6 AUG 2022:
One more week of my business trip and looking forward to getting back home and working on Scrapship!
In the meantime, I’ve been leveling up my QB64 skills:
The concept of Game Engines has been on my mind a lot recently, especially with the latest news about Unity and the amazing possibilities displayed by Unreal.
Creating a game engine like any of those two — or even Godot — is way beyond my ability at the moment, but it got me to thinking . . . What if I made a very simple Text Adventure game engine in QB64?
Basically, it would have 2 main elements — Scenes and Choices. Scenes would be where you have your narrative, “You are in a dark forest at night.” And the Choices would link up to additional scenes.
Creating this basic framework was pretty easy, but I quickly realized that I was missing a VERY critical element: The ability to save!
So I spent a few mornings learning how to save data in QB64.
Right now the program creates a temporary text file. Any inputs from the user are saved to this text file. If the user wants to save their progress, they specify a file name which renames the temporary text file.
Learning how to load data is the next item on my To-Do list.
In the context of Scrapship, this could come in very handy. Although I intend for Scrapship to be a short, one-session type of experience, the ability to save and load data would certainly allow me to do things like save user preferences.
In the context of my Text Adventure game engine, I’ll now have a way to save all the Scenes and Choices that have been created by the player so far.
Quote of the Week:
“Every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!