Developer Diary 40 - Loading/Saving Implemented

The last few days have been very exciting for me! I sat down and began coding a saving system that actually writes to file. I had never attempted anything like it, so I was a bit scared to begin working on it. But quite quickly, I was able to save the relevant variables to an external file, and load those back in. At this point, I was very happy with the results. Everything seemed to be working well. I just needed to find a place where the game can save and load. Since the player cannot choose themselves when to save or load, I needed to find the best spot when to do these operations. The game only loads once: when you start the game after closing it, and pressing the start button. Saving, on the other hand, happens on three different occasions: when you earn money, spend it, and when day becomes night and vice versa.

Things seemed to be working on PC so I decided to give it a go on mobile. It's actually much harder to test on mobile than it is on PC. Normally I press the play button and run the game, to see how it behaves. For mobile, however, I need to build an .APK, upload it, then download and install it on mobile. That takes easily 10 times more time than testing for PC. I installed the .APK and the worst seemed to be true: the game was completely broken on mobile after implementing the saving feature. It really made me very sad, so I made a test project which focused just on the saving/loading process. To my surprise, this worked flawlessly, so I went back to the actual project and inspected my code. After a long time staring, I noticed I had used a single quote (') where in the other project I had used a double quote (") to refer to the file. I knew this was a mistake but didn't assume that would solve it, but built the .APK anyway. To my total shock, everything worked perfectly. I couldn't believe how such a small mistake could make such a big impact to my code. But it works, and that is the important part!

This is a really, really big step. Finally, doing an action is the game actually matters beyond the few minutes I would spend testing. Now, when you change the appearance of the character, it will stay that way! That’s honestly got me very excited.

I didn’t know if I could pull of a system like this, let alone in a matter of days. The only thing left to do now is to polish things up a bit, add some minor details and then start the lengthy process of killing as many bugs as I can. After that, you will get your hands on release 3 on both Windows and Android!

As always, thank you very much for your support <3

Albatross