Why our first plugin is the free one
We wrote tools to build our dungeons faster. Then we understood they all needed the same thing: to see what we're doing.
Our mission right now is to make this game, the game we hold close to our hearts. But learning the craft, we found out how rich and complex it is, sometimes hard to get into, sometimes tricky to get the hang of. Things were missing. Tools, to go faster, to be more efficient, to create without overthinking, letting ourselves be guided by this world of Eldoria and by what it asks of us: to make it live the way it is, at least in our heads!
That's why we're building these tools, testing them, turning them every which way so they fit our way of working. And, we hope, the way of plenty of other people and creators working in Unreal Engine too. The first one, SizeUp, is nearly ready, and it will be free!
It isn't the most powerful, but it's the base every other one stands on: to see what you're doing, and then to be the living panel for everything the next plugins do. This first plugin is the screen that helps us out, because it guides us on whatever we move in the scene, and it's the first stone of our building. We truly hope others will follow, and let us all build the worlds we've imagined.
Off-game. None of this is part of Islands of the Blessed. It's the tooling that came out of making it, sharpened so other Unreal developers can use it too. Nothing is out yet. When the first listing goes up, the Discord hears about it first!
It started with the dungeons
It all started that day, when we wanted to run the modular-kit tests for the first dungeon. In Devlog #03 we showed you part of one of our first modular kits, that "dungeon" kit exactly. Pieces that fit together perfectly, or at least that work together in any configuration: that's the whole idea of a modular kit. The problem is placing them cleanly, and above all quickly.
What that devlog already said, and it's something we care about, is that everything, well, almost everything the player sees built on their journey through Eldoria, they'll be able to rebuild one day for their own glory. Assembling, in practice, means gluing pieces one against another. Again, and again, and again… Several hundred pieces, in as many configurations as possible, and then all taken apart because in the end it just doesn't work. And then starting over, quickly if we can, to keep the frustration away!
That's why the first tool we worked on does exactly that. It lets you snap pieces together, quickly and cleanly, every which way, without having to think about the technique, just about the design you're building. This first one is FaceSnap. And it's the one that made a second one necessary.
FaceSnap. The first one we wrote, and the reason there was a second.
Then the gizmo got in the way
We can admit it: a lot of people coming from Blender struggle, struggle a lot for a while, with Unreal's native gizmo. How do you build scenes, how do you stage a modular kit with just a grid and a gizmo? Yes, we tore our hair out too, looking for the best way, watching how others do it, and above all practising, practising, and practising again…
But the real question was this: with the tools we have today, couldn't we change the rules of the game and make life simpler? What if the technique adapted to our way of working, instead of the other way around? And yes, it's possible now. Hard to believe, honestly, but real. So we did it, and we've spent months building these tools, every day, pushing them as far as they'll go and testing them every which way, trying to make them fit every situation, or at least as many of the cases we run into making IOTB and other projects as we can.
This one, the one that finally moves things the way our hands want, is Grab & Move. Grab, lock to an axis, watch the offset, drop. The gesture we already knew by heart.
Grab & Move. The gesture our hands already knew.
The thing both of them were missing
Two tools, then. And that's when another problem showed up, quieter but very real: our two tools were doing good work, and neither of them told us what it was actually doing. Unreal, to our taste, doesn't show much at the moment you act. You run an operation, and you guess the result.
What we wanted was exactly the opposite. A small panel, clear and nice to look at, that says what's happening in the scene as it happens: the dimensions, the offsets, the distances, the state of whatever you're holding. And the second we started drawing it, one thing was obvious: there should only be one of them. Four plugins each bolting their own little window onto the editor is four ways to clutter a screen that's already busy. One shared panel, and every tool plugs into it.
SizeUp. The shared panel, and the first plugin out.
That panel is SizeUp. On its own it's already useful: you select something, and it tells you its real size, how high off the floor it sits, how far another actor is, and even whether you've left two copies inside one another without noticing. But its real job is to be the surface all the others speak through.
And that's why it's free
Once SizeUp becomes the place where every tool shows its work, it stops being one product among four. It becomes the floor all the others stand on. Literally, in fact: each of the others names it as a dependency, and Unreal refuses to activate a plugin whose dependency is missing. Without SizeUp, the others don't run "blind". They don't run at all.
So charging for the floor would be a strange thing to do, wouldn't it? SizeUp is free, it comes out first, and everything we release afterwards simply plugs into it. Grab & Move follows as the first paid tool, with LevelSmith and FaceSnap behind it. We'll talk about each one properly when it's really out. This one was about the groundwork.
A word on AI, plainly
There's no point hiding it: with the modern tools we've had at hand for a while now, the possibilities are multiplied tenfold. These AI tools let us understand the heart of Unreal, and let us build our own tools, the ones we cared about. We don't see how any of it would have been possible, at least not right now, and certainly not for just 3 people, with only 1 coder (and a half!).
So the programming was helped, a lot, by these tools. But the design, the conception, the use, the tests, the fixes and the tweaks, the headaches… how do you fit a square peg into a round hole… all of this comes from us!
For the Unreal developers
A few honest details. These are editor tools: they change how you build a level, not how the game plays. You reach for them while dressing a scene, never while you're playing it.
Every action goes through named undo, so the history stays readable instead of filling up with anonymous transform steps.
And apart from the SizeUp dependency, nothing is tied together: no paid tool requires another, and there's no "bundle". You take what you need. One shared panel rather than four also means one place to look, and one thing to keep out of your way.
All of it is built and tested on Unreal Engine 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8.
Back to the island
None of this was planned. We set out to build dungeons, and this is what it took to keep building them without losing our afternoons. Our heads, though, are still on Eldoria, always. These tools just got useful enough that we wanted to share them.
And who knows? Maybe they'll help others out, the way they help us out, every day. We can't wait to show you what's next! All four live on the plugins page.
More devlogs
Want to know when SizeUp lands?
Nothing is out yet. The Discord is where the first one will be announced, and where you can tell us which part of your own day is slower than it should be.