Jun 17
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 …
Apr 25
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
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 …
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 …
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 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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