Saving, Loading, Pause Menu, Updated UI, and More

Information

For the past 8 days since the Last Devlog, I've been working non-stop on bringing new features to The Roamers. Since the very beginning the story has remained the same but bear with me, it will have some drastic overhauls in the next few updates (Alpha 1.3, 1.4 or 1.5). If you havent noticed by now, if the title doesn't have the update name (Alpha 1.X) then there is no download. I'd like to get the game to a stable running point before I release an updated .exe. That update should be here within the next few hours / days.

Saving Loading, and Pause Menu

Saving and Loading was introduced in Alpha 1.2, but it was the bare minimum, using a pop up file selector to select your save and using GameMaker's built in 'game_save' function to do all the saving. This was all fine and dandy until I realized that everytime I added a variable the save file became outdated, and this simply was unusable in any phase of development, even once the game is eventually released. For example, a simple change in the name of a variable would cause a save file outdation, making your save unloadable, therefore losing all progress. But don't you worry, all that's fixed with the new and improved saving and loading system. It took a bit more effort (about 10-20 hours) but it was well worth it and you should never have another outdated file again.

This new loading menu has the basic load button, once pressed will display a box containing all files (up to 1000 should you ever need that many) and let's you select your save you want to load. Once you select the file you would like to load (either by left clicking or using the arrow keys), another box appears with a screenshot of what you'll be loading into, a load button, and a delete button. Unfortunately, autosave files don't have a preview image, taking a screenshot drops the framerate and creates a lag spike, and every 15 seconds having a lag spike is pretty annoying. The exitsave and manualsave files do, however, have a preview image.

For all of this to work, I've done the justice of making a pause menu with a blurry background, wow so amazin! The pause menu displays 4 buttons, Resume, Save, Options (WIP), and Exit. They're all pretty self explanitory, but im going to explain them anyways for those who actually care (which is probably no-one). Resume resumes the game, save creates a save based on your time played, and if for any reason there's already a file with that name, it makes a copy (example: Save 0D0H0M2S C5) and (example translated: Save 0Days 0Hours 0Minutes 2Seconds Copy1), and last but not least exit, exits you to the main menu, creating an exitsave. Here's a video that should be replacing these three overly explained paragraphs.

In this video you can see all the things mentioned above plus the new UI and Player Animations (WIP). Menu music is disabled because it gets on my nerves from launching the game 100 times a day, it will be re-enabled before Alpha 1.3 rolls out.

Updated UI, Player Animations, And Lighting

The UI has been updated by Adwitr, we started working together on this project and he's the new UI Designer, check out his itch.io page if you're interested. He made changes to the Objective Box, Stats Bars, Weapon Image, and suggested some fonts to use for each. Big thanks to him, and if you would like to help with the project comment here and I'll respond with contact info. If you are good with drawing concept sketches and full scenes I'm looking for someone to redo the menu background with a picture and maybe do some other art / sprite related things.  I'm not going to post an image of the UI because it's shown in the video above.

The player animations are still a work in progress but implementation has commenced. The next update (or few updates) will be out before this is complete. As far as lighting, a few bugs have been squashed and tweaks were made allowing me to add multiple lights to a scene. For now it's set to the Z Key to spawn one, so check that out when the update rolls out. Some smaller features are that I've changed the way you switch weapons, so you can scroll as much as you want to cycle through weapons, and once you switch away from your hands you can go back to them. Also, now if you hold C and scroll it will change the zoom (up to a certain minimum and maximum value) and holding C while clicking the middle mouse button will reset zoom, or just start running, that'll do it too. Finally I made some changes to controls, like pressing 1 or numpad 1 displays controls now instead of the C Key.

Thanks for keeping up with the game, donations and feedback are always appreciated.

~ Dawson