Let's hope I never have to touch this code again...

Finally, I am done with the full release of "Saving Grace"! Let's hope I never have to touch the mess that is my game's code again, because something will probably break - it's either the game or me. Even though the game's protagonist is named Blobby, I can't recommend the Blob design pattern, especially if used as a singleton...

"Saving Grace" was initially made for the Trijam #160: Don't turn it off. As a kid, I spent most of my spare time staring at the infamously long saving messages of older Pokemon games. So why not make a game that wants you to actually interrupt the saving process?

I really liked the result of the Game Jam, so I decided to put some more work into it and make it a full game. Compared to the game jam version, the final release has the following features:

• More levels! Also, I implemented some new game mechanics.
• Particle systems! It's really astonishing how much more polished a game feels with particle systems.
• A (secret?) ending!
• Story cutscenes! Many people who played the game during the game jam were really confused the first time they had to corrupt their save file and didn't know what to do. So I decided to add some cutscenes (and a villain), to provide some hints to the player about what he is expected to do.
• A main menu. At first, I thought it was a "cool and meta" idea to require the player to actually turn the game off. Turns out, restarting a game 1,000 times isn't as fun as I thought and gets annoying really fast. Now, you can just quit to the main menu by pressing Q and jump right back into the game. However, you can still just close and restart the game if you really want to.
• A Boss Fight! In a puzzle game. Prodigious.
• No less bugs and glitches. I completely rewrote the movement system, so not all the code ends up in the player class. However, the saving system is still implemented in a global singleton node, which I definitely wouldn't recommend... Also, some aspects of Godot (the game engine I used, it's great nonetheless) can be really confusing. How methods are called, and especially in which order they are called feels sometimes opaque. Some things are just inconsistent, like some special overwritten methods still calling their equivalent in the super class automatically, while other's don't.

If you played "Saving Grace", please feel free to leave some feedback - I am happy over every comment!