Steam Workshop Update, Tiger Skins for Big Mig (Patreon)

I've been busy implementing basic Steam Workshop support for the game! To properly test the Workshop I have also created a new custom skin for Big Mig to give him some fancy tiger stripes—I have attached the custom skin files to this post, so you can download and import them into your game, already, even without the Workshop!

So let's see where we're at, right now...

Mod and Workshop Support

In the game there now is a Mods Menu, which is accessible from the main menu:

Here, you will see a list of all the mods that are currently available in your game: Either because you have created/installed a mod, manually, in your Mods folder—or because you have subscribed to it, in the workshop.

Each entry in the list also gets a checkbox which allows you to quickly enable/disable any mod.

If it's a mod from your local Mods folder, you also get the option to upload it to the Steam Workshop.

If you want to find mods to subscribe to and download, you can click the "Browse Workshop" button, which will take you to Steam's Workshop page for the game: You cannot subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) mods, from inside the game—you have to go through Steam's interface.

How Steam Workshop works

Just a quick word about the Steam Workshop, in general, because many players have misconceptions of how it works...

Basically, you can upload a folder to Steam as a Workshop item. And then, when someone subscribes to your Workshop item, they download that folder and its content to their computer: Steam will then tell the game: "Hey look, here's a folder with user-generated content!"

Up until this point, no game has been modded yet: The mod data is on your computer, in some random folder, but it's up to the game to load its contents and implement any modifications that are supposed to happen.

Long story short: Pawperty Damage can load custom billboards and custom character skins. Now that it gets Workshop support it can.... load custom billboards and custom character skins. The only difference now is that those billboard and skin files are managed by Steam.

So if you were hoping for new character models, buildings and city levels, right out of the gate: None of that comes with just enabling Steam Workshop, I'm afraid—apologies!

Uploading Mods to the Workshop

The upload process is pretty simple, and a little janky. If the game finds a mod in your local game files, it will offer you to upload it to the Workshop.

What's important is that your mod is set up, correctly... To help with that, you can find a mod folder called "_Template", in the game's Mods folder. You can use this template to create your own mod: Simply copy/paste the whole folder and rename it to any other name (that doesn't start with an underscore.)

After that you can modify the files in the folder: Most importantly the Mod.json that contains the details of your mod (name and description) and the Preview.jpg, which is necessary to upload your mod to the Workshop.

For more details, you can check out the Mod Creation Guide, which you will find in the Mods folder, but which I have also attached to this post, for convenience.

Custom Skins: Big Mig, the Tiger

I wanted to make sure there's going to be something in the Workshop, when it goes live. So I decided to create a new custom skin for Big Mig: He's a tiger, now!

Cougar, jaguar, snow leopard and now tiger. Mig is going through a bit of an identity crisis.

As mentioned, you can find these two skins attached to this post, so you can download them and import them into the game, with no need for the Steam Workshop, whatsoever. Just unzip the files and move to folders to your game's Skins folder!

New option for custom skins: Adjust ear and tail size

That's more ear and tail than this town can handle.

In the future, I'll maybe add options for other body parts as well, but at the moment it's limited to tails and ears, because... well, they don't affect the game's balancing, in any way, heh.

If, for instance, you were to drastically increase the size of hand/feet paws or make the arms and legs much longer, it would give you quite the gameplay advantage!

That's only relevant for the Steam leader boards though, really; so if I am going to add more options, I might simply deactivate high score uploads, to keep things fair.

Thanks for your Support!

I hope the game update with Steam Workshop integration will go live, some time in the next 1~2 weeks!

Then there's a short break to hang out at Eurofurence: If you go, come say hi!

After the basic Steam Workshop implementation is finished (and after Eurofurence is over) I'll finally get started on implementing custom character model imports: So, exciting times ahead!