I thought this might be a helpful idea for developers who need to track many global values in their games. I refer to global values as a set of values that are used to alter the game state, store quantities, etc.

I have used strings rather than numeric values in a Dictionary in the past, but I have preferred to use numeric references for value stores for the last two games we have made. I found that referencing variables by name enforced lazy coding, and using a numeric reference with a spreadsheet was more efficient.

DEBUGGING GLOBAL VALUES

One thing that helped me tremendously with Beautiful Desolation was storing the reference AS WELL as a note to the code that changed the global value. So, for example, if you look at the code above, I store a string reference to the Script file and the Method that altered this value. It may seem cumbersome now, but it has saved me hours of trying to work out where a value was set from.

I have a singleton that stores the State Array as a List that contains all of the values and the place that set them.

Here is the clever part, I also write this data to the savegame file.

This Save is a dump of the State - what this means is that I can load ANY save from a player, tester, or my code base and review where and when the value was set. This helped out a MASSIVE amount during the playtesting of Desolation, which had 1500 variables in the State.

If a player sends me their save file, I can quickly ascertain why a value is not being set, or where it collided with another puzzle. If the save file only contained the value it would be useless in a debugging context.

My ingame Debug tool also allows me to check the details on any variable quickly.

This only took a few minutes to implement and it has made my life much easier!