Why our first plugin is the free one

Pixel Doodles makes a game. Along the way it turned out we were also making Unreal editor tools — not on purpose, and not all at once. Each one exists because something in our own days was slower than it needed to be.

The first of them is nearly ready, and it's the free one. That isn't a marketing gesture; it's how the thing is built. Here's the order it actually happened in.

It started with the dungeons

In devlog #03 we showed the modular kit: one shared grid, snap-together pieces, intact and damaged and ruined variants of everything. What that devlog also says is the part that matters here — the pieces you explore are close to the pieces players will build with at the Sanctuary. Level and player construction run on much the same logic, so anything that makes assembly quicker pays off twice.

Assembly, in practice, means putting one surface flush against another, several hundred times a day. Doing it by eye is how small gaps end up in finished rooms. So the first tool we wrote was the one that makes two faces meet properly.

Then the gizmo got in the way

Snapping solved one half. The other half was simply moving things around, and there the standard gizmo never quite suited us — nor did navigating the 3D view, some days. That's a matter of habit more than of quality: when you come from Blender, your hands already know a different way to grab something and push it along an axis, and every session spent translating between the two costs attention you'd rather spend on the level.

So we wrote the transform tool we already knew how to use. Grab, constrain, watch the offset, drop.

The thing both of them were missing

Two tools in, a different problem showed up. Both of them were doing useful work, and neither could tell us what that work was. Unreal, to our taste, doesn't offer much that is genuinely visual at the moment you act: you perform an operation and you infer the result.

What we wanted was a small, clear, good-looking panel that says what is happening in the scene as it happens — the dimensions, the offsets, the distances, the state of the thing you're holding.

And the moment we started drawing it, the obvious decision was that there should only be one of it. Four plugins each bolting their own widget onto the editor is four ways to clutter a screen that is already busy. One shared panel, and every tool grafts into it.

That panel is SizeUp. On its own it's already useful: select something and it tells you how big it really is, how far off the floor it sits, how far it is from another actor, and whether you've quietly left two copies inside one another. But its real job is to be the surface the others speak through.

Which is why it's free

Once SizeUp is where every tool shows its work, it stops being one product among four. It's the floor they all stand on — and quite literally so: each of the others names it as a plugin dependency, and Unreal won't activate a plugin whose dependency is missing. Without SizeUp they don't run blind. They don't run.

Charging for the floor would be a strange thing to do. So SizeUp is free, it ships first, and anything else we release plugs into it. You'll never need to buy two tools to make one work — you'll need the free one, and you'll have it.

Grab & Move follows as the first paid tool, with FaceSnap and LevelSmith behind it. We'll talk about each properly when it's actually out; this one was about the groundwork.

Back to the island

None of this was the plan. We set out to build dungeons, and these are what it took to keep building them without losing the afternoon. The studio's attention is still on Eldoria — the tools just got useful enough to be worth handing over.

All four live on the plugins page.