Hey!
Its been another month and time for an update from the developer - aka me 🤓
Good progress this month! Not on what I was originally planning, but good progress anyway 😂
4th of July & Summer Sale
July was, surprisingly 😅, the month of 4th of July, which is a big deal for Fireworks Mania.
It is the second biggest time of year for the game, only topped by New Years.
This year Fireworks Mania was part of the Summer Sale on Steam, which runs over 4th of July. I was lucky enough to also get a Daily Deal spot right after the Summer Sale followed by yet another 2 weeks sale. So more or less 4 weeks on sale - so if you didn't get a copy on sale it's your own fault 🤓
(No worries, there will be sale again at some point).
This was a big success and a lot of new people have bought the game, resulting in a lot of positive reviews - which means a lot to me!
The game is now "Overwhelmingly Positive" in both RECENT and ALL reviews 🕺
Thanks again to all who bought the game, either recently or years ago 🙏🎇🎆
Firing system
This month I have actually worked on the upcoming firing system.
However, much of the time has actually been spend on talking with people in the community about ideas how this could work from a players point of view, combined with my own vision for how I want it to end up in its final state.
To give an example of what I mean, I have been back and forth on if the interaction with the Firing Controller, should be like an "in game" interface or it should be regular UI.
So what do I mean by that.
In general, I'm really a fan of having things be "physical" things in the game world. So like, if you need to press a button, there is a "physical" button in the game world you have to press, instead of a UI with a button you press with the mouse.
The reason is that I think it feels better somehow and it translate better to be played with a controller too or in VR if you have things physically in the game world.
However, there are drawbacks to this approach too, which I will get back to in a bit.
As an example, my first attempt here, I created a "Firing Controller" that had buttons you needed to look at and press to for instance fire of "cue 1".
This have that ingame feeling (right now it doesn't, as the button don't move, make sound or any feedback, but lets imaging that there for now). One of the problems though, is that you are looking down while pressing, meaning you are not looking at what's shooting off.
Another issue might be that it might not be easy to make an "interface" this way, when things get a little more complex, where you maybe have a waveform from a song and you wanna place markers at a specific time.
Another approach is to have regular UI as we know it from like the Inventory, menu's etc.
This could work in a way where you walk up to the firing controller and press E to use it and a UI shows, where you can do stuff.
A simple simple mockup could be something like this:
Making it like this, I think it will be easier to have a more advanced interface, as the firing controller system evolves with more features, like a waveform, markers etc.
However, this have the same challenges as the other, by having a huge dark UI blocking your view when you press the "Cue 1" button to fire it off.
To solve that problem, I could make it so the buttons Cue 1, 2, 3 etc. was bound to NUM1, NUM2, NUM3 etc. on the keyboard, so you had physical keys to press. That would solve the problem for both approaches... but what if you have more than one Firing Controller spawned then? What if there are multiple players in the game, what happens when one player press NUM1?
Anyway, this was a very very very short and simplified version of the thoughts I'm thinking these days.
The goal is to find a solution to this that makes you guys say "Yes, of cause it should be made like that" - however that's typically also the hardest solution to come up with.
Please share your thoughts and ideas of how this would work in the perfect world - I'm listening 👂
That's all for now 🤓
Change log
I have pushed the following updates since last Developer News.
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- Enjoy!