dozens of NPCs in the game world, gives the GH1 NPCs a sense of personality that the DME NPCs lack.
Finally, choices in GH1 can have lasting repercussions. Fight the Bone Devil Gang for the Federation Defense Force and you’ll get trouble the next time you try to enter Kist. Steal one little antique vase and the Guardians will never let you forget about it.
Actions in DME should change things in the persistent world. Of course this would be easier if there was a real campaign world, as opposed to just a Moria-esque between-mission village. It would also be easier with dynamic plots.
Mar 03
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 files from the config folder to the user folder because the config folder is a PITA to get to in Windows. When upgrading to the new release you can find the old folder by doing a search for file “gharena.cfg” on C drive, then copy your save games and config file to the new gharena folder that will be created in your home folder the first time you run v1.201. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Mar 02
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 development was to test some of the systems I plan to use in the next GearHead. Here are some of the things I’ve learned.
I dove into the development of both GearHead-1 and GearHead-2 without any clear plan. I knew that I wanted to make a mecha RPG set in a sandbox world, but I didn’t have a clear picture of what the completed state of the game would be. Instead I just kept building and building, occasionally painting myself into a corner.
With Dungeon Monkey Eternal, on the other hand, I decided what features the final game would have before I started coding. Although these plans changed several times throughout development, simply having an end state to work towards was a big help. I could anticipate the effects of things that were not finished yet. This brings me to the next point…
Make sure that a newly added thing works well before charging ahead and adding more stuff. A lot of GearHead’s features were added with the expectation that I’d go back and improve them later… then I never did because I kept jumping ahead to the exciting bits. It’s best to get things working well the first time. Then you can relax and forget about them, at least until conflicts with another feature start causing problems…
Graphics is one of those not-so-fun things I kept putting off. I kept telling myself that making GearHead look good would take too much work, or that I wasn’t very good at graphics (despite the fact that by day I’m a cartoonist; young Joe was a contradictory guy). Well, I’m happy to announce that you don’t need a million hours (or dollars) to make a game look presentable. Just a little effort can make a big difference to a game’s appearance.
Ugly memo browser from GearHead-1 and ugly console display from GearHead-2.
Compare the two GearHead examples above to the Dungeon Monkey Eternal examples below.
Dungeon Monkey Eternal popup menu and text display box.
It didn’t take very long to add a border and textured background to the Dungeon Monkey Eternal panels, but it looks far nicer than simply dropping a colored rectangle on the screen. The same goes for making sure that the size of the panel matches the content that will be placed in it. Next look at the use of terrain:
There are several different versions of each ground type and the forest tile. This breaks up the shapes and stops those areas from having an obviously repeating pattern. There is a transition between the grass and the dirt, unlike the abrupt change seen in GearHead. The walls have been decorated so you can tell at a glance which building is the library and which is the armor store. None of these features are particularly hard to implement, but they make the map look much better.
All NPCs in GearHead use the same combat AI, and consequently they are all relatively predictable. Dungeon Monkey Eternal uses several different AI types. Individually they are still rather stupid, but the presence of types means that the player has to be ready to use different tactics.
Good AI can make a monster more dangerous than simply increasing its level or abilities. An archer who attacks at range but doesn’t flee from the player characters is kind of dangerous. An archer who attempts to stay away from the party while still maintaining line of sight is more dangerous. An archer who stays away from the party, maintaining line of sight while hiding behind cover, who specifically targets the party’s mage or other vulnerable characters, is super dangerous.
Currently, the way personality traits are handled in GH1 is that for any dialogue line that should be variable, there’s a list of alternate versions corresponding to different personality traits. So for instance, the same greeting should have a default version, a shy version, a sociable version, a cheerful version, yadda yadda yadda. Writing multiple versions of every line of dialogue is extremely labor intensive, and it ignores the fact that most NPCs will have more than one personality trait.
Dungeon Monkey Eternal makes good use of procedurally generated text. Several techniques are combined: a context free grammar expander is used to expand tokens into sentences, then a phrase substitution function swaps words based on the character’s dialect. This happens for both the PCs and NPCs. Dwarves talk like dwarves, orcs talk like orcs, and fuzzies talk in LOLspeak. It works pretty well.
This technique could probably be implemented in GH1. It would require reworking much of the existing dialogue to add tokens, but even that would be less work than trying to fill out all personality trait variations in the old system.
One of the big problems with GearHead is that a lot of information is effectively hidden from the player. More information needs to be visible, and just as importantly the ways this information can be used should be more obvious.
Feb 29
As I’ve said before, my current goal for GearHead-1 is to polish up what’s there rather than to expand the game. Here are my top priorities for things that need improvement.
Note that this list leaves out various improvements and refactorings that would maybe improve the code base but have zero impact on the user experience. For instance, did you know that it’s possible to declare objects in FPC without switching to ObjPas or Delphi mode? Turning the gear records into objects would simplify the code immensely, but it would take a long time to do and it wouldn’t improve the game in any way that would be visible to players.
I think this list of goals is quite achievable. Is there anything else you think I need to do?
Feb 28
I’ve just uploaded a new release of GearHead-1 to Github. You can download compiled versions for Windows and Linux, as well as the source code, from here. Let me know if you have any trouble… I haven’t done this in ages and just hope I packed everything right.
Version 1.200 compiles with the latest release of Free Pascal. It now uses the FPC SDL units, so you no longer need to download JEDI SDL separately. Linux uses should have SDL 1.2, plus the associated SDL_ttf and SDL_image packages, installed. For Windows users, all the needed dlls are included in the precompiled zip.
Try it out and let me know what you think. The complete list of changes is beneath the fold. Continue reading
Feb 25
I just completed my recent playthrough of GearHead1. Xiap and his lancemates- the robot Omega 1004, guardian Meskyfer, and combat medic Joyjen- defeated Typhon and the Clan Ironwind army. During the final battle Xiap also managed to shoot down Yjin’s neko, which was a nice bonus.
Overall I really enjoyed this playthrough. I think the game successfully captures the mood of 80s/90s mecha shows; there’s an ever-present feeling of peril and loss without any sort of grimdark affectation. There are so many things to do. The world feels active and vibrant.
Xiap was created as a basic mode character since I haven’t played the game in ages and chose to play it like a newbie. He didn’t learn mecha engineering for the same reason. I didn’t use save file backups or other cheats because I wanted to see how badly the game could kick my arse.
GearHead is a lot more forgiving than most roguelike games, but this is not to say that it lacks challenge, exactly. Losing a prized mecha can be almost as bad as dying; losing a lancemate can be worse than that. Xiap lost plenty of both over the course of the campaign. I guess I just like that feeling of peril and loss mentioned above? The only time I was ever tempted to cheat was during the great Namok bus stop pineapple salad incident, but I kept going and soon formed a new lance (who probably had lots of difficult questions about what happened to my previous lance). It might be a good idea to add a difficulty setting like DoomRL, though I have no idea right now how that would work in practice.
I didn’t encounter any truly game-breaking bugs, but found plenty of small ones. The homebrew scripting language that all the plots are written in is just as hateful as I remember, but fortunately I remember it better than I thought I would. The same goes for Pascal, honestly.
My goal now is to fix problems and polish up the rough edges. I will probably want to add some new content later- there have been requests for the rusty scepter quest, and there really ought to be more than four guaranteed lancemates- but for right now the emphasis will be on making sure the stuff that’s there works well. There are a number of things which I now regard as bad design decisions that will be left in the game because that’s just the way GearHead-1 is. It’s a fine line between problems that ought to be fixed and problems that are essential identity.
Victory file below the fold. Continue reading
Feb 22
This weekend I tabled at Comic World Busan 96. I met a bunch of people, ate a whole bunch of food, and sold out of four books. It was a good time.
Unfortunately, it was the last ComicWorld for Belli-buttons and Puppyshaker (for now), leaving me the last foreigner at Korean comikets (for now). I wish the two of them good luck in their future endeavors, and thank them for all the help and advice they’ve given me. Incidentally, everyone who tables at ComicWorld has a cool trucker-esque nickname. Mine is 펭귄아저씨.
One thing I noticed is that there’s no mecha at Comic World Busan. In Seoul there’s Kim Yura (aka GoddessMechanic) and sometimes a few other artists, but they never seem to make it down this way. I really ought to look into putting together some GearHead swag. I thought about making illustration cards with a mecha on one side and its pilot on the other. Another good idea would be papercraft mecha; I’d love to have some models of the GH mecha myself, and this would be a reason for me to try and improve my 3D modeling skills.
Feb 17
Just in case there’s any interest, here is the new rusty steel wall spritesheet:
And here is a blank wall template:
The remaining walls that need to be done are Residential Wall, Stone Wall, Hospital Wall, Plain Wall, Gold Wall, Wooden Wall, Stainless Steel Wall, Earth Wall, Shop Wall, Fortress Wall, Industrial Wall, Neon Wall, Restaurant Wall, Garage Wall, and Organic Wall.
Feb 16
I am going to try to add thinwall sprites for all of the wall types. The former thinwall sprites were so large that they completely hid the tile behind them, so I’ve reduced the height of the new ones a little bit. The color scheme of the new walls is inspired by the Sunrise real robot cartoons of the 80s.
There are many improvements that could be made to the map display. As seen in the door tiles above, there’s some mismatch between the walls and the ground tiles underneath them. This could be fixed by giving ground types a border, so the tile next to the door could have carpet on one side and dirt on the other. Borders would also fix the patchwork problem ground tiles currently have. Another big improvement would be to add signs or some other way of telling the purpose of a building just by looking at it. Although some walls are already associated with specific businesses (shop walls, garage walls, hospital walls), this is not applied consistently and doesn’t cover all building types.