Gearhead [roguelike]

[679a89b9d9979Twerty]

Tags: °roguelike
http://www.gearheadrpg.com/

Gearhead is probably the only Sci Fi roguelike I know. But it's damn good at it. I've been playing (see: constantly savescumming) one file for a few months and while I do believe I've 'beaten' most of my playthrough (as in, the set quests, beaten the arenas, gotten to a ridiculous level) I still haven't even beaten it. It's got a lot of value in it, for sure.

The game's divided into Personal and Mecha Combat. You need the best of both worlds to win, for sure. There's lots of randomly generated quests that are dropped throughout the game to improve your reputation (better reputation = better quests = hardier enemies = better pay) and to get a buttload of cash, which you'll be needing to improve your GIANT WALKING[hovering/flying] ROBOT WITH GUNS AND SWORDS. That is, Mecha. Even the main storyline itself is semi-randomly generated, insofar that it's dressed up a bit different, but the main plot points are still the same. (Bad guy kicks your puppy, you escape to Earth, bad guy hunts you down, you have several encounters.) But it still manages to add interesting flavour to the game, even if it is somewhat predictable at times.

Image: http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/5471/ghscreen.png

Oh, and it has some really nice isometric graphics. Interested yet? And that's just the first one. The second one's 3D and is a current work in progress, though you can pick up the mostly-completed work and try it out, it's still being regularly updated. I myself have only tried the first and refuse to move on to the second without finishing at least one playthrough.

Just be aware that the game is kinda rather quite heavily underdocumented, so the wiki will probably help if you want to get into the game.
http://gearheadrpg.com/wiki/index.php?title=GearHead

As some starting tips: Your reputation is extremely important, if you go wangtta (Negative reputation, wangtta means loser, outcast) it means you failed a mission or died in battle. Winning random battles IIRC doesn't improve your reputation, only succeeding at missions do, and if you lose even one, or die even once, it takes several to raise your reputation back up. If you don't, you're going to literally be running into random encounters with the weakest robots in the game constantly, over and over, even if you're superskilled, and it gets really boring with no challenge and no chance for useful salvage. Hence why savescumming is somewhat necessary.

Your happiness, very strangely enough, varies mostly based on the quality of what you eat (Don't just eat boxed lunches, you need to buy from restaurants in the game, deluxe rations, and chocolate bars from general stores), how much you spend talking to people (higher conversation/seduction helps, these skills automatically raise with use, so just continue talking), and how often you fail/die. Positive mood improves stats, negative mood (which you'll find yourself in much more often) can incur some mean penalties. So monitor this carefully.

You will need all Mecha Skills. In fact, you'll need a lot of skills. So be careful what you put points in. Lockpicking is not necessary, you can destroy doors. Performance, I've never used, and know for a fact it's not vital. Conversation is, Seduction pretty much is, Investigation can be [Lawful], Science helps, Pickpocketting is useless. Pick either Melee Combat or Ranged, both is very stupid. So is personal scale artillery. First Aid is, Medicine is, Personal Repair is...
Hell, you need most everything. Savant feat helps by increasing your skill cap by three of four or so, Knowledge further helps. I think I've given enough advice that won't make sense right now, go ahead and try the game. Just pick the randomly generated character and see how far you go blowing up other giant robots. It's great fun.

[679a89b9d9b2fAmpersand]

I thought it looked pretty promising when I saw it a while back before I joined these boards, but if I recall the original needed you to compile it to run or something that I decided I didn't want to fool with, and the second, well...  The character portraits really put me off.  The style was highly inconsistent among them all...

EDIT:  Forgot to even put in the questions that I came to this thread to get answered...  Is the first game free of the anachronistic art styles?  Am I remembering things wrong about the need for a compiler or maybe downloaded something else by mistake?

[679a89b9d9c89Twerty]

You don't need a compiler. Maybe you're thinking Gearhead 2, which is still heavily under development?

The character portraits are a really strange thing to be put off by: granted, there are some that are low quality, but it's really not that big of a deal, as it's not even most of them. All the isometric graphics and all other content are completely consistent and good quality.

[679a89b9d9da3Ampersand]

No, I'm definitely not thinking of Gearhead 2 in that case, because Gearhead 2 was the only one I ever played...

[679a89b9d9f3bTwerty]

Just doublechecked, the download link on the site works perfectly fine, just open up Arena.exe.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gearhead/files/gearhead/1.100/gh-1100-sdlwin.zip/download
You'll also need the image pack to download (below) and drop that in your gearhead folder, otherwise you'll just get errors when you startup. Maybe THAT'S what you meant?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gearhead/files/gearhead/1.100/gh-1100-sdlimage.zip/download

[679a89b9da1c9Ampersand]

No, it isn't...  I've still got that version, it even comes with a compiling.txt that reads:

Code: [Select]

*****************************
***  COMPILING  GEARHEAD  ***
*****************************

Download the Free Pascal Compiler from www.freepascal.org.
Type "ppc386 arena". That should be it.

GearHead takes advantage of many FPC mode features, so if you get
strange errors while compiling check to make sure you're in the
right mode. The game probably won't compile under Delphi or Borland
compatability modes.

Note that there may be problems if compiling for DOS using the FPCv1.0.
It seems that DirectoryPresent crashes when used. I'd advise towards
compiling for Windows when possible. If you absolutely must compile
for DOS, edit the file gears.pp and remove the CheckDirectoryPresent
procedure along with the call to it during initialization.

Many thanks to Michalis Kamburelis for helping to make GearHead
FPCv2 compatable, and portable across OS's.

****************************************
***  COMPILING  GEARHEAD  WITH  SDL  ***
****************************************

Download latest jedi-sdl from CVS from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jedi-sdl/ and everything should compile
fine straight away.

Unless you're using the public release of Jedi-SDL, in which case this
is going to get way more complicated. To start off you're going
to need the following things:

- The GearHead sources (should be the file this came in)
- The GearHead image archive (get it from the web site,
                        or email me for a copy)
- FreePascal, available from www.freepascal.org
- Jedi-SDL, available from www.delphi-jedi.org
- The SDL, SDL_TTF, SDL_Mixer, and SDL_Image runtimes, available from
  www.libsdl.org or as part of the Jedi package

First things first. Install the compiler, the Jedi-SDL source
files, and the SDL runtimes. Make sure that the Jedi-SDL units
are in FPC's search path. You'll need to compile for either
Windows or Linux since AFAIK the package doesn't work in DOS.
Install the GH images in your GearHead directory; they should
be in a subdirectory called "Image".

Next, you must get down to actually compiling the Jedi
sources with FreePascal. See the document "Using Jedi-SDL
with Free Pascal" for an explanation on how to do so. Several
options need to be set before the units will compile correctly.
If you don't use the IDE, the following compiler directives
will do the trick:

{$OUTPUT_FORMAT PECOFF}
{$MODE DELPHI}
{$ASMMODE intel}
{$DEFINE FPC}

In addition, I couldn't get the unit SDL_Image to work properly
without a bit of modification. I had to comment out lines 150 and
200, the references to "IMG_string_equals", before any program
linked to that unit would run. Did I do a good thing, or did I
open a pandora's box of potential problems? Only time and the email
I sent to the Jedi-SDL dev team will tell for sure.

Finally you should be ready to compile. To link the program with
the SDL units, define a "SDLMODE" symbol. This can be done from the
command line by using -dSDLMODE when compiling arena.


According to the update history text it's version 1.100 from February 11 2007.

[679a89b9da30fTwerty]

All the latest files on sourceforge are from 2008-03-04, and 1.100. I just doublechecked by using those links. Put the images into the folder, both of which I just downloaded, and it works fine. I never had to compile anything. I don't know what else to tell you. It just...works.

[679a89b9da46cTooLazyToRegister]

Man, savescumming takes like half the fun out of roguelikes for me.

But to each man his own.

Played the orignial many years ago, never got around to finishing it though.

Twerty, did you make a lot of sentient robots? I did that a lot in my game, both sentient and non-sentient, f*cking great allies!

Eagerly awaiting GearHead 2 reaching 1.0!

[679a89b9da5e1Twerty]

I picked practically every single skill BUT robotics, had to max out whatever skill it was to be able to train more skills without penalty... Knowledge, I think. But never got around to Robotics. Or Biotechnology. Naturally, the former was used to build awesome sentient lance mates out of paperclips and the latter was used to fly the best mecha in the game. -sigh- Too many choices...