Hello!

1.310 is out now. It's been 8 weeks since the last update. Progress has been slow but steady. This patch brings the save system I promised. This took so much longer than I thought it would. The short explanation is I didn’t plan for expansion when creating this game and it made implementing a save system 100x harder than I thought it would be.

But first, check this out:



Thanks to manvirarts for this beautiful design. Check out his work if you need a logo for your own project. I found him on Fiverr (https://www.fiverr.com/manvirarts/design-a-fantasy-rpg-cartoony-game-logo). You can also contact him at https://twitter.com/manvirarts or https://www.manvirarts.com/.

The save system is simple and functional. It lets you browse through Ardarium saves in the APPDATA folder and select files to delete or load. There is no limit to the number of save slots. Every time you save it creates a new file. You can load saved games from the launcher and save games from the main menu in-game.

This took a long time to make because I naively thought I could just slap something together using Gamemaker's built-in save function. This didn't work out. That function is old and apparently you're not even supposed to use it, so I had to make my own from the ground up. It was a good learning experience. It taught me a lot about things I should have done differently back at the beginning (like how to store data in a way that can be easily copied).



Imagine how fun it was to manually pass hundreds of individual variables into and out of a save/load process because you didn’t think to put them in arrays 2 years ago, and now the only path forward is either fundamentally reworking the way the game stores data or slogging through a mountain of tedium in order to make the old code work. Lessons were learned.

As always, this update includes countless minor changes with the goal of making the simulation
more interesting and pretty.

That's it for this update

Thanks,
Dan

Future updates:

• 1.311+: Bug fixes and other minor stuff that can’t wait for 1.4.
  
• 1.400: Animals. They will have properties like carnivorous/herbivorous/omnivorous and land/water. There will be around 10 basic species including fish, snakes, and lions. They will breed with their own kind and evolve according to selective pressures (available food, type of environment, temperature, etc). The evolution will affect color, size, metabolism, aggression, and other stats. Here is a screenshot showing the basic sprites.
  
  I’m hoping to release the animal update before the end of May. I think one major update every couple months is a nice cadence for me, considering this is just a hobby and not my full-time job.
  
• 2.000: Complete rebuild in Unity. The existing code is slow and hard to expand upon and Gamemaker is already a slow engine. I expect Ardarium 2.0 will run several times faster than the current version. The biggest map size (40x40) should run at a solid 30 fps with thousands of people rather than the 5 fps it barely manages now. I’m not sure on the timeline for this one. Unity should be a piece of cake for a novice game developer to just pick up right? Right?