[jolexxa]

All very good advice that I feel deeply. I think I fell into the honey trap some time ago, but I've made peace with that — the tools I'm making will probably do more good than any game I could finish making, at least for now.

Jokes aside, though, I do try to dog-food my tooling as much as possible. I maintain a Godot/C# 3d platformer game demo with full state preservation/restoration (<https://github.com/chickensoft-games/GameDemo>) to demonstrate this.

By the time I've finished writing tests and docs for a tool, I've usually identified and fixed a bunch of usability pain points and come up with a happy path for myself and other developers — even if it's not 100% perfect.

I also have a bunch of unreleased game projects that spawned these projects, and even gave a talk on how this stuff came about (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLBkGoOP4RI&t=1705s>) a few months ago if that's of interest to you or anyone else.

The requirements you mentioned in your comment cover selectively serializing state and decoupling saving/loading logic, and I could not agree more. While you can always abuse a serializer, I hope my demonstration in the game demo code shows how I've selectively saved only relevant pieces of game data and how they are decoupled and reconstructed across the scene tree.

Also probably worth mentioning the motivation behind all this — the serialization system here should hopefully enable you to easily refactor type hierarchies without having to maintain manual lists of derived types like System.Text.Json requires you to do when leveraging polymorphic deserialization.

Manually tracking types (presumably in another file, even) is such an error-prone thing to have to do when using hierarchical state machines where each state has its own class (like <https://github.com/chickensoft-games/LogicBlocks>). States as classes is super common when following the state pattern and it is well supported with IDE refactoring tools since they're just classes. Basically this serialization system exists to help save complex, hierarchical state without all the headaches. While I was at it, I also introduced opinionated ways to handle versioning and upgrading because that's also always a headache.