Quote Originally Posted by WILL View Post
You know what. A simple article about making a save game and best practices would do it. It doesn't have to be some complicated over-bloated article with huge technical words/terms like methodology or some other fancy new programming technique. We have to appeal to new programmers or beginners to attract a whole new community. So do small and simple.
  • How to make your own Save Game system. (just cover basics and how to structure the data so that it's easily readable upon reloading save games)
  • How to make a simple RPG combat system. (just cover HP and basic stats (think Dragon Quest 1) and action list and do it as a text/terminal program)
  • The basic Code structure for games. (cover basics, main game loop, separating things like graphics into procedures, initializing, deinitializing, reseting game state, etc)
In my article about RPG battle system I do have already more complicated battle system. But I do start from smal and simple and explain how to make it more comlex etc. And since my battle system calculates values based on certain item a character wears (wepons, armors, ect., I also explain of how to make an inventory system. Also part of that article taks a litle about optimization. When doing all this I try to make it all writen in a way to be understandable even by those who have litle programing expirience. That's why I do some programing teachings also.
For my article about savegames I intend to show how to save data from some object do file and later retrive it. I also imntend to tell about wich data should go into savegame and wich doesn't need to (just teoretics). Then I also intend to talk a little about creating backup copies of previous savegames. Recently I hapened to se a game wich has been doung backup copies by literaly making hard copie of a savegame file by FileCopy routine. This aproach takes more time and is prone to data damage incase of power outage at the time. Simply renaming curent file and then saving savegame into new file is much faster and much safer.