Separating chapters for larger game development

Questions
#1

I’ve been involved in the DELTARUNE community (a game created by Toby Fox, creator of UNDERTALE), and one big thing in discussion is a GameMaker LTS update that will help the game.

This update includes a “game_change” function, which basically allows an app created with GameMaker to switch between .win files (the files that contain the actual app data). This will be beneficial to the development of Deltarune as they can program chapters separately without effecting each other and having to check for any new bugs in old content due to the addition of new things.

This got me thinking about Defold. I have a plan on creating a story rpg (very much inspired by Toby’s work) split by chapters, and isolating parts of the game sounds very beneficial. I thought of Defold’s live update function and if that could be used to achieve such an effect. I’d like to see what others would think of how one would implement such a strategy for Defold.

#2

A quick thought I had about this:

I wonder if it would be possible to do this in multiple Defold projects. For example you would have a “core” library with all game logic that you use in each chapter project. This though, would have the effect of having multiple binaries, one for each chapter, which I don’t know if is desired or not.

Desided to have a quick look at the live update manual after writing the above and it looks like that is what you would want to use, though I have no experience with it.

#3

Yes, Live Update will let you do almost anything. You can download, mount and use live update archives containing new game logic and assets.

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#4

Because of how Defold works with collections, I think it would be easy to implement something with live update. The only issue is when love update code has to communicate with “base” code that may cause that code to develop another issue somewhere else

#5

Yeah I don’t think for this situation I’d want multiple binaries. I was just thinking of an easy way to “quarantine” code for easier development in a single project