Episodic Games using Construct

Hey guys,

Just a quickie, cause I've been thinking about that:

Would it be possible at the moment to use Construct for episodic games? Basically, what that means is that the player would have to be able to save:

1) His character and all of his stats.

2) The choices he made during the game (example, could be a global variable: Did player kill NPC X? Yes / No).

3) Options he set in the Options Box, like resolution, full-screen, brightness, camera options, etc.

4) Whether or not he has completed this episode.

as a file, so it could then be loaded for the next episode (which would be a different exe file, basically a new game that just uses the old save file to keep going).

Is it possible to determine what events / stats will go into the save file and can we somehow set Construct to be able to load in the file and read all the data in it, even if it's a new compile / a new episode?

I think Construct could be an awesome testbed for stuff like that and it'd be great if we could release episodic content like that without the player losing all the hard work he put into it.

It is quite possible, yes. You can save all sorts of information in a certain format, then you make the new episode read that information when requested. Or you could just "save game" at end of the first episode and then read only specific information in the next episode.

INI file, hash table, binary file... many possibilities.

Yeah you could have the same exe and everything, cept layouts, and event sheets would have to remain the same.

I haven't tried it with different compiles yet, but the save / load to/from file option gives me problems already.

Say I'm on layout 1 and I save. Then I go to layout 2. If I then load, the runtime just freezes. Does that happen to anyone else?

Also, if I save my game and then load, the music that I had set for the layout doesn't play anymore.

Devs: Can we set it so that the save / load automatically also saves the state of the music?

Quicksave/load won't work on different layouts I wouldn't think, simply because they are always going to be slightly different (instance ids of the objects, order of objects, etc). I'd use something other than that to save if you want to transfer a state from one layout to another.

Music and sounds could be saved, we'll see about doing that for a future build.

Quicksave should work fine for moving between layouts. That's what it's intended for: you should be able to entirely save and load the state of a game as long as it's the same EXE. Please, report bugs formally through the tracker with .caps etc. if you find a problem with anything. It won't be fixed if you just mention it in passing on the forum.

I don't see any particular problem with episodic games. You just need to invent a file format and a way of saving and loading between EXEs.

if you use an array, or ini, i see no reason how this would be impossible