Most commented posts
- GearHead 1 v1.300 — 23 Comments
- New Idea: The Story So Far — 17 Comments
- GearHead-1 v1.201: The Inevitable Bugfix — 16 Comments
- Full Screen Map Working — 16 Comments
- Lancemate Switching from Backpack — 16 Comments
Joseph Hewitt
Author's posts
Feb 15
GearHead Caramel: Next Day Ruckus
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 07
Fantasy Portrait Set at itch.io
I’ve uploaded a series of 26 fantasy portraits that I did in traditional media (mostly acrylic, some watercolor and gouache) to itch.io. The pictures are licensed under CC-BY 4.0, but any donations I get for the set will go towards hiring artists to help with GearHead Caramel. In related news items, you can soon expect …
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 …
Jan 23
THD-36 Thorshammer
Jan 15
Z45-60 Zerosaiko
The Zerosaiko is one of the most popular mecha in the GearHead universe. It is designed for mobility and maneuverability. The basic version lacks firepower, but this is easily fixed with a little modification. Originally the Zerosaiko was produced exclusively by Zero Tech, a family-run company in Namok. In NT160 Zero Tech was acquired by …
Jan 12
My Computing Adventures
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
On Roguelikeness and Ultimatude
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 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 …