Tuesday 19 September 2017

Game Maker Progress 51: Exporting Game Data to Text File

Hello everyone,

As I continue the Udemy Digital Arts course - with not much to show for at the moment as the course does start off fairly basic with concepts such as line work and line weight, I decided to bring forward a system I have implemented into the game to later on help with balancing and gathering game-play data.



The system as it is at the moment simply saves specific data from the game session to an external text file - which can then be imported to a spreadsheet software to help with interpreting the data itself. At the moment - the data gathered is simple, population growth, decline and immigration during a specific turn. However eventually I hope to add other data points that could help with balancing; including resource production, amount of workers at various workposts, and so on.


Needless to say - balancing is not the highest priority for the moment; although having this system in place, together with the insights it could help provide, might help make design decisions later on. Plus due to the simplicity of implementing the system itself [less than to around an hour's work], I decided it would be best to just implement it whilst the idea was fresh in memory, and I had some time to spare. The information is also gather un-intrusively - which will definitely aid in play-tests later on - to help figure out what numbers to adjust during game-play and so on.

Until next time,
Dylan 

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