As you already noticed, save games isn’t implemented yet. This is also one of those features that I will postpone until it’s obvious you definitely need it ;).
For now, all games I’ve seen can be played in maximum 15-30 minutes, so I think it’s still OK to skip the save functionality. You’re also the first one to bring up this topic (my features are highly influenced by what people are requesting), so I’m definitely taking note. But for now, I think I can still get away with not having it. We all still make short games.
There is also an extra thing I need to consider when I implement save games: what happens with game updates. Assume some player plays your game version 1.0, and stores some checkpoint and leaves the game. You make changes to your game, add some enemies, remove some, add a level, etc. Now the player comes back to your version 2.0 game, and wants to load the old saved game. What do I do?
- Bring the player back to version 1.0 if he wants to continue. But this means I need to keep track of all previous versions.
- Try to upgrade the 1.0 save file to 2.0, but it’s impossible to get this 100% correct all the time
I’ve already analysed a solution for save games, and the implementation, which is basically game state saving, can be applied to 3 different things:
- Save your progress in the game
- Rewind/Replay functionality (in the maker tool, not in the game itself)
- Multiplayer
Multiplayer seems a bit weird here, but it’s actually sending (a part of) the game state to the game server and clients.
And I’m definitely excited about the rewind/replay functionality that could become a part of it. Imagine you are testing some boss fight in your game. The boss is maybe too strong. So you open the editor, rewind a bit, set the boss damage a bit less, and test again. I think this could be really cool.
And of course, as you mentioned, saving the game progress together with the game in a project file could be handy that you can just resume where you left off.
So, long story short: not in the near future.
But if I am correct, it seems you want it purely to not lose the tokens while editing your game. Would it help you if I added functionality where you could add/remove tokens? This way after loading your game, you could add the tokens manually and test the part of your game that you want.