Yes, YoYoGames, the creators of our engine, Gamemaker, are adding a special new function to it just for us!
This is a new command for GameMaker called "game_change". It allows you to separately launch different games you have created in GameMaker, and even works on console! That means we can create each Chapter as an independent game project, and swap between them using this function!
For Chapter 1 & 2 DEMO, we initially committed the strange act of smashing both chapters together into one game project. It wasn't such an issue with only 2 chapters, but as the game progresses, doing something like that will become more and more troublesome.
Here's the kind of trouble that could arise if we DIDN'T have game_change...
- When editing the combined project, we wouldn't know if anything during the process might have inadvertently affected anything at any point in the game… So, each time we patched ANY chapter, we would have to test ALL the Chapters over again.
- Gamemaker would potentially be slow to run the game with content on the scale of three chapters or more.
- On the player's side, initial loading of the game would potentially take longer and longer as we add more chapters...
Anyway, the point is... with this command, we have a solution to all those issues!