Powerhoof! Development


The Telwynium – Book Three

The Shadow of Spring

Welp, we’re really neglecting this blog ha ha! But I’ve wrapped up the next instalment of The Telwynium! So what better excuse to update you here 😀

Another year to look back on… I’m still full time on The Drifter, and its still coming along. Finished the writing pass and started recording voices and working on SFX. About 1/3 still needs artwork so that’s the big thing. But we’ll see how fast we can make progress this year!

If you’d like more updates (I just noticed a bunch of comments in here that I ignored all year, sorry), there’s our discord where we’re chatting daily, and I’ve been doing youtube dev diary entries periodically too!

Well, until next time, have a great year!

– Dave

The Telwynium – Book Two

The Summer King

I’ve wrapped up the next instalment of The Telwynium! Just in time for Christmas!

Looking back on the year, we’ve still mostly been working on The Drifter and Acid Knife. Both are slowly but steadily coming together (still). The Drifter’s been play-tested through from start to finish by testers now, so that was a big milestone! Lots of art and sound to do but it’s happening! And Barney actually let me play Acid Knife last week for the first time since the early combat demo, it’s got an amazing level of depth and detail to all the mechanics, and a huge amount of interesting ideas, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of it so far!

Have a great new year!

– Dave

The Drifter Dev Diaries

Youtubey goodness

Ok, I guess I’ve done enough of these that it’s worth sharing! Been doing these dev diaries on youtube the last couple of months, I just record them at the start of a dev stream, so they don’t take a bunch of time away from development. (You can also check the stream out at https://twitch.tv/duzzondrums)

In each entry, I say what I’ve been working on, and then briefly chat about a topic, related to what I’m working on, or to adventure game development in general.

Check ’em out!

– Dave

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!

Continue reading

The Telwynium

A cosy 90s Fantasy Adventure

I got all nostalgic for Adventure Jam this year. With an EGA game inspired by the games and fantasy novels I grew up on.

It seemed to strike a chord with a bunch of other devs, because it was voted #1 in the Jam!

– Dave

Intergalactic Wizard Force

It’s Twins (1988), but with wizards… in space

I teamed up with Jacob Janerka (or Paradigm Adventure fame) to make another point ‘n click over the last couple of weeks for AdvXJam!

Travel between planets, solving space mysteries and casting spells from the spellbooks of both Prince Xandar, hero of the cosmos and Maldrek, the galactic wizard!

-Dave

Crawl Coming to Switch

Soon…

Stay tuned for more details, we’ll be announcing a release date shortly after Barney’s back from showing Regular Human Basketball at Day of the Devs!

– 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

Peridium Dev Logs

Making an adventure game in under a week

While we were working on our adventure jam 2017 game Peridium I recorded a bunch of videos to show the process. Check it out here:

-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