Stats and Save Files

There's one aspect of Girl Games that I'm still to fully implement and I know I need to be careful with it, as - a little like the Sex Display stuff - it has the propensity to get out of hand. 

You see, right now, as you play the game, your save file is logging a bunch of variables. I won't list them all but here's a bunch to give you an idea: 

"current_location" : "bedroom",

"current_quest" : "",

"chapter" : "Start",

"first_name" : "Ethan",

"girl_name" : "Allie",

"last_name" : "Daniels",

"wait_button_pressed" : false,

"game_color" : "blue",

"feminized" : 0,

"en_femme" : false,

"tucked": false,

"chastity" : false,

"can_sissygasm": false,

The list goes on like that, and as you can see, those are all pretty important things to track. Most of them are either just true/false bools or incremental numbers, although a few, like the sex history log, are a lot more complex (basically a whole other nested dictionary of stats).

But yeah, looking at the above ... feminized, for instance, (just about) mirrors the game chapters, meaning when you hit feminized level 3, you'll have different reactions and thoughts at that point in your journey to feminized level 0 - i.e. you'll be kind of interested in the idea of dressing up and presenting as female, yet still somewhat hesitant about going all the way, while by feminized 6 onwards, the whole game world will be open to you in terms of what you can buy, try on, do  ... 

That said, I've been thinking of ways to have some more fun with statistics, by adding in some extra things like 'corruption'. After all, if you decide to steal something from Amy's room, that's a pretty big decision, shaping you as a character, and I feel like it should also be tracked, right?! And maybe there's some fun to be had with new options opening up, depending on whether you've been good or ... not-so-good. 

Maybe they could be either/or. Like, if you've reached a corruption level of 3+ or your feminization level is 6+ then certain options present themselves to you. (Not that I want to suggest crossdressing is a 'corrupt' activity, you understand!) But yeah ... You can hopefully see where I'm going with this train of thought. 

I'm also hoping - in the not too distant future - to have a little 'app' on your phone where you can open up a panel and actually view your stats, just in case that's useful when tracking your progress in game. 

Like I said at the start of this post, there's an urge to just go hog wild and track absolutely everything I can think of. But I really want to keep all of this under control, too, and be savvy with my choices, and not create some unweildy mess. I guess this is all a somewhat long-winded way of saying, don't be mad at me if - at this point in the game's development - future updates sometimes break your previous saves (due to me adding in new stats to track)!!

I could write a helper function at the start of the game that appends the new stats to your player data, and I might well do that at some later point, but right now things still feel so much in flux that I hope you can understand why this might happen for now. 

The way i'm seeing it, I have to get all the 'final' player stats, variables, etc, locked in by the end of this release cycle: when I hit 0.5.7 - that's when all the main Girl Games storyline content is complete, and I'm seeing that as a finish line of sorts. By then, i.e. at 0.5.7, I can lock in the final stats, refactor some of the code, and from then on it'll be more of a case of just fleshing out the surrounding game world, adding in all the fun post-games content, side quests, etc, etc. 

But until we reach that point, as I said, please don't be mad if with these last few updates - 0.5.3 to 0.5.6 - you run into the issue of the save files no longer working. 

I hope all this makes sense! x