root vegetable boy
CHORUS MACHINE DEV LOG #15 - JANUARY 2025
Happy February, everyone! Apologies for the late arrival of this log; the past week really got away from me, I've been super busy with rest-of-my-life things. But I'm feeling really pleased with my progress for January! Let's check it out!
I basically exclusively worked on the save/load system this month, finally encoding everything I've drawn together. Now that it's nearing 100% functionality, I'd like to show it off a bit.
At the very beginning of a game, players receive a short explanation of how saving and loading works: save files can only be used once, and cannot be overwritten. Players are prompted to choose how many save files they would like access to: in the demo version I'm currently working on, the minimum is one and the maximum is five.
This is what I am offering in place of a "difficulty" setting. Decide how many checkpoints you require to survive, and then live with the consequences of that decision.
Players can only make saves at certain save points, as well, although interacting with any save point will heal you to full regardless of whether or not you choose to save. Another aspect of saving to consider is the effect it has on non-boss enemies: while bosses will stay dead permanently once killed, non-boss enemies will stay dead until a save is made, at which point they will respawn.
Fun fact: I got horribly stuck coding this! In the July 2024 log I talk about how I solved a visual consistency issue with both the player & enemy hitboxes by having the hitbox be a separate object that follows its "leader" around. I'm here to report that this decision came back to temporarily (but thoroughly) bite me in the ass. It's hard to explain without getting into the nitty-gritty of what exactly my save/load code does & how it works, but I had this very irritating situation where my bug-type enemies were responding to the new save/load code exactly as I wanted and my snake-type enemies were seemingly completely ignoring it.
I figured it was a hitbox issue pretty much right away, because the only real difference between the two enemies (besides attack styles) was that the bug doesn't have a separate hitbox object. It's a little square enemy that doesn't need an extra shape to keep track of. It took a little while to brainstorm a solution, but the easiest, simplest fix ended up being just reworking some of the hitbox code so that the hitbox becomes the "leader" instead of the follower. Now it all works well, and my headache is gone :-)
As far as what I need for the Demo, the save/load system is currently considered complete. This is really, really satisfying to me! I've been thinking about it for ages, and it's hard to put into words how good it feels to finally have the working system to properly interact with. It really feels like a testament to how much I've improved with GML that I've been able to successfully implement everything I've wanted. I'm so proud of how much progress I've made!
I have some rearranging of rooms and legthening of certain sequences planned for February... lots of actual in-game content being built! Music being written!! Sound effects being engineered!!!
I'm getting a little bit closer to this Demo being finished all the time. I'm still a long ways off, but... I think I have a pretty good idea of the length of the path at this point!
Have a good month! Meet back here in March?
Originally posted February 5th, 2025.