Before reading: Our Fans who have joined our Discord server do already know some parts of this announcement.
We don't want to beat around the bush, so this is what this posting is about: We were not able keep the Q1 announcement up. Obviously.
As many of you know, Firesplash ENtertainment is not the main job of our team members. It is not even an employment as it is much too small to be able to employ people and live from the money we make. So actually we are creating games and other things besides our main work. I (Alex, the writer of this announcement) am the only programmer and the owner of Firesplash Entertainment. This means any release cycle is currently hard tied to the time I can invest into the projects.
The corona pandemic caused a lot of stress to all of us - for me that means having days of 11 and more hours of working time - which is the reason why I've often just been coming home tiredly. On top I got a huge private life project in planning phase right now which has huge impact on my further life and also on our Firesplash proejcts for the future. This is an essential thing and it is priorized.
We planned to have Maze Crusher out of early access before we started this project but the delays caused by the pandemic crashed all our time plans, so now the reduced spare time, the additional stress and the hugest update we ever made for maze crusher (from code side) are mixing up.
I know this sounds like "cheap excuses". I hate myself for doing exactly what I never wanted to do: Re-Prolonging a deadline for an announced release again and again - but implementing the level editor as well as the required technical backgrounds is seen from code side - as I already stated above - the hugest update we made yet.
If things go like they do right now and if no additional issues arise we should be able to release the level editor and steam workshop integration into public access by the end of this year.
Currently the level editor itself is working quite well. There are a few bugs and some UI work left and the reference run (think of it like testing if your maze works) is not fully integrated yet.
The Steam Workshop implementation is still missing completely, I am right now working on this portion (for testing purpose: We need to know if things work like we expected before "sealing" the editor).
I would say the Editor is at 90%, Reference Run at 60% and Steam Workshop... Well... Right now 5%.
This makes a total progress of about 60-70% as the editor and the reference mode itself are the biggest part of the upcoming update.
Thank you very much for your support and understanding.