• 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

Implementing savegames

Savegames are .esc files that set the global environment as necessary, load the current screen, and move the player to the last position.

On a higher level, save files are implemented in the file globals/save_data.gd as numbered "slots". Each slot represents a save file, and has a saved date. The save_data object can be used as a member of the /root/vm scene. The save_data API is asynchronous, to allow for implementations that might require time to complete the operations (like network saving, or saving on consoles). All calls specify a callback that is called when the operation is complete.

Retrieving the slots

To retrieve the available slots, use "get_slots_available":

onready var vm = get_node("/root/vm")
func retrieve_slots():
	vm.save_data.get_slots_available([self, "slots_retrieved"])
func slots_retrieved(p_slots):
	# p_slots is a dictionary, it can have sparse keys
	for key in p_slots:
		print("slot ", key, " saved on date ", p_slots[key].date", "! :D")

Loading a slot

To load a slot, use the function "load_slot" in the /root/vm node

func load_pressed(p_slot_n):
	vm.load_slot(p_slot_n)
	# this will automatically call the "menu_collapse" event and start the new game

Saving

To save the game to a slot, first retrieve the save data information from the /root/vm node using the "save" method, then use the "save_game" method, not the save_data object.

func save_pressed(p_slot_n):
	if !vm.can_save():
		return # maybe show an error? the vm is not ready to save
	var data = vm.save()
	vm.save_data.save_game(data, p_slot_n, [self, "game_saved"])
func game_saved(err):
	if err != OK:
		# error :(
		pass
	update_ui() # this could call "get_slots_available" again, since the slots changed

Low level savegames

To load directly from a file, of the method "load_file" in the /root/vm node

vm.load_file("user://path/to/save.esc")

When a game is started, this method is used to load the file res://game/game.esc

To save directly to a file, first retrieve the data to save from the /root/vm node using the save() method, then write to a file. The data to save can be a string, or an array of strings, in that case save each string separately.

var data = vm.save()
var file = File.new("user://path/to/save.esc", File.WRITE)
if !f.is_open():
	# error!
	return FAILED
if typeof(data) == typeof([]): # data is an array
	for s in data:
		f.store_string(s)
	else: # data is a string
		f.store_string(data)
	f.close()
return OK