I Don’t Know How I Did It, But I did It!

A belated Happy New Year! I hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday season! Not much happened over on my side; it was fairly quiet and that’s just the way I like it!

I’ve still been chipping away at this giant mountain called Out Of Hell with a puny hammer and the absolute biggest problem in the entire development cycle has been overcome! This is actually really big news (to me anyway) since it was such a challenge and I am talking about the save/load system!

Being a smooth-brained non-programmer, I had absolutely no idea how I would ever tackle this and had been dreading it ever since the very beginning of development. I kept pushing it to the back of my mind and kept thinking that I’ll deal with it when the time came that I had to do it. Well, the time came a few weeks ago! I was/am in the process of compiling the alpha for the testing team so this had to be included.

I mean, the good news is that we’re at the point where I needed to include the save system so that the game can be properly tested, but the bad news is that it suuuuuucks to implement! XD

Sure, over the years I was able to snag some save system frameworks (they were free on the Epic Marketplace) but none of them worked properly for the project and I spent so much time trying to fix and debug all the issues that were coming up. This was made more difficult by the fact that I didn’t make the system and so I had no idea where to even start looking to fix things!!!

So rather than spending all my time and energy into trying to root out bugs and issues with someone else’s system, I decided to just make my own…from scratch…with no real coding skill.

This is what that idea felt like to me at the time:

It had to be done and there was no way around it. I opened up YPAPS-G and tried to see how I made the score saving system in that game then buckled down and worked my way through it one step at a time! Surprisingly, it didn’t take long to get the system up and running!

You can imagine the absolute high when I finally got the weapons, their ammo counts and all of the player stats to save and then load properly! I had somehow muddled my way to victory, but it was a short-lived one. The soul-crushing defeat came right after!

The only thing left was to take care of the items and supplies (food, health kits, bullets, smut magazines etc.) and this was such a pain in the ass to deal with. I spent nearly 8 days trying to solve this problem and it had to do with duplicate items in the player inventory.

For example, if I had 4 apples and 1 orange, the system would only save 1 apple and 1 orange! I eventually managed to get it to save 4 apples and 1 orange, but upon loading, I still only got 1 apple, 1 orange, and somehow 1 cinder block, 1 crowbar and 1 knife. I am not joking. XD

This had to be a flaw in the way the save system was built early on and it was creating these massive bugs now. And before anyone says anything like “Oh, just have a nested loop check the array for yadda yadda…”…don’t forget: Me smoothbrain, remember? 😉

Instead of wasting any more time, I brainstormed and came up with a fairly hacky way around it and surprisingly, it works fine!!! Not only that, there’s an unintentional benefit to me doing things this way, in that it actually puts a limit on the number of items that will ever be available at any one time, so it will make supplies truly, truly scarce! Hold onto that can of cola and medical kit…it may be the last ones you’ll ever find.

Now that the save system is complete, I will be spending the next week making the game over screens and working out how to get this thing onto Steam. FINALLY! 😀