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
Jul 12
Buru Buru Loading
GearHead Caramel can now load a complete SAN-X9 BuruBuru mecha from a text file. I can’t necessarily say everything is functioning yet, but it’s all there. The GHC version is 52.5 tons and is worth $117,280, which fits between the GH1 values (45.0 tons, $106,287) and GH2 values (53.0 tons, $194,368). Here is the complete …
Jul 07
Gear Loader Working
I’d like to report another milestone in the development of GearHead in Python: that item on the right is the first bona fide Gear to be loaded from disk and displayed onscreen. It’s a human scale class 5 armor plate. As in previous GearHead games, I’ve written a parser to load mecha and item designs …
Jul 02
Random Maps from Dungeon Monkey Eternal
I’ve been ripping out the skeleton from Dungeon Monkey Eternal and genericizing it for GearHead Caramel. Python has made this process far easier than it would have been in (non-Object) Pascal. The random map generator presented a special challenge because of how much game-specific stuff it relies on, such as the terrain list and wandering …
Apr 04
New Idea: The Story So Far
After yesterday’s post about GearHead-2, I started thinking about how the game reminds the player of the story so far. Instead of listing the history items as above, I wonder if it would be possible to generate a single paragraph describing the current state of the story? Something like: The space colonies of the Free …
Apr 03
More GearHead2 Thoughts
Sorry for the silence- it’s been a busy couple of months. I’ve been playing through GearHead-2 again. Tonight, my character Hawk finally earned the respect of his criminal space trucker rival. One of the things that makes GearHead-2 very different from GearHead-1 is the scale. In GH1, you will travel between a small number of …
Jan 24
Random Story Generation Part 2: GearHead-1’s Core Story
To briefly recap part one, one way to create a random story generator is to write a whole lot of story fragments, arrange a subset of the fragments into a list, and count on your player’s sense of closure to assemble the list into a coherent story. In this part I’m going to look at …
Jan 16
Random Story Generation Part 1: Nothing More Practical Than A Good Theory
I’ve decided to document my experiments in random story generation, in the hope that these notes will be helpful to other developers and hobbyists. This first post will define some of the terms I’ll be using and introduce some of the theory. My first idea for a random story generator came during a literary criticism …
Dec 15
Painting Fantasy Portraits
To practice both painting and faces, I’ve started doing fantasy portraits. Once I get enough of them I’ll upload the set to OpenGameArt.org and maybe incorporate them into Dungeon Monkey Eternal. I wanted to do the pictures in traditional media because in my mind that’s how classic fantasy portraits are supposed to be done. Obviously …