Probably because it’s warm outside and all the students are out of school and quarantines have been lifted, so you’re all out willingly exposing yourselves to solar radiation instead of the nice calm florescent glow of indoor electronic radiation…
But anyways. People on here always said, “if you have a question, ask it”.
Well I still have about a half a bazillion questions about how to do everything here, but I mostly like trying to figure stuff out on my own when I can. I do have a few questions though that I’ll need to know later for future projects. I don’t necessarily need to know how to do them just yet, more just whether or not it’s even possible.
I came up with 3 to start with.
Question #1: is it possible to copy sprites and objects from one of my games to use in another? Say I want to make a sequel to a demo, but I don’t want to have to remake everything all over again from scratch. I’m assuming this would be possible by cloning the game and editing the clone? Or some other way?
Question #2: can I “import saves” between games? Say I make a game, “Sword Guy: Chapter 1”. Character Sword Guy starts off as a level 1 noob with a wooden sword and a ratty old t-shirt. By the time he completes chapter 1, he’s a level 20 sword wielding master with a +3 flaming sword of awesomeness and fortified steel armor. Is there a way to carry over his earned status from SG:C1 to a new game of “Sword Guy: Chapter 2” so that he doesn’t have to start all over again from zero?
(And no, automatically starting him as a level 20 with a flaming sword in chapter 2 wouldn’t work, because it’s possible that he might have finished chapter 1 as a level 25 with a +2 frost sword of coolness instead… whatever the character had when they finished chapter 1, I want to be able to carry over to the next game)
Question #3: is there a way to make a game 100% private so that only myself (or say, anyone else I give a password to) can access it?
Just a few random things I was wondering about, in case anyone is bored and knowledgeable enough to answer them.
I am awakening and not able to think properly so here are some answers.
Q1: yes, there is a copy and paste feature in the sprite editor but I would recommend just downloading the sprite onto your device for ease of access or if you make your sprites in a different program.
Q2: No? I’m not too sure but I’ve heard that there is a cloud behavior that is subscription only, the behavior handbook doesn’t say anything about being able to transfer information to other games so I would say probably not but I’m not too knowledgeable with it, maybe in the future we might have something like this but other than this, I don’t really see any other possibilities.
Q3: nope, this feature has been requested multiple times and I think it might be considered by grazer but at the moment, everything is currently open-source.
I think there’s a website that grazer made to organize ideas and future updates to flowlab but I can’t find the link, maybe someone else can send it to you so you can see if anything you want hasn’t been considered yet.
I have not yet fully woken up so take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Hope this helped answer your questions.
I figured that might be the case, so I came up with a possible workaround…
Some of the older school games gave you “save codes”… random stuff like AeQ82xcTuVpy1 that you could enter in that would “reload” your previous progress (apparently each character in the code represented a different stat).
Now of course this system was very much open to cheating, as players would just share codes to automatically load up a max leveled character, but… hey, when you cheat in a single player game, you’re only really cheating yourself, right?
No, this wouldn’t be possible. Would be a cool feature though…
I had a similar idea with spawning objects by ID but realized it’s not a thing. If it were, I could spawn objects from game to game with the extract ID behavior.
I’m thinking… I could make it possible. Let’s say I complete a game in chapter one, and it takes my stats and tells me “your save code is: blue 14 up down buffalo”
Then I start a new game in chapter two and it asks me if I have a save code. I say yes, and it asks me random questions. If I correctly answer blue, my new character spawns with the weapon I had from the first chapter. If I correctly answer 14, my character spawns with the same armor… etc.
Would be incredibly complex to code, but… I like to believe that nothing is impossible… at least not when it comes to games.
well theoretically it could be possible, but it would have to be manual.
you can automate the first half of the part by making a system that takes every item or upgrade, every single piece of data and make it a string of code.
For example, lets say that in SG:C1 there are three items, fortified steel armor armor, a flaming sword of awesomeness, and a gun. if we take those three items and turn it into a sting of code it could look like this.
000 - nothing
100 - steel armor
010 - flaming sword of awesomeness
001 - gun
110 - steel armor & flaming sword of awesomeness.
etc.
You would need to make an output to each sting of code but it could take forever so you could make the code individual so that it changes the value of only one single number behavior and then when you input a 1 or 0 again it changes the next number all the way till the end of the string of code, for each 1 it activates a switch and if it is 0 it doesn’t.
This would take literally forever so It would only work with small games, but in theory you could.
Also it kinda screws the player since they have to press 1 and 0 evetime they want to transfer data.
I’m falling back to sleep and I’m hungry so I probably didn’t explain anything vey well so If you need a follow up wait a bit so that I can go eat something.
How it would work would be… when you finish chapter one, it will assess your stats. It will have pre-assigned values for each stat like “+1 sword” is coded as “blue”, “chainmail armor” is coded as “14”…
Then the chapter two game will give you the option to recover a save. It will ask you something like “what letter comes after C?” If you say D, you will fail, and it will tell you “no items recovered”. But if you say “blue”, the game will add a +1 sword to your inventory.
Take the words from game 1 and incorporate them into the code of game 2, without making them easy to guess.
Now obviously after enough people played the game, they would all tell each other “answer blue if you want a +1 sword, answer 14 if you want chainmail armor, answer buffalo to unlock advanced fire magic” etc.
It would have to be a random nonsensical code that only the game would understand, and you’d have to write it down after finishing each game to carry over your progress.
Actually that would be possible, but there would be some limitations.
Like for my ball bounce game for an example, it saves the players progress entirely with a choice of resetting it at the main menu, but I could make it so the game gives you a code when you are about to leave the game, so the game saves the code until the next time you play and if you enter the code correctly then all of your saves stats loads in.
This is very much possible, but the code acts more of a key to unlock your previous saves instead of like an actual file with your data on it. I don’t think it would be able to be shared between other players since the code is saves on your device so it would be kind of useless, but a neat idea.
I also have my game a cheat code so you can gain op stuff instead of grinding for it, which in my opinion is a lot better than an actual saving or loading code. Cause it’s more simpler to make, but then again it would be considered cheating.
But In order to really make any of that even work you need like a JR_01 brain or something cause he could probably make this in under ten minutes or something, lol. But it could be possible within flowlab.
Also question number 3 you can private your games or prevent them from popping up on the game menu, but this is a indie or premium benefit so free users don’t have this.
I accidentally made one of my games private when I had indie and now that I don’t have indie anymore it’s stuck in private mode so no one ever sees it, lol.
But other people can still see it if you post the link to the game.
RE: question #3… I do have Indie. I was mostly wondering if there was a way to put a privacy lock on a game in case either (1) I want to keep a game temporarily confidential to everyone, or (2) I want to make a game that only people I invite are able to play, or (3) I’m working on a game that has some heavy adult themes and I don’t want any poor innocent impressionable youths to accidentally find it LOL.
And yeah, for the saving between games… I know the code wouldn’t access the original save file. Mostly I just want the player character to be able to carry over a few basic stats, so that they could start the next chapter with roughly the same character and inventory that they finished the previous one with.
Some might ask “why not make them all just one game instead?”
Several reasons.
One, I don’t want to spend several years just working on one massive game, only to release it and have people be like “u haven’t been on forum in years, who dis?”. Game will be immediately DOA. If I spend a few months making enough content for one section of one game, and it has enough playable content to keep players entertained for a while, then… I’ll release that. If people like it enough and ask for more, then I know it might be worth it to work on a part 2.
Two, my long term goal is to make some money from my games. I’m not unrealistic - I know I’m not Blizzard or EA, I won’t be trying to sell my games for $60 a pop. I’m thinking more along the lines of selling individual campaigns for like $0.99 on Steam or mobile game stores, with each campaign providing hopefully at least a few hours of entertainment. If I lump the entire game into one massive project and release it for free… ummm… then I have nothing to sell. And yes, I know, I know, “games should be free! Art should be free!” Yes! And so should rent and food and utilities! But they’re not. I got bills to pay, man. If people like my games, and want me to keep making games, then I need to be able to pay my electric bill. Otherwise my butt is going to be sitting in the McD’s drive thru window 16 hours a day asking if you want fries with that, and I won’t have any time left over to make games. KWIM?
Three… I’m fairly certain that if I made a Flowlab game with 2000 levels and 10,000 sprites or something… everyone who tries to play it is going to have to wait 10 hours for it to load, only to end up with a framerate of 0.5. In other words, unplayable.
So um… would probably be best if I split them up a bit. Not only for my sake.
Definitely possible. But complicated. I have a seed generation/call back system in place for Nightfall! Certain screens will look different each time you play and will retain that appearance when you go back
This is a lot of reading, so I’m just going to add my own response to the 3 questions.
yes, get indie and clone the game
No, exported games can kinda do this but thats just limitations of resources.
Grazer has thought about doing something like this with cloud save, but they are only per game atm.
Kinda but not really, you can click “unlist game from list” which would make it unsearchable on Flowlab, but anyone with the game link to the game can still access it.
Since there is no cloud save option yet, I think I’ll try to build my own “save code” system into the game… won’t be an exact save, but hopefully I can at least make it so that entering the code will spawn previously obtained objects into the new game (yes this would be open to easy cheats / exploits, but I don’t have any problem with people cheating in my single player games, that’s their business)
Making it unsearchable would help. I doubt anyone is going to randomly type in URLs for all of the 1.7 million plus games here… would be nice if there was a password lock on the individual games themselves though.
And yes, I know, I know, “games should be free! Art should be free!” Yes! And so should rent and food and utilities! But they’re not. I got bills to pay, man. If people like my games, and want me to keep making games, then I need to be able to pay my electric bill. Otherwise my butt is going to be sitting in the McD’s drive thru window 16 hours a day asking if you want fries with that, and I won’t have any time left over to make games. KWIM?