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.
Category: Development
Jul 31
Shooting Anim Working
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 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 …
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 …
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 …