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 …
Category: Development
Apr 25
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 …
Mar 20
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 …
Feb 26
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 …
Feb 17
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 …
Feb 05
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 …
Dec 30
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 …
Dec 29
GearHead Caramel One Week Update
Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback on GearHead Caramel so far. If you haven’t tried it yet, you can download the release or the latest commit from GitHub. I’ve heard one report of fullscreen mode not working properly on a laptop computer. I haven’t managed to replicate that problem, but I did find that …
Dec 26
New Style Portraits: Step by Step
As you can see from the above picture, GearHead Caramel uses much bigger portraits than previous GearHead games, and the color switcher can handle subtler shading. Plus, there are now five recoloring channels to work with instead of just three. Here’s a quick tutorial on how I’ve been making portraits for the new system. I …
Dec 13
GearHead Caramel Exploration and Combat Working
Both exploration and combat are now working in GearHead Caramel… if you can forgive the fact that the enemy pilots fight like they’re drunk. Right now they just pick a random weapon, try to attack a random target, and if that doesn’t work out they walk randomly. I am hoping to release a playable demo …
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