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
Sep 06
GearHead Caramel Damage Update
Work continues on the GearHead Caramel damage handler. Today I added damage animations; the more damage done, the bigger the explosion. There’s a special extra big explosion for the shot that destroys a target (pictured in the animation). I think everything is more or less ready to get the effect system working.
Aug 16
Troubles with Iconic Life
The Troubles with Iconic Life was an adventure game I started working on during university. The player character is an icon living inside a computer world- sort of like a low-fi Tron. Your mission was to solve some sort of crisis by traveling through this world and playing a bunch of buggy minigames. In each …
Aug 13
Origins of GearHead
I am currently visiting my parents in Canada and trying to sort through all the junk in my closet. I’ve found a bunch of notes which predate GearHead development, but which show many of the influences that went into it. This page from my 1993 university notebook describes a method for generating random sentences- basically, …
Jul 31
Shooting Anim Working
Jul 29
Death Sword
Death Sword is a haunted 1980s-style adventure RPG. There is a malevolent presence trapped in the program; as the game world breaks down, you will learn more about this entity and the fate of the teenage programmer who created Death Sword. Developer Ranilda Baeddel is currently running a GoFundMe so she can finish this game …
Jul 26
GearHead: Caramel Combat System
Today I tried to figure out how attacks and other such effects are going to be modeled in GearHead: Caramel. If you’ve ever checked the GH1/GH2 source code, you’ll know that the old GearHead attack routine is a confusing mess of spaghetti that handles everything from beamswords to smoke bombs all in the same place. …
Jul 25
Party on Mecha Beach
A progress video for the new map renderer that I’ve been working on in Python. Layering and transparency work with the mecha traveling through the water. Also, the water now has a nice beach border around it. All of this took way too long to get right. As I’ve said before, if you’re thinking about …
Jul 21
Going to Cake Square
Tomorrow I’m heading to Incheon for the Cake Square comics festival. I’m hoping to get some work done on GearHead after the festival closes since it’s way too hot to go explore the city. Here’s a shot of some trees I made this morning; I’m not happy with them, but every little bit of pixel …
Jul 17
Proposed GearHead: Caramel Skill System
I spent much of last weekend thinking about how the GearHead: Caramel skill system is going to work. This is likely to get a bit long-winded, so please bear with me. Stats These define the untrained abilities of your character. They will not change by much over the course of the game. Health, Stamina, and …
Jul 15
Third Edition?
I’m trying out a new sprite recoloring method for GearHead Caramel. In the original version (left), colors are defined by a midtone which gets scaled up or down to a particular value. In the new version (right), the brightest and darkest colors are defined and the color gets scaled within that range. This means that …