Hi Everyone! It would appear that since the world has been falling apart due to this lovely virus, now is a better time than ever to explain where I've been before updating on progress...
After spending ~2 months really working hard on Periodic, I decided to take a break. I was planning on taking a week or two off, but as soon as I did, my day job started to get much busier and I put that as the main focus. Now that I'm working from home, I don't have to spend time commuting and have more time in the day to get things done, and I'm taking advantage of it!
I'm going to try and post more updates, but they may not be weekly. There's also a couple of updates I'm going to be doing to the network rack, so stay tuned! But that's not what you came here for, so let's get to it!
TL:DR - Got all of the platforms on the level to be the same object and got the save system pretty well designed and implemented.
Below is the full story:
Update - Since I started to work on this again, I managed to take care of some stuff that I had been meaning to for a while. The first thing that I did was went through and touched up a lot of the little things I was having issues with in the Library stage. Any platforms that weren't working right are now fixed, and I also updated them to be able to traverse to multiple positions.
Next, and the bulk of what this update is, is about the save system and how I got that working. To start, I made a save template in JSON with everything that the save file will need. A lot of it is placeholder now, but it looks something like this:
Because it's JSON, I can read in the file, and change fields as needed with very low overhead. It also means that if there's stuff that I haven't used, it's not going to be an issue to keep playing the game as long as the file is formatted correctly.
This also required some changes to the GUI, and I managed to fix a lot of problems by adding in the save system. If it's a new game, the player is forced to start a new game at the main menu. If there is a save file, the player can choose to load it, and if there was a previously loaded game, the player can hit continue.
After getting that working, I moved to the level select screen where I added in the save file the ability to enable/disable levels based on progressing. This took a little bit of work, but it makes my life much easier! It also allowed for me to finally dynamically size the boss tiers.
The next thing big thing I need to do for the save system is add in the ability to delete saves, so that's high on the priority list, but I don't see it being that difficult. I'm also going to be adding in collectables through the levels, so when those are picked up I need to trigger an event to mark the item as unlocked, and fill it in appropriately in the save file.
What's Next - I think I'm going to be mixing it up, and trying to see what comes to mind to get things done. Since I'm working from home, I do have quite a bit more time, but I'm trying to keep myself up and away from the computer too. As I said in the last post I'll probably start working on the next level soon, as well as changing up the GUI at some point. I also need to start working on getting more gameplay and making more art, so what gets done, gets done!
Catch ya next time!
-TJ
