Fire Man Incoming Storm v2.1.0 – Gamepad Support

by IRA

Fire Man Incoming Storm gets gamepad support and restored high scores.

Major changes

  • Gamepad support.
  • Restored High Scores.
  • Revamped Main Menu.
  • Choose the difficulty setting right before the game starts.
  • High Scores for Easy mode.

Read after the break for more details.

Demo Video

Gamepad support

The technical details about the gamepad implementation are almost the same as I discussed in my previous post for Fall of 21XX.

The challenge was that Fire Man Incoming Storm has a very primitive engine. Getting it to the same level as Fall of 21XX was going to be a lot of work. I had to choose my battles carefully and make surgical changes just to add the gamepad support and not to mess with anything else. This was supposed to be a quick update so other than some small maintenance and minor bug fixes, the game is practically the same.

High Scores

This was a stretch goal but since I was making good progress with the gamepad I decided to press on and fix the high scores. This created more work since now I had to look at the server side to understand and fix any issues the original code had when running in a modern server stack.

As for the game side, the score input form did not get a navigation upgrade since, most likely, you will need a keyboard or touch controls to enter your name, anyway. Maybe I can think of something for the gamepad scenario next time. By the way, the soft keyboard shown in the demo video is thanks to Ruffle.

And just for fun, I enabled a new leaderboard for Easy Mode. I did not find any good reason not to do it.

Skill Selection and Easy Mode

You can choose the difficulty right before the game starts. I also made some small adjustments to make Easy mode even easier. Since this mode had no scores before, no one should feel affected. All the other modes remain mostly unchanged.

Portable Mode

The main reason this work attracted my attention is to be able to play this game using a smartphone. Loading the game thanks to Ruffle was nice, but being able to play it on the go is a completely new experience.

Final Notes

As much fun as this little project was, I had to leave out some stuff to make it in time for this release. At least the game is fully functional now.

Have fun!