Powerhoof! Adventure


Wrapping up 2024

Bring on 2025, the year of The Drifter!

Another year down, and The Drifter’s getting real close! Still a lot to do though… I’ll be head down working on it, casting actors, recording and editing VO, getting art and sound in for the final few climactic scenes and bugfixing and polishing the whole thing up. The next time I pop my head up for air it’ll probably be when we announce a release date!

Anyway, here’s a little 2024 wrap-up video I made-

– Dave

PowerJams

Powerhoof PowerQuest Game Jams!

Over on our discord we’ve got a good bunch of folks together making games with PowerQuest, and early in the year we decided to run a little game jam, dubbed PowerJam, to encourage people to get something out, no matter how tiny or silly.

We ended up doing three of them, and I made a couple of games myself-

For PowerJam1 I made DUMB HEIST with my son Tom, he came up with the idea and concepted the art, and I put it together, the main objective being to make my kid laugh-

For PowerJam2, instead of making a game, I took the week to add some classic text parser tools to PowerQuest.

And so “Text Parser” became the theme of the PowerJam3 where I made TERMINAL CITY– a text parser adventure where you can’t stop moving.

The Drifter’s getting closer now, and it’s unlikely I’ll run any more PowerJam’s until we ship. I’m looking forward to getting it in your hands and having more time to devote to little side projects like these. They’re a lot of fun!

If you’re interested, jump in the discord, and check out the jam and other entries here!

– Dave

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

PowerQuest

A nifty 2d adventure toolkit for Unity

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!

– Dave

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

Free Game Double Feature

You’re Watching ICEBOX!

 
It’s been a while since we released a free game, so here’s two!

The first is a comedy adventure, along the same line as last years The Inanimate Mr Coatrack (and with a returning character!). Try to keep your cool, as you host a disastrous episode of failing 80’s variety show, ICEBOX!

Dunder

 
The second is a platform-puzzler, think Lemmings meets The Incredible Machine, with graphics inspired by the ZX Spectrum.

We found making levels was as fun as playing them, so we’ve made a level editor for this one too, you can export levels as text, and share them in the itch.io comments!

Thanks to the various SeaDads that worked on these with me- Louis Meyer, Adrian Vaughan, Jon Murphy, Kyle Olsen and Ivy Dupler!

-Dave

The Inanimate Mr. Coatrack

More adventure than you can shake a willy at

 
We made another adventure game in two weeks for Adventure Jam! The Inanimate Mr. Coatrack’s full of sweary undead shenanigans, jokes about willies, and a hefty amount of dismembered limbs!

We decided to do a comedy for this jam, and intended to take it easy and just have fun with it… Instead we ended up working way too hard and making our longest adventure yet. (Not including my current main project at least.)

Also, we were thrilled to come in first overall for the jam, and place first or second in each award category too! You can check out some of the other amazing entries at AdvJam.com

-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