Technicals tweaks (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

I progressed quite a bit on the next big work planned and improved the save system. 

Now, when you save, you can choose on which of the four slots you want to save the file. You can see when a slot is empty or if there's already a save in that slot. To be honest, I spent far too much time that I should have on something that trivial, but that's something you might read a lot from me while I'm trickling down all the QoL work. It's often little things that take a long time to debug. 

I think it would have been nice to also get the last date/time saved so you get a better idea of which save is which, but for now that'll do it. 

And of course, the loading screen is the same. 

I also made sure the boy is correctly saved and everything load nicely. Again, this is something that took me far too much time for how "simple" it is but, hey, it work now.

And last but not least, I finally tackled the hair subject. Now, it save both your hairstyle and your hair color ! That was also an issue that bugged me for a long time. There was two main issues that were annoying me on that matter : 

First, you change hair color and hairstyle with a menu. And when you're loading a save, that menu is closed, so the game can't access it. I resolved this by creating an "hair gizmo", which is basicaly an invisible object that stay around no matter what you do and remember your setting and can change theses at runtime. So, when you're loading your save, the hair gizmo replace the menu and change theses for you. 

And second, due to how the save system work, every information must be written in binary. This mean I can only convey simple information to the save : numbers (both integer and float) , boolean and strings. So I had to find a way to convert hair colors and style into numbers. The colors are the easy part, because a color is at the core an array of three numbers (one for red, blue and green). It was harder for haircut, so I had to rely on indexing the differents hairstyles into a list. Then, when the save is loaded, the game know where to look to activate the correct hairstyle. 

The end point is that your hairs are now correctly saved,loaded, and, icing on the cake, the debug menu where you can change your hairstyle in game also work seamlessly. 

So,this is a quite technical heavy post, but I though it might interest some of you ! And that can give you a better idea of why I need a dedicated time to focus on theses long-lasting issues. 

There's one last thing I need to do with the save system : make sure every little state in the game is correctly saved. Lastly I took some liberty with it, like in the mansion, and the results was some potential softlock issues, and I want to handle this. 

And next, I'm going to overhaul some of the dialogs, starting with the tutorial area. On that subject, I think this will be a good time to enhance a bit that part of the game to make it more tutorial-like. I also think about implementing a "skip tutorial" button in the option menu for thoses of you who did it far more than it's needed! 

That's it for now, see ya soon !