Advanced Data

The data directory in Usagi games is very powerful! You can do all sorts of things with it, like store your games levels, localization data, and more. Here are a few examples:

• Loading a level from CSV
• Loading a level from JSON
• Loading localization data from JSON

usagi.read_text and usagi.read_json allow you access the files in the data folder, and they support live reload as well.

One nice thing about using text or JSON files in data is that you can read and parse that data with other programming languages. For example, I put my game’s build version in data/metadata.json:

{
  "build": "cara26.2"
}

In my Usagi game, I can display it for the player:

Metadata = usagi.read_json("metadata.json")

-- in _draw
gfx.text(Metadata.build, 10, 10, gfx.COLOR_BLACK)

And I can make use of it in my push.rb Ruby script that I use to deploy my game to itch.io:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# Script to deploy to itch

require "json"
DRY_RUN = ARGV.include?('--dry-run')

VER = JSON.parse(File.read("data/metadata.json"))["build"]

def butler_push(build)
  butler_cmd = "butler push --userversion=#{VER} export/neogear-summer-caravan-26-#{build}.zip brettchalupa/neogear-summer-caravan-26:#{build}"
  if DRY_RUN
    puts "[DRY RUN] pushing to itch: #{butler_cmd}"
  else
    system(butler_cmd)
  end
end

puts `usagi export`
butler_push('linux')
butler_push('macos')
butler_push('windows')
butler_push('web')

The VER = JSON.parse(File.read("data/metadata.json"))["build"] line reads that JSON file and gets the "build" key’s value.

If you want to share data across your game and other tooling, using the ./data directory is the way to go!