Hello fellow game devs,
I recently started doing some design on a game that will be my first experience beyond "simple games".
what I mean is, to this point I've only made the conceptually basic games, such as scrolling shooters, platformers, tic-tac-toe, checkers, etc.. basic arcade games and emulation of board games....
But, now I'm pursuing the design of a game that hopefully will give me more useful/practical skills in game developement. One with story and heavy use of text and branched dialogs. One that will have a "complete Time" long enough to merrit a save-system, rather then the code-system I was using in my platformer. But I really don't have any experience in either of these fields OR know exactly how to search for these sorts of things online.
What I'm looking for help with:
1) how does one go about making "save files", obviously I could do a basic text or xml file with the important data, but even then how is a good practice for structuring it? Also what methods provide more "secure" save files, something the user couldnt just open in notepad+ and edit to change their game? any file types that are used? or possibly encoding methods I should know?
2) how does one deal with large ammounts of text in a game? I understand that, again, yes I could use an XML file and look up blocks of text by an IDtag or something, but again nothing is stopping the player from opening that file in Notepad and spoiling the story, or finding out which conversation decisins lead to what rewards, etc... So I'm asking what a good way to do large quantities of text is?
**I'm doing this game in C# in Unity for now, so if anything here is needing platform/language specific addressing thats my tools. But honestly I would be happy with pseudocode, links to guides/tutorials, or general discussion on theory and practices.
TL;DR - I need guidance on how to do save files, and how to deal with large ammounts of text/dialog that I feel shouldnt be ghardcoded into a game. looking for pseudocode, guides/tutorials, or discussion on theories and practical structures
Thanks and sorry for the long post!