Hello again GDevelop community!
Thanks to your support, I was able to publish my first game on Kongregate a few days ago: Play Exercises In Style, a free online game on Kongregate
The game has overall positive reviews, but the players discovered a few bugs that appear to be browser-related and that I would like to discuss with you. I also have a question about how to make sure that player’s save files will be preserved when updating the game.
As this post features multiple questions, please feel free to provide help for only one or a few of them depending on your availability!
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The most important: how can I make sure that player’s save files will be preserved when updating the game on Kongregate?
My current saving system is as follow: the progression of the player is recorded by a total of 30 global variables, on a unique storage file called ‘save’. When starting the game, the content of each group of this storage file is copied into a scene variable, then copied again into the adequate global variable. Then, every time the player changes scene, the current value of those 30 global variables overwrites the previous value stored in the storage file.
This system works completely fine so far. My question is: how can I be sure that the content of this save file will be preserved for each player individually when I will upload updated files on Kongregate? -
Some players ran into an issue regarding timers, and that seems to be browser-dependant. I was unable to reproduce this issue by myself, but it was described to me by a player as follows: in a certain room in the game, the player has to stand still for 5 seconds for the door to open. I use the negation the condition ‘platformer behavior - character is moving’ to reset a timer every time the character moves. This works fine one or two times but then, when visiting the same room for the third time, doesn’t work anymore. The issue was reported by multiple players both on Google Chrome and Firefox, although they say that reloading the page usually solves the problem for a time. Attached are screenshots sent by a player showing the web console’s error messages when this issue occurs. Does that look familiar to any of you?
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Some players reported issues with the text entry object on both Chrome and Firefox: the spacebar button doesn’t actually insert a space. This doesn’t trigger any console error. Any idea?
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Last one! Some players complain about the game being laggy, and using up to 1GB memory when playing. This is very surprising to me as the game is mostly a minimalistic platformer, without fancy animations or demanding functions, also not using the physics engine. Is it a normal thing for a HTML5 game created using GDevelop to use that much memory? Or is it my events system that is very under-optimal and that I should rework? If so, any advice to help me reduce the memory it takes to run the game?
That’s it for now!
I apologise for writing such a long post with so many questions! I hope you’ll have time to provide help for at least the two first questions, as they are really the most problematic so far.
In the end, I would like to thank GDevelop’s creators as well as active community, for creating and maintaining such an awesome tool, which allowed me to design, create and publish a fully functioning game without prior knowledge about coding languages, and with very few issues overall!
I personally took an ‘Indie Developper’ subscription just before I published my game, and I would advise anyone who uses GDevelop to publish games to do so as well, so as to support a great project and a very helpful community!
Thank you all, keep up with the good work! 
- GingerBread