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Gearhead 1 vs Gearhead 2

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Vigilant:
Hi, i've been kind of floating around for a while without saying anything, but I figured I should give my feedback:

I love what i've seen of combat so far, the skill system being compressed a bit, etc, but despite how much i loved GH1 and played it for days on end, I simply cannot get into GH2, at all :(

Dull World Travel : both the in-game lore in both games and comics in Ataraxia Theater seem to point to stuff happening space, but when you get out there in game : There's a big wide nothingness. As annoying as it could sometimes be for "You're attacked by raiders," the random events moving around the world in GH1 gave the game more life and a little more action than just moving around inbetween cities doing quests. The same goes for moving around in town. As you walk around the streets inbetween buildings... it's just... empty.

Speaking of which, moving in and out of towns is more complicated now. Since if you so much as enter a spinner, you have to navigate to the spaceport and then to the airlock or ticket guy if you want to leave. In the first game a shortcut to leave the town would have been inappropriate since oftentimes there might be someone chasing you through the town, but since the city streets are vacant, there may as well be a shortcut.

Also, the one thing i really dislike is the universe has become so much less free-form, or at least has in appearance. GH1 you could be so many things besides a mecha pilot. The ticket system wasn't so much to account for it being hard to travel for the world map as much as it was to account for you possibly not even owning a mecha to travel with. And towns would have bounty hunting jobs, paramedic jobs, chances for you to earn a living with music. I can't tell whether these things are still there or not but they've definitely gone into the background, which i just can't stand. I originally was sold on Gearhead because it was a game you could fumble into without really knowing what you were doing. Now GH2 it seems you can only really play it if you know exactly what to do. The simplicity gained by compressing the skill system is destroyed by the rest of the game being that much harder to understand.

I'm not really expecting everything that's already solidified in the game to change and have it become a shinier GH1, but one of my friends convinced me I should voice these concerns.

Frumple:
First, welcome! It's good to see you're invested enough in the game to be concerned about its future :D

On the bright side, a lot of what you're having problems with is a content thing; not to excuse, per se, but Mr. H has (from what I've seen via board and blog comments) quite a few responsibilities that supersede GH coding (Family, work, etc.), so a not-quite-up-to-completed-game-par isn't totally surprising. Progress on GH2 is, so far as I know, planned to continue for a while yet.

On the specific points:

Re: Interspinner manual travel: Agreed, 'tis slim pickings for interesting things, right now. No clue what Mr. H's plans for that are, but the planned spaceship inclusion sounds promising for adjusting the issues involved there. At the moment, space is just a thing to mostly be ignored, unless you've got a ridiculously large amount of foodstuffs to eat through; it's generally more expensive, in terms of keeping yourself from starving, to do the manual travel than it is to buy a ticket.

Re: Inside spinners: There actually are fellows patrolling around most spinners, most of the time. Depending on renown and faction relations, as well as current events, you can also be attacked. It's still not fully fleshed out (I hope :P), but the mechanics for random raider attacks and pick-up missions (A few times playing Gh2, I've stopped in at the wandering purple *s and they offered to let me tag along with them for a mission. It's been many versions since I last saw it, and it was terribly rare even then, but it is -- or was -- there, which is nice.) are implemented. Still, it is, indeed, fairly rare and currently not terribly interactive, so there's room for that to be improved.

That's also probably the reason it's more difficult to get out of the spinners -- it's laying foundation for more complex content related to in-spinner conflict or similar such things. It would be interesting to have some sort of mecha-sized exit (or being able to make one ;D) or outside ticket booth to nix the constant in-and-out of port thing, though.

Re: Nothing else to do besides mecha fight: This is again a content issue, but an appropriately noted one; we've had a number of discussions related to it. There are several options to explore -- you've got some music related quest-type stuff and a number of SF:0 centered areas (Theles, various mines and ships, McCabe, etc, etc. Fungal infestations are reoccurring the money makers.) for folks that want to go it afoot, but it's certainly either relatively sparse compared to SF:2/mecha related content, or comparatively well hidden. I certainly feel your pain on this issue, but outside of user created stuff (There's guides on the wiki, iirc, but the mission code might as well be moonspeak to me.) it's mostly going to be a hurry up and wait kinda' thing. Of course, suggestions, brainstorming and (most delightfully) actual coding will likely help speed up the process!

In any case, it's good to see your comments. I hope you enjoy your time here :)

Vigilant:
Ahhh. It's good to see things being worked on then :)

Joseph Hewitt:
Thanks for the comments. I'm taking a short break from GH2 right now while working on a side project, but I should be getting back into things very very soon.

A lot of the problems you mention are caused by a lack of content, as Frumple says. One thing I should do upon getting back is to finally put together the universe guide (even if it's just scans of the raw pages from my sketchbook) and recruit some other people to start making content. I should also work on some tools to automate the content-making process.

magic.coding.fairy.peridot:
It's certainly true that GH2 could use some more content. Perhaps a tutorial on how to add content would be good? I realize that plots spanning multiple spinners or involving new game mechanics will always be "developer" tasks, but even just adding new "stop the gang of muggers"-type plots would open the game out somewhat.

As for your specific concerns: some of the things you're looking for can be worked around by playing the game differently. For example, the trek to and from the spaceport can be avoided by simply staying in the spaceport and doing everything over the phone. This is hard at first because nobody wants to give you missions, but once you have a faction pestering you you can just park in the spaceport and phone for missions, rewards, and rumours of more missions. Trudging around to all the stores looking for that elusive Mecha Welding Set (or whatever) can be annoying. In any case, something like the in-game tutorial GH1 started with would be nice; there are the beginnings of this already, with that one guy in the Cavalier's club who likes explaining, but a more explicit tutorial would help get new players started.

Spinner interiors are dull not just because there's not much going on yet but also because there's nothing to see. At least in GH1 towns there were people wandering around and different buildings to see. Perhaps some visible mecha traffic in the streets? At the least making the patrols visible as sprites would make the places feel a little more inhabited. More variety in the graphics (for those who use them) and maps would also help distinguish them - currently almost all are just rectangles with randomly-located useful buildings. Theles' multiple floors gives it some flavour, for example. I'd love to see cylindrical maps, so that as you walk off one side you come back in the other, but I can see that's a considerable technical hurdle. Still, giving some spinners extensive farmland, others hulking factory blocks, radial layouts for the authoritarian ones, things like that, might add some flavour. Content matters here too, of course; Theles is interesting in part because of its plots (get up to the second floor, find out what's up on the third, find the hidden markets). There was also discussion of "theme text" - propaganda posters, advertisements, grafitti, and so on - but nobody was sure where or how to incorporate it.

Making room for more jobs, more play styles, is again largely a content issue. Some of it is already there but hard to find; for example you can do pirate jobs, but not right away (and you have to become criminal before you find out about them). Playing music is an option; you can busk and make a fair amount of money, and as your reputation increases you get offered increasingly lucrative performance gigs (which have a simple minigame implementing them) and there's a quest related to performance too. There is not yet a base-destruction mission, but there are "protect the ship" and "destroy the ship" missions. Most things could be added by just writing plot description files.

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