Well, that wasn't incredibly helpful. Thanks to respondents, though!

Hey folks, I'm looking to get a little info on preferred methods of on-boarding/tutorials/help.

My game is a bit complex, and the friends I've had try it have felt a bit lost to begin with. Please vote, and comment if you have other thoughts or suggestions!

#gdscript #godot #rpg #osr #indiegame

I've had the bad habit of starting way too big even knowing it was the wrong approach. But I think I've slowly learned how to back into a reasonable scope, by shrinking it over time.

Not the course I recommend for others, but we all have our own paths to walk, I guess.

And yes, time will be a factor in quests.

The simulationist elements are important here. Factions with their own agenda are going to do stuff as time passes - and that might impact the player, whether they want to interact with those factions or not!

I'm highlighting travel here - I've got one off-map location, the city of Ehlessandrya, one of the key features in my game's world. But it's a few days away from this area!

I still wanted to include it as an option to visit, especially since this is a remote area and vendor options will be limited.

Oh, the horrible things we did with that "unity".

I don't disagree, but it's also a meta-knowledge problem that isn't programming specific, which is part of the frustration.

The resources available to learn from on the internet right now are incredible, and free. Finding them isn't really that hard.

Twinstick metroidvania with rocket jumping, a grappling hook, and gorgeous pixel art?

I'm sold.

Sounds both blasphemous, and tasty.

I end up with a dictionary in this case, and it should be easy to rebuild the resource tree when loaded in.

I wanted to avoid binary storage for two purposes: 1, allow players to edit the file if they desire to cheat, and 2, the same structure defines the underlying game world for mod purposes

My current approach is currently about 3k~ lines and a similar ratio in total storage.

Not like saved games being a few dozen MBs would have been a big deal, but... why duplicate a ton of data when we don't have to?

There are definitely positives to the plugins not working, though!

JsonClassConvertor - saved, but couldn't load. Doesn't appear to properly handle custom classes, despite saying it does. 9k~ lines for my current world

SimpleJsonClassConverter - got further on load, but 30k! lines of json

I'm ~halfway done already, and it hasn't been that hard, but I complicated the issue for myself by allowing my data tree to include that mix of deltas and template references.

It was mostly on an object-by-object basis, fortunately, so I've been able to flag things as "save" or "do not save".

completely if I want to support mods, players should at least be able to swap pre-defined world files and saves in a safe manner if they so choose.

So... switching it up to serialize to json. And neither of the two plugins out there work, so I get to write my own implementation.

Yaaaay.

and references to pre-defined resources, with no modification! I can use this awesome data structure during procedural generation and during gameplay, and just save/load with a single line each.

Oops, turns out it's a potential vector for malware. While I won't be able to avoid that

and the option of just generating everything, which will probably end up feeling too bland and repetitive.

The core of these approaches should be handcrafted bits, and hopefully by allowing the world to procedurally come together, I can provide unique experiences with how those pieces interact.