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 that’s a bad thing. Genre definitions can be a useful thing when talking about games. Rigid adherence to definitions, on the other hand, can often impair creativity and growth.
The main characteristics that GearHead Caramel will retain from the roguelike genre are replayability, procedurally generated content, and consequence persistence. Some of the non-roguelike features it will have are tactics style combat, a non-ASCII interface, and a focus on story. Whether this means GHC is still a roguelike or a roguelite or something else is left as an exercise for the reader.
The part of the game I am most interested in programming is the scenario generator. There’s a lot more going on now than simply random story generation. There is also procedural puzzle generation, a bit of which you can see in Winter Mocha (please forgive the fact that the puzzle is trivially easy; this is proof of concept work only). There’s generative text and dynamically constructed conversation trees, both of which should revolutionize NPC interactions in GHC. There is also reactive story generation, in which the player is given opportunities to alter the world state and the story reacts to those changes. In short, there are a whole lot of things I want to experiment with and I can do that better if the game consists of short linked episodes rather than a single epic adventure.
I’d also like to talk about the visual design of GearHead Caramel. I decided early on that I wanted to make the graphics attractive, functional, and low-maintenance. As you can see, each character and mecha has a single forward-facing sprite. In my notes I describe this style as “Neo-Ultima”.
The GearHead Caramel mecha sprites are scaled so 3 pixels = 1 meter; all of the mecha in the picture above are to accurate fictional size with one another. There is no definite scale for human sprites, but I plan to eventually introduce a paper doll system showing the character’s clothing and equipment.