The final major thing I wanted to do before releasing the beta (other than going back to the PC port) was implement multiple save ‘slots’ per game. It’s surprising how few games bother with this now but for me, it’s essential. Not only does it provide a loving nod back to the days of 8bit consoles, it allows the player to mess around with different upgrade paths and/or multiple members of the same family to maintain their own save state.

It’s not really a technical challenge either. What’s time consuming, as with most functionality of this nature, is designing and implementing the UI.

Fortunately I was able to cheat by recycling 90% of the UI for the upgrades screen (which I’d implemented in a pretty flexible manner to allow for different numbers of stats per weapon). This saved me a ton of time and allowed me to romp through this task pretty quickly.

The only real change I made from a UI perspective was the positioning of the ‘jetsuit’ and ‘jetboard’ icons. I also though the jetsuit looked a little static without any kind of animation so I implemented a few simple idle anims to bring things to life a bit.



On MacOS I have shifted location of the save files to ~/Library/Application Support rather than the default C# IsolatedStorage directory. This makes more sense and, crucially, means save files are preserved between builds (I wouldn’t be able to test it otherwise). As I’m using JSON for the save data I’ve also implemented a very simple encryption algorithm to obfuscate the files, it’s now now longer a trivial business for users to edit the file to change upgrade levels etc!

The game saves at the end of every level and at other key points, such as losing a life and upgrading a weapon – not every time the user picks up a coin or something. Consequently progress will be lost if the user quits in the middle of a level but I don’t think this matters – the end of the level is effectively the ‘save point’.

Testing seems to have gone relatively smoothly so far but I’m continuing to test as I do my final round of pre-beta playtesting.



Wishlist Jetboard Joust here, and view the trailer here, sign up for the beta here.

Dev Time: 2 days
Total Dev Time: approx 308 days