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 …
Category: News
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 …
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 …
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 …