Saturday, August 4, 2012

Working on a Save/Load Feature

 


   Just a small update on Moonlight Mountains current progress. All the levels from the first half of the game are now fully complete. They are five unique mountains that Commander Moonlight can climb and explore to gain cat-cash and collect the required ship pods. I will post a video soon probably to demonstrate the menu level selector.

Anyway this game project has a lot of stuff in it that changes as the user gets further and further like the amount of cat-cash and ship pods the player has collected, the levels the player has unlocked, the boss battles the player has completed, etc. So I figured it is very necessary to include a save system in this game. The problem I ran into was, I had never learned how to save player progress in unity. That is because I always thought saving game progress is a complicated process. Then until yesterday, after going through the unity documentation I realized that creating a save system is actually not that hard. Really it depends on what/how things need to be saved depending on the type of game it is since each game is pretty different.

So just as a test I put together a prototype of a real simple game that allows players to save, load, and delete their score. You can see it here:

Save/Load/Delete Prototype

controls:
     Move with W,A,S,D or arrow keys
     pass through ball objects to increase score
     click on GUI buttons to carry out their functions (savebutton, load button, etc)

This is probably saving at its simplest form. The only thing that saves in the entire level is the users score. But other things such as which objects you collected reset themselves when the level is re-loaded.

 Anyway now that I have a general idea of how to make a save system I can start working on one for Moonlight Mountains so you guys can keep all of your cat-cash!

I will have more soon! :)