Saving: How did I go about it?

 A solid save system in games is an undeniably important feature, especially in exploration focused games like A Dream's End.

Lately, I've been thinking about why I haven't been pushing myself to actually make maps and create a concrete foundation for how the game should look and play.
I think the answer is rooted in how incomplete the game is technically overall. I think things have improved with my introduction of global functions for scene switching, returning to the main menu, and more. However, the game just doesn't feel right. I know it's good enough for now to be playable. But I thought I'd give it one last core feature before I start fleshing out the actual story.

I wanted to create a save system that would be easy to use and would be as little of a headache for me in the future. I think something I tend to do is over think things here, like "the docs say I should use something I've never used before but what if it breaks another part of the game". For this reason, I went with tried and true JSON save formatting.
I'd love to say that it was easy to accomplish, but it really took over four and a half hours of tinkering and figuring out errors (also breaking part of the game accidentally :p ) to finally come to an actual somewhat stable saving system.

You can save to and load from one of three save slots. A new "Load" button has been added below the "Play" button allowing you to open another UI to access your save files. The save files are kept in the Roaming/Aureus/ADreamsEnd folder. There's also a new save button in the pause menu.
I hope to eventually display a small screenshot from each file on the load menu soon but it hasn't quite worked out yet.

As of now, the save system only saves your current position, character rotation, camera rotation, and active scene. The game simply forwards this data to the existing swap_to_scene() function i implemented a while back (i knew it'd be helpful). So loading saves uses the same code that doors and menu buttons use to move the player around through scenes.

I'm still working on the apartment exterior and filling it with buildings and decorations. When I'm done with it, I'll give it a post of its own. I'll hopefully be done with the interior by then as well. This will also be the time I put out the next public access alpha build for the game. I'll still make the debug world easily accessible if you wish to mess around with anything I add there.

For now, I hope you all have a fantastic day or night and I'll see you in the next dev log!