Hi guys,
I was curious about what may be an effective way to test bits and pieces of a game as its being developed. One feature for instance on Godot is the ability to run a scene without running the entire game itself, which proves to be very effective when coming up with tests for micro elements of the game itself.
How can you achieve something similar with defold? Whereby you can develop and test various aspects of the game without running the entire game all at once?
If you structure your game such that the individuals levels, scenes and menus are in their own collections your can easily change the bootstrap collection to use an individual scene instead of your main/loader/start collection.
You also need to think about game state and a way to easily set it up so that the various parts of your game that is dependent upon a certain state can be set up for use in isolation.
I do this all the time. I sometimes wonder if it would be a good idea to have a button that says “build this collection” in the right click menu when you’re editing a collection because it’s such a fundamental part of my way of working.
Hot reloading is also your friend. This allows you to reload a script without reloading anything else in the game, and it’s a great way to test something, make a minute change, and test it again without having to rebuild.
I sometimes wonder if it would be a good idea to have a button that says “build this collection” in the right click menu when you’re editing a collection because it’s such a fundamental part of my way of working.
This is actually a very good idea, simingly to other engines that have this Play button for the scene - in Defold it could be actually even more powerful. I wonder if something like this is possible via Editor Script?