It’s been two weeks since the last update! I rewrote a major system and it took longer than expected. Weekly updates will continue to be the normal pace, but it was worth waiting an extra week. These systems I make changes to push us closer to a finished game. So that it’s not a boring update, I also made a bunch of level design changes I’ve wanted to do for some time.
Save System Rebuild
Since the beginning of the project, REVO has stored your game settings and player progress data into the system registry (see above, left side). This was for convenience and because I hadn’t yet other methods.
With my eye on a finished product, I decided it was important to offer players a flexible way to manage their saved data. Perhaps someone would like to back up their progress, manage multiple saves, or allow someone else to play on their installation using a separate save.
The solution chosen was to write data to a simple file (see above, right side). This allows anyone to copy it as a backup and restore it if the game has to be installed onto a new computer. It also gives me a nice format to more easily offer multiple saves, which is something I have put on the schedule to do, probably in September.
From a player’s perspective, there really is no difference in the save experience from previous versions since the game is not intended to behave any differently yet. If any progress is incorrectly saved or improperly reset (which you can do from the Options screen), then this is likely a bug to fix. Please let me know! And now you can even send me your save file. (:
Level Design Upgrade
I really didn’t want to publish an update of only Save System changes which is essentially invisible to players. Nobody wants to download and test a game that has no apparent changes. Especially when this update took twice as long as usual and there was no update last week.
So I made an effort to work on something highly visible which is to upgrade every single level of the game. The focus was to fill in gaps where enemies weren’t present or not challenging enough. Sometimes gaps were left as resting spots for players, but after many test sessions of my own as well as watching others play, it seemed that these were more boring than beneficial.
In addition to a denser swarm of enemies on every level, I tweaked a few others things like explosions and the toughness of one of the large but previously weak enemies. In general, I think you’ll find the game more engaging, rewarding, and fun across the board. There might be some rough spots to continue to smooth out, but I think it felt pretty good and I will continue to polish combat scenarios.
Taste the chaos!
Why not give it a play yourself? See if you can handle the swarms that have multiplied across the entire game. Let me know how far you can get.