Mar 09
I’m happy to announce a new release of GearHead Caramel: Winter Mocha. The enemies are now smarter. The repair skills work. Module attacks have been added, so if you run out of ammo you can at least go down kicking. Configuration can be edited in-game, and there’s an option to disable the music (which was …
Mar 06
I’ve made some progress on GearHead Caramel this past week. The generic invocation targeting interface is complete, the attack interface is a subclass of the generic one, and everything seems to work both in and out of combat. But I’m not making a release tonight because I’m sick and hopped up on cold meds. Instead, …
Feb 28
I took a brief hiatus from updating my comics site while working on GearHead Caramel. Now that it’s out there, I’ve started posting a page every Wednesday again. Also, I’m hoping to make yet another GearHead Caramel release later this week. Wish me luck.
Feb 26
The GearHead Caramel mission generator uses basically the same random story generation process as the GearHead2 core story, but since you can play through Winter Mocha in about ten minutes it makes a much better demonstration model. This story generator uses what I call Propp’s Ratchet. Vladimir Propp was a Russian folklorist who broke folk …
Feb 17
Hopefully, by now at least a few of you have tried the latest version of GearHead Caramel: Winter Mocha. How do you find it- too easy? Too hard? My plan for Winter Mocha is to use it as the introductory scenario and tutorial level for GearHead Caramel. As the planned features get added to the …
Feb 15
I’ve just uploaded a new release of GearHead Caramel to GitHub. The Winter Mocha mission scenario has been expanded with a full random plot generator; play time should now be 15 to 20 minutes, moving this into the category of genuine coffeebreaklikes. You can import characters from GearHead1, and there’s another possible lancemate in Mauna. …
Feb 07
I’ve uploaded a series of 26 fantasy portraits that I did in traditional media (mostly acrylic, some watercolor and gouache) to itch.io. The pictures are licensed under CC-BY 4.0, but any donations I get for the set will go towards hiring artists to help with GearHead Caramel. In related news items, you can soon expect …
Feb 05
Last week, I reworked the way conversations work in GearHead Caramel. Originally, the conversation generator gathered conversation bits from every plot in which the NPC may be involved and arranged them into a conversation tree. Unfortunately, this means that certain dialogue paths might get hidden in the maze. For instance, if you wanted to ask …
Jan 12
Last week I had to bring my laptop into the shop because its creaky old case had finally blown a hinge. This week I had to bring it back to the shop because the ROM BIOS suddenly stopped working. These are the first problems this machine has given me in the five years that I’ve …
Jan 05
I’d like to talk for a bit about the design of GearHead Caramel. As usual, most of the big decisions were motivated by the type of game I want to play and the systems I want to program. Many of the changes are moving the game away from a classic roguelike, but I don’t think …
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