Powerhoof! Tools


PowerQuest

A nifty 2d adventure toolkit for Unity

PowerQuest Banner

I posted here aaaages ago about PowerQuest in it’s early stages, but haven’t really mentioned it since. However, I’ve been working on it steadily, alongside The Drifter, and it’s pretty fully featured now. It even has its own itch page!

There’s a bunch of others using it now, hanging out on our Discord. So if you have the urge to make your own point ‘n clicker, now’s the time!

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Unity Tool – PowerSpriteImport

Free tool importing sprites/anims into Unity

 
Here’s another tool I made. This one is what we use for getting sprite animations into the project. If you use Unity, and Photoshop or Aseprite for anims then you might find it useful!

The easiest way to use it (For photoshop users only though), is just to right click in your project and import sprites from the currently open PS file, like so-

For both Photoshop and Aseprite users, there’s a more structured method for mapping your source files to the sprites in-game.

Here’s an example of that-

The idea with this one is that you copy/paste a new importer file for each source file. Once your project is set up with these it makes editing existing sprites and re-importing super quick.

It’s windows only I’m afraid, but it’s free to use/edit however you see fit. Grab it here:

Download PowerSpriteImport.unitypackage

Stick it in your project and click on the “SpriteImporter” file, instructions are in there.

-Dave

Unity Tool – Selection Log

Free tool for easily navigating between previously selected objects

 
Making Crawl in Unity involved a lot of going back and forth between different objects in our project. When say addding an enemy’s attack, you’d want to be going between editing the enemy, it’s attack animation, and the damage effect it spawns. Since the project has so much stuff in it, I made a little tool to help with going back to previous selections. There’s some more fully featured things on the asset store but I just wanted something super simple and lightweight.

Anyway, it’s just a single file, feel free to use/modify it however you like. I’d love to hear if it’s useful for you too!

Grab the code here: https://pastebin.com/V9kkemiu

 

Save it as /Editor/SelectionLog.cs in your unity project, then hit Window->Selection Log in the toolbar to open it.

Then every time you select an object, it goes to the top of the list. You can lock items to the top, and click the magnifying glass to highlight the object in the project without selecting it (useful if you want to drag it onto whatever’s in the inspector).

-Dave

PowerQuest Development

Showing off my adventure game tools

I’ve been putting together some tools for making point and click games in Unity, and wanted to share how I’ve done things and how I’d use them to make adventure games

So I’ve made a 3 part series showing it off:

It covers my history with using tools like Adventure Game Studio, and how they work, and then shows how I use the tools I’ve made in unity to set up a scene and script some dialog and puzzles.

I’m not planning on making the tools public, they’re too specific to our workflow to be generally useful without loads more work. But if you’re curious to try anyway, or have a gander at any parts of the code let me know (contact @ powerhoof.com), or feel free to tweet questions (@DuzzOnDrums) at me too .

-Dave

PowerText

Code for generating randomized lines of text

 
Quite a few times I’ve found myself writing code to mash together a few strings randomly for games. Inspired by some sweet generated text stuff @eigenbom‘s been doing for his game Moon Man, I thought I’d write a tool to make this easy to do.

Features

  • Quick and simple way of generating a randomized lines of text for a variety of purposes.
  • Chuck some simple rules in a text file and use PowerText to generate random lines.
  • Lightweight, easy to use code. Just 2 function calls really.
  • Automatically handles some simple language things like capitalizing first letter of sentence, and converting “a” to “an” where necessary.
  • Simple handling of plurals– mark numbers in your text with [#], and then plurals of words like so: “cat[s], leech[es], goose[/geese]”.
  • Add weighting for certain options by adding [weight] at the start of a line (eg: “[50]common housefly”, “[0.1] rare dodo”).
  • Insert variables from code eg “You have [numLives] life[/lives] remaining.”

There’s fancier things out there that do the same thing and more, but if you want something really quick, lightweight and easy to use this might do the trick!

Get it

PowerSprite Animator

I made a Unity Extension for editing sprite animations

We do a lot of sprite animation (well… Barney does) so I made a swanky tool to make it nicer to edit them in Unity!

image

It means we can edit animations without having to fiddle around with unity’s convoluted animation system that’s built for much more complicated 3d games. Also I realised making tools like this is really pretty fun!

So if you’re a Unity developer check it out here:

Unity Asset Store Link

-Dave

Find Object References in Unity

A unity tool to find prefabs that reference an object

I don’t post here much because Barney has all the cool art to show and I just do programming which is sooooo boooooring. But the blog was getting so interesting that it needs some mega-dull code related stuff to tone it down. (Seriously, code is super boring. It’s literally just text. Like one of those books that don’t even have any pictures in, or a website with zero rotating skull gifs)

Anyway, made a tiny tool which is pretty useful if you’re using unity and your project’s starting to get unmanageably big like ours is for Crawl. It searches through the dependencies of all your prefabs to find which ones reference an object/script.

image

To use it, grab the code from here (it needs to be in under a folder named “Editor”).

Then you can right click an object or script in the project window and click “Find References”. It’ll pop up a window with all the prefabs, which you can select from there, or click the little arrow to dig deeper. EASY!

-Dave