Category: Development

GearHead Caramel Progress

Work has been continuing on GearHead Caramel. The next scenario, DeadZone Drifter, is quickly approaching playability. There’s a random building generator and the random NPC generator has been significantly improved. The Mechanical Tarot scenario generator is working. Things are starting to look pretty good. In DeadZone Drifter the player character travels to various towns in …

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GearHead Caramel Cosplay

The color editor for GearHead Caramel is up and running; it still needs a bit of polish, but it shows off how much nicer the new color switcher is than the GH1/GH2 version. Just look at how glowey everything is!

Random Portrait Generator

I’ve been working on a paper doll type portrait construction system for GearHead Caramel. This is the first randomly generated portrait created by the system; the player will also be able to use the portrait generator to customize their character. Once I have randomized NPCs up and running I’ll be able to start work on …

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GHC v0.130: Father’s Day Deployment

I’ve just uploaded a new release of GearHead Caramel. This release finishes off Winter Mocha, at least for now, so I can move on to creating the first real scenario. Six months after the Typhon Incident, you are invited to a charity mecha tournament at the newly built Mauna Arena. ​It should only take ten …

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Stealth and Searching Work

As the title says, stealth and searching now work, both for the player and NPCs. GearHead Caramel uses a Dungeon Monkey-style invocations system for all attacks and skill uses. One of the great things about this system is that skills contain their own usage instructions; instead of the NPC AI needing to know about every …

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Working on Stealth

My current project is to get stealth working in GearHead Caramel. For now, it will use the same rules as in Dungeon Monkey Eternal- if your stealth action is successful, your character will be effectively invisible until revealed. Unfortunately there are still a whole lot of details to work out- for instance, if your entire …

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Winter Mocha Random Story Generator: Propp’s Ratchet

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 …

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Future Plans for GearHead Caramel

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 …

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Reworked Conversation System

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 …

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Competing Goods: Cavalier Virtues

GearHead Caramel will not feature the Heroic/Villainous morality scale used in previous GearHead games. Typically, games that feature a good/evil scale use it to divide up the content: play a hero and you get one story, play a villain and you get a slightly different story. The moral choices you get to make tend to …

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