Opened the project up and quickly went over what I could do for the camera actions, ending up using a camera shake when certain attacks hit. It’s just a place holder, I want to have more interesting camera movement later on. Camera shakes seem more appropriate when taking hits or being around large impacts. It did look funny when I added too much shaking.
It took three attempts for me to finally implement saving, at least at a very low level. The first two times the lessons weren’t sticking to my brain, I can’t say exactly what it was. Perhaps a part of me knew how tedious it was going to get. Saving and loading is easy enough, tracking the character’s location when you save, and loading the game from a series of variables. I still don’t have the capability to do it in-game, or while the game is running. But at least it saves certain values. I didn’t realize I made it harder for myself because there are tons of objects in the world you can interact with, i.e. doors, and moveable objects. So if you open a door and load the game you expect the door to still be open. With that I have to keep track of every single door in the level and whether or not they had been opened. It isn’t complicated, but it is tedious because the next thing I have to keep track of are the objects that can be moved and even destroyed. I still have to continue to look into how to approach all this.
At the moment it doesn’t seem so taxing to save and load the game, I still have to figure out how to do it in-game so the player can try again once they die. But I may have problems when I create larger levels, at least larger than this first one I am making. It’s clear that next on my agenda is adding the physics objects to the saving and loading of the level and then actually being able to load game while running the game instead of stopping the simulation and loading it from the engine itself. Once those parts are done it will start to feel more like a real game with the ability to try and try again. There’s still tons I have to think about especially with how saving and loading works. I need to think about the scope of the game and the levels in order to plan ahead so it doesn’t get to confusing when I add more levels to save and load to.
GoldenGratus Games 