Saving / Loading

Good news, everyone, (whoever you are)!

Saving and loading functionality is currently in the testing and debugging stages, which is to say that it's implemented and seems to work so far, but I bet there just have to be one or two bugs hiding somewhere unexpected. 

I am probably not going to update the demo with those features any time soon, because the testing may take a while and, this being a demo, saving and loading is not super essential, but this is still a pretty big internal step towards a more solid "feature complete" status. This means that I'll be able to more confidently launch a crowdfunding campaign soon, and can dedicate any time and resource that such a campaign might grant me towards making the game "content complete."

Aside from the saving and loading, I would like to, if possible and if time and money allow, design and implement a "time travel" system that'd give the player the ability to hop back and forth between already unlocked "chapters" of the story in order to strive for different outcomes. This is less essential, as the game is structured more like a non-linear adventure gamebook (or even a combat-less RPG) than a more conventional Visual Novel in the way it treats choices and routes (think a bit more Disco Elysium or Planescape Torment and a bit less Zero Escape), but it'd be nice to have IF I can cobble out a design that actually "works" from both a usability and consistency standpoint. 

That's a bit of a big IF, however, so we'll see. Basically, when you're dealing with discrete blocks of content broken up along discrete diverging paths, a la branching visual novels in the vein of the aforementioned Zero Escape series, then "jumping" back and forth is trivial from an implementation and design standpoint. The number of variables to keep track of is limited, and we always know exactly what has already happened at any given block in the narrative flowchart. If, however, you're dealing with multiple intertwining threads, many of which can be tackled in any order, some of which can be entirely ignored, and some of which may even unlock additional threads, then you have a much more complicated situation on your hands. 

An obvious solution would be to simply save all the necessary variables at key points, but if such a system was to be more useful and meaningful than good old tried-and-true save files (which already do exactly that), then certain additional caveats and features would have to be addressed, or else literal time paradoxes would have to be accounted for.

Anyways, yeah, that is mostly just a tentative idea at the moment. If you played the demo, you may have been tantalized by the notion of puzzle boxes and the like. And yeah, the game may have you solve a few, though the purpose of this feature is not to make up the core gameplay loop but to occasionally sprinkle in some spice and variety in between long stretches of reading and thinking. The puzzle mechanics will be implemented as necessary to match each puzzle's design. Basic standards, such as passwords and combination locks, are already in my toolbox, so no brand new features or unique code will need to be implemented for those (I may just have to clean up and refactor some of the older stuff). 

Hmm, it's not like anyone is reading this, probably. So I am not sure why I ramble on so much. I suppose it helps me organize my own thoughts to an extent. 

So, yeah. That's all I've got to say for now, I guess.