Sundial

YOUR GAME, MOOD-IFIED.

Ever feel like your game world feels just a little flat?

Well, Sundial is my little library that lets you easily alter the mood of your game through a day/night cycle with each time period having a distinct feel, without creating any new artwork.

Oh, and did I mention you can edit it visually inside GameMaker without running your game.

EDIT THE CYCLE DIRECTLY INSIDE GAMEMAKER.

Install the Sundial IDE plugin for free, and you can visually edit the look of your game without having to run an external tool, edit any code, or even having to boot your game to see the results!

You don’t need to buy Sundial to test out the Sundial Visual Editor. Just follow the steps at the Plugin Access page to install the Visual Editor, learn how to use it on the docs page, and see how Sundial would make your game look.

Pick a time period in the Sundial Visual Editor, then choose a colour, adjust the strength and brightness, decide how you want indoors versus outdoors to look, setup callbacks to run when each time period is hit and tons more.

Then all you need to do is run:

SundialStart();

When you want Sundial to start applying its effect to your game, and:

sundial.Stop();

When you want it to stop.

That’s literally all the code you need to add, and Sundial will transform the mood of your game, adding a full day/night cycle to it and making your game world feel alive.

Of course, you have more options than this, including taking complete manual control over how Sundial draws, but for the majority of use cases, this is enough.

INDOORS AND OUTDOORS.

Sundial lets you set up separate lighting for indoors and outdoors, so you can let the outside world fall into darkness while the inside of a house stays nicely lit.

It also gives you access to the current amount of sunlight in your game, so you can make dynamic reactions that depend on the actual light available, like turning lights on as the sun goes down or starting birds chirping at dawn.

TIME.

Sundial can automatically handle the clock for you, or you can manually control it if necessary: Jump to a specific point in the day, pause time, or tie it to your own world clock.

Sundial itself is independent of the Sundial IDE editor. So your players don’t need to install a plugin or anything like that, and removing the editor doesn’t remove the day cycle system from your game (although, of course, you can easily uninstall either).

How you install it: Sundial includes an IDE plugin distributed through the GameMaker Package Manager. After purchasing on itch.io, follow the plugin installation guide to add the RefresherTowel Games package source to GameMaker. Then install the Sundial IDE Plugin and Sundial itself from the Package Manager.

GET SUNDIAL.

Get Sundial on itch.io >

Sundial is also available as part of the Full Suite Pass.