• Introduction
• What is a point-and-click Game?
• What is Escoria?
• Requirements
• Basic Concepts in Godot
• Basics Concepts of Escoria
• About this book
• First Quick Game with Escoria
• About the example game
• Our project planning
• How to start your Escoria project
• Create your first scene
• Testing your Game
• Create Actions
• Escoria Fundamentals
• The Items
• Main Scene
• The Esc scripting language
• Inventory
• Verbs & Actions
• Speech Text
• Dialog interface
• Main Player
• What you need to know as an artist
• Artwork Import
• Scene composition
• Animations
• Music and sound effects
• Terrain: Light and Perspective
• What you need to know as a game designer
• Global states and saving
• Structure
• Booleans and conditions
• Instructions and commands
• Dialog trees
• Internationalization
• Audio speech files
• What you need to know as a programmer
• Game menus
• Implementing savegames
• Optimization
• How to publish
• Export your game

Global states and saving

As you already know, a Godot game is composed of multiple scenes, but some global state needs to be maintained to link them.

In Escoria this state is very simple to avoid debugging problems and keep the game as lightweight and fluid as possible.

The global state

The global state consists of a few pieces of information about your game that are saved, stored on savegames, and kept in memory between scene changes. When you launch the game, this information doesn’t exist, and is gradually stored by the engine each time an item, a scene or an action creates it. So there is no specific file in your game for that type of data.

The main data that are saved are the global flags, the item states, and items active property.

Global flags

Global flags are true or false values (booleans) that can be used by the game script to drive the game logic. You can store them using the set_global function in Esc scripts. For example in our sample file we used globals to keep track of the item the user picked with:

set_global picked_item true

Item States

The state of an item is a string attached to the item, that describes its state, as explained in The Items chapter. States in the item can also be implemented as animations so an animation is played at the state change. For example, we used animations in our sample game on the panda god to save his neutral, happy or angry state. Those animation names considered as states could be set like:

 set_state bamboo_god angry

Item Active property

The Active property defines the item's visibility. An inactive item is invisible and receives no input. You can also set this property in the Godot editor by changing the Active property in the Inspector. This way, you define the initial value for the item. If you want modify it during the script, you can use the set_active instruction. For example, when the player picks up an object, it is added to the inventory and made invisible on the seen with:

set_active bad_bamboo false

Savegame information

Other information stored in the savegame includes:

• The player position (if there is a player)
• The camera position and configuration if it was moved
• Any scheduled event that is pending

As you can see, we don't have a global registry with all the objects and their positions, or where the player is, etc. Each scene is in charge of instancing its own player character, its own UI, etc. Of course, some trickery is used to avoid loading the player and UI resources every time at engine-level, but the game is unaware of those objects (see the Optimization chapter for more on this).

You can play your game and then use the F4 shortcut to ask Godot to save the game as soon as possible. The informations will be stored in the quick_save.esc file which is either in the device folder of Escoria, or in your personal data folder with the name of the game if the game has a name, for example /home/user/.godot/app_userdata/Escoria in Daïza under Linux.

Refreshing the contents of the autosave file on a text editor while playing will allow you to debug the game’s global state data.

Global state versus Engine configuration

The global state should not be confused with the engine configuration you access with the Scene > Project Settings menu or by editing the engine.cfg file in the device folder of Escoria. In this menu or file you will define parameters of the Godot engine so it will launch the game accordingly, but you will not define game data. We will speak about the engine’s configuration in the last section of this book, Export your Game.