Thank you very much! I'm glad to hear you liked it and had a good time!
To answer your questions:
- "FileD" is the default fallback save file, since while I'm debugging/playtesting I will instantly spawn into rooms and I don't want to accidentally save over actual active save files when doing that. It's basically a safety net
- As of right now there is no way to unlock the Vera sprites, but that's entirely because I just forgot to put in the code to have them unlock! Thank you for bringing that to my attention.
- The next journal entry is intended to activate at the very start of the next book, and the following after a specific sequence of events. Sorry ya spoiled it for yourself! Though it's likely some of those things will be tweaked as the game is developed
- "medalsCollectedSave" is a holdover from back when you could quit the game in the middle of a level and load your save right back into the level, I got rid of that and made loading your save always put you back at the world map because it just lead to too many potential complications for not much benefit since the levels are all fairly short. embersCollectedSave is the same thing
- People have beaten the congratulatory wave by glitching it, but it's not intentional and only leads to a crash, the congratulatory wave is just there to prevent that from happening by forcing you to lose
- All of the flags like "growl" are just integers (minor correction, they're floats even though I never use the decimals, curse you dynamically typed GML) that track how far along you are on storyline progress. The "growl" flag for example tracks if you've already talked to Growl or not, which will turn off the cutscene collider box that forces you to talk to him, and will trigger different dialogue with Gnash if you go back and talk to her. Most storyline flags will reset when you re-enter a level so you can play them fresh, but there's some that persist like the one that tracks when you talk to Bambi, hence why they're in the save file
- I don't have much desire to protect against save file editing since majority of players won't know how to properly edit them, and those who do could easily find other ways to do so if they really wanted to. The only reason I encrypt the dialogue CSV is I don't want all of the dialogue to be easily accessible to the average player
Thank you for your interest! The game is a true labor of love and I'm very motivated and excited to get the full thing into player's hands!