Hey there!
Hope you are all ok out there in these crazy times!
Let me update you on some of the major things I have been and are working on lately.
New Years is peak season for Fireworks Mania, so I do what I can do get as much as I can ready for you guys before the holidays.
Custom Map support
After I added mod support to the game last year, one of the big requests have been to enable support for custom maps, meaning mod creators can create full maps for the game.
I have been working on that exact feature for the last couple of months and are (as of writing) running a closed beta test with a handful mod creators.
There are still some bugs to fix and features to add, but it's coming a long nicely and should be ready for all of you before New Years.
Smarter mod handling
Due to the Custom map support I had to refactor a lot of the code and completely change how the game loads maps and thereby also loads mods.
It wasn't easy and it took a while, but the result is awesome.
The handling of mods are now made in a smarter way, so only mods that have been changed are reloaded on map load. As a player this means the first time you load a map it takes more or less the same time as before, however on reload of the same or another map (as long as the game is running) it loads A LOT fast. Like a lot!
Me and the mod creators have used this for a while now and it seems pretty solid and stabile.
As always, there are still a few ways I would like to improve it - but they are mainly technical and not something you as a player feel or see directly.
The faster reloading of maps is the big news here for you guys.
Minor fixes and changes
One of these minor, but important things, have been to update the "Map Selection UI" to now handle a dynamic amount of maps. Before it was fixed to hold the total of 4 maps in the game. Now the list of map is dynamic, which I have had some fun with. Still needs a little work, however, I see this as the v1 of the dynamic Map Selection, I plan to completely redo all this UI in the future, but for now, this is how it looks and works.
I also faced some issues with custom maps that ended up with me figuring out that there was a new version of "Enviro Sky" which is what I use for the Day/Night cycle in the game. I did a live stream about upgrading to it.
Besides that I have also found a new type of Steam key scam that I didn't see before.I made a video about it you can check out here.
That's it for this Developer News post :)
Subscribe to my YouTube channel if you want to see video updates and live stream :)
- Enjoy!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1079260/Fireworks_Mania__An_Explosive_Simulator/