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 …
Dec 29
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
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 …
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