Postmortem of Salad Slapper

This game was a bit tough for me to make just due to the amount of other things I have due at this time, so I didn’t have as much time to put into it as some of the other games. 

But overall visually I am VERY HAPPY, like the main menu is absolutely beautiful in an intentionally ugly kind of way. And over all everything works as intended except one very very important thing…

So I coded it into the game for the game to keep track of a high score using a global script, so in theory the game looks as the number of slaps in a current game and would compare it to the “high score” and if it was higher than the high score it would set the new high score, and on the end scene it would actually display different text that circles the plate that says “highscore!” However it does this every time the game is played because by default the starting high score the technically 0 so every time the game is played it will play the highscore message (however you are able to see the other message if you don't click the salad at all as it will not change the high score)

In theory if the player was able to play the game again in the same session it would work and keep track of each consecutive high score. But this doesn't work because you are not able to return to the main menu and repeat the game again to try and beat your high score. Which I am aware kinda beats the whole point of the game, as the goal is intended to be the player just tries to click it more times than before.

So the reason this isn’t in the game is because I have some main menu related trauma that came back to haunt me from the first game I made in the first semester, which was the platformer game. I don’t really know the reasoning for this but in the other game I had a main menu and when the player beat the game it was supposed to send them back to the main menu at the end so they could repeat the game if they wanted. And I thought that would be easy because I would just change the scenes the same way I had been changing scenes all along. It worked but it ended up corrupting several of my game files and I literally lost like a whole day of progress. (Like it would work during that session, but once I closed Godot it corrupted and wouldn't work the next time I opened the project) I literally don’t know why it did that, I never got an explanation, and I honestly forgot about all this until this morning when I was basically done with the game I just needed to make it loop back to the main menu so it can be played again. 

And then I remembered. 

And so I made a backup of my file, and was just gonna try and do the same thing and see if the same thing happened (because this time I had a backup), and It didn’t corrupt my files but it just wouldn't let me loop back to the main menu scene. Like I literally don’t know why. And I just didn’t have the time to figure it out with every assignment under the sun imminently due.

My theory is that it has something to do with the fact that that scene had already been called during the game loop so it can’t be called again because I don’t exactly know what Godot does with the scenes once they've been changed. Maybe they're literally gone from the memory of that session? Because If i started from the game scene (instead of the main menu) it would let me loop back to the main menu with the button at the end of the game but then it wouldn’t take me to the game scene. I figured I maybe have to structure my scene switching in a completely different way to combat this, but I couldn’t easily find a tutorial or an explanation online for this, that didn’t seem incredibly complicated. (Like unnecessarily complicated for such a tiny little game)