Thanks for the bug report! I noticed that too; kind of annoying, but I've been too lazy to fix it so far, working on savegames and all. And yes, I made all the art myself, though I intend to give them a touch-up in the future - and, of course, have something other than smileys and frownies running around the map.

I'm no expert programmer, but I think most of the load time is just the brute effort of generating tiles (a 256X256 map has over 65,500 tiles to generate!), and determining what are buildings. Buildings are especially slow, taking several seconds each, as the counter reveals; I think my code may be inefficient, though at the moment I'm just glad it works. When it comes to generating worlds that are 1024x1024, or larger, I think I'll have to see what can be done to shorten the loading times, unless I want to sit around and wait ten minutes for the game to load.