Decided it would be a good idea to do loading/saving sooner since people on Discord chat suggested it.
Turned out not to be too bad. Here's how it works: There are save points which look like familiar statues throughout the game. There's one in the "home" catacombs area and a save room with these statues just before a boss room. You can manage your saved games at any one of these points. I haven't bothered with encryption yet, but considering my game is FOSS, I'm unsure that really matters.
The game also now tracks your play time. I was trying to decide what the best way to count play time would be, as I wasn't sure whether or not showing the "pause"menu should be considered part of the play time or not. Got some opinions online about other games that count playtime from some other gamers, and the general consensus appears to be that the "pause" menu where you look at stats, change options or equipment should be considered part of the play time, but that there should also be a way to actually pause the game that doesn't increase the playtime counter because waiting for a save point to become available isn't always convenient. Another suggestion was to track how long the player is idle for, and if there isn't any input after a certain amount of time, stop the playtime counter. Since I ran out of extra buttons to use for a "pause everything" screen different from the menu that's already there, and I didn't want to make the game more complicated, I decided to use that feature. Also, the game automatically pauses and shows a pause screen and stops the playtime counter when you focus on a different app and resumes when you focus back.
Gameovers have also been updated. If you die, you can try again, but the game will track how many times you've died if you save.
Another enhancement: Apparently, I've had problems with the player's collision box not allowing the character to slip through gaps 1 tile wide. For reference, the player's collision box is exactly 1x4 tiles in dimension, which also means passing under a 4 tile tall gap is not possible because the gap is exactly the same size as the collision box. I thought this would cause problems for collision if I were to make the collision box smaller as the game is based on a tile based (smooth) implementation, but it hasn't caused too many issues, and now players can slip through 1 tile gaps.
I also found out about the camera smoothing feature offered by Godot, so now it feels nicer.
(Unfortunately, I forgot my login for the Youtube account, so I'm using MediaGoblin instead. The conversion appears to have messed up the audio timing, so excuse that; it was just intended to show the whole passing under 4 tiles thing and the camera smoothing.)
http://roaming-initiative.com/mediagobl ... smoothing/