5/7/22 Chaos Chain Devblog

Salutations, dwellers...

Headline for those who don't want to read this whole thing: ːcleanfloppyː *MOST* SAVE GAMES FROM PREVIOUS VERSIONS SHOULD BE WORKING FROM HERE ON OUT AS DEVELOPMENT MOVES FORWARD!!! ːlunar2019deadpanpigː

So, I have some good news for the game! Last night, with the help of a friend who is also another programmer, I was able to make some changes to the game's code that will accommodate most old saves/save games moving forward. It is still Early Access, so some things may still change that require a fresh start in the game after a huge update, but now it will be a lot less frequent.

I did considerable testing on my own last night with my own saves and all of that testing showed me that it is working well. Even if I make drastic changes, the old saves still work just fine.

This morning, a tester of mine was kind enough to email me her save file from 2 updates ago, and I was able to get that successfully running in my dev build as well. No noticeable issues whatsoever.

Now, with all of that said, there are still a few caveats. As I said above, huge updates may still require a fresh start every so often, so that is one thing to be aware of. That's just part of the Early Access development process and there isn't much I can do about that. Another is that the further back your save is from, the less likely it will run smoothly as development progresses. To put it simply, the older the save on the newer the version of the game, the less likely it will be stable and you may encounter issues here and there that are not present in a stable, new start.

Aside from the few stipulations, this is a really huge and really great change because to be completely blunt, I absolutely hate having to reset people's progress. Yes, I give a ton of warnings on the store page and in announcements and stuff, but it still is not a great situation, but some of it is in fact beyond my control as the game is still coming into a state of being. At least now, it will be much rarer to need to restart.

I can modify entire areas, add new quests, characters, equipment, modify enemies, and so on - all while using old saves and they still continue to work after the changes are made. This should make testing easier, and it should also make it easier to just simply play and enjoy the game as I continue working on it without you being forced to restart after every big update. Again, some big updates might still require it, but not nearly as much now since the game back-end stuff is all pretty much finalized. At this point, it's mainly just gameplay content I'm working on.

The game is very stable, bug free as far as I'm aware, and runs smooth as butter after yesterday's optimization improvements. Hopefully, I can maintain this, and you all can enjoy the game without annoyances of restarting constantly whenever large batches of new content is added.

Hopefully by the end of next week on Friday the 13th - spooky - I will be putting this build (1.2.5) out and with it, I'll be including a couple of new quests and changes to the "Helping Hands" quest as it takes way too long currently to complete and it's not meant to. I will also as usual be including improvement tweaks and optimizations as I go to keep everything running smoothly and possibly even the second companion if time allows. No promises, but that is my goal.

Thank you for reading!

-Corrosion ːCStudiosː