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 …
Category: News
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 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 …
Dec 23
Enjoy some Winter Mocha!
Dec 13
GearHead Caramel Exploration and Combat Working
Both exploration and combat are now working in GearHead Caramel… if you can forgive the fact that the enemy pilots fight like they’re drunk. Right now they just pick a random weapon, try to attack a random target, and if that doesn’t work out they walk randomly. I am hoping to release a playable demo …
Dec 11
All The Missiles
It’s a bit hard to see the shot animations on the video (especially since I only fired one missile), so here’s a gif of a BuruBuru launching (and hitting with!) all 20 of its missiles at once. In GearHead Caramel the missiles anim shows how many missiles were fired, letting you know at once just …