Let's start with the TL;DR -> NEW UPDATE IS OUT!

This version includes a number of polishing improvements including but not limited to:

- Save/Load system: No longer will your run end because life gets in the way of gaming!

- Pause Menu: Conserve your fuel when nature calls or life interrupts!

- Volume Sliders: Save your ears and enjoy a beautiful ambiance hand mixed by... well, you.

- Achievements List: For all you completionists. Rest easy knowing you did, in fact, beat the game.

- Tooltips for items: Thank god we can finally know what is going on BEFORE getting to the workbench!

- Better UI Art: My goodness that looks so much better. Who designed this before? Oh, right...

- Mechanics Rework: Gone are the days of single-tap grindwheels or irrelevant sword stats.

In all seriousness, this update has really brought some better and much needed system elements to the game. I'm going to go in depth with what exactly has changed later, but I'd highly recommend checking out the new update. It has brought the demo to a much more polished state with a wide range of quality of life improvements.

Now that that's out of the way, let's dive into what's new. 

Firstly, I want to apologize for the tardiness on this update. In my last post I mentioned wanting to release this update a week ago. But low and behold, save systems are not as simple as they should be, and I didn't want to give you guys a broken game. There's still some bugs to sort through, but currently this build is mostly stable.

Now onto what got done the last two weeks: New UI Art and the Save System. Let's start with the UI. The information menu seemed to be a bit of a drag, and so one of the collaborators on the team worked up their magic to make some new art for it. The menu now looks like a nice book and feels much better to interact with. The new look features new buttons, tabs, fonts and a whole slew of nice looking assets. While we were at it, we have updated all the station menu art to look much more consistent, added tooltips, and added a full pause menu with settings, achievements lists, and of course a list of save files. All of this wasn't too difficult to get working since we had already overhauled the UI system out of the game scene. For those interested, we now essentially have two sides to the game structure, the UI and the 2D game. So we can change, delete, or add onto the game structure, and the UI side just responds to what data it has available. Also, because the UI has its own dedicated system, adding onto that system has become much easier.

For the save system, we first had to figure out how to get the data from all the different parts of the game together into one place. This took some work, but basically consisted of writing save/load functions for each major script that would manage that object and its children. Then, we call the save function of the root node. that node calls save on all its children, and the process continues until all the nodes have written their save data. From there, we turn it into JSON and write it to a file. Then, for loading we reverse the process. Take the file, load the JSON, parse into different child objects, and pass that data to the children until all the nodes are loaded. This wasn't too bad, but I then had to start implementing some other systems that would be important. Firstly, I had to create a saves folder for all the save files. I also had to write a config file that would manage the list of saves. Lastly, I had to actually hard code the game version. This is because as the game changes, old save files will not be formatted correctly with the new saves, so we need to make sure the user doesn't accidentally load what would be a corrupted save file. Also, loading data shifted how I coded a few things and implemented a number of bugs I had to go hunt. I haven't finished my list, but at least the game is mostly playable now.

Honestly, this process has been really cool to go through. The mentality I have approached this process with has been something like, "Don't worry about all the systems, just make things as you need them." So it has been very interesting watching new systems arise as I have been expanding the game. Just a couple of months ago I didn't really have many dedicated systems in the game, but now I have a UI system, achievements and event managers, and now a save/load system. It also feels like these systems are project specific. If it were a different game, I might structure things differently or write some other systems I might need. So, hopefully that is a little encouraging if you are working on games at all and feel like some of these systems are too complex. I know there's a ton of complicated ways to make these systems, but that comes with time and project scope.

Anyways, hope yall enjoy the new update. Our team is now shifting towards focusing on adding shop management into the game, so stay tuned for updates on that.