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DISCOURAGING SAVE SCUMMING
Posts
Dyhalto
7536
Dyhalto
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CloseSadly, we can't go back to the days of "Ninja Gaiden is hard and you want to play something else now? Well tough shit! Super Mario Bros is hard too!! And so is Bucky O'Hare!!! Where's your messiah now??!!1"
I miss those days.
My current project, and plan for future projects, has difficulty levels. The challenge seekers will have what they want, and the casual gamer won't be alienated by 'cheap deaths'. If possible, you might want to consider it too. For an RPG, it's as easy as buffing enemies and/or slight AI modification (use this instead of that).
I miss those days.
My current project, and plan for future projects, has difficulty levels. The challenge seekers will have what they want, and the casual gamer won't be alienated by 'cheap deaths'. If possible, you might want to consider it too. For an RPG, it's as easy as buffing enemies and/or slight AI modification (use this instead of that).
Yeaster
6164
I'm a save scummer and I dun cay-yer, especially when I'm playing games on an emulator. You think I'm going to play MegaTen I without save scumming (I didn't know there was an actual word for that)? You crazy.
DFalcon
2141
author=Shinan
Last night at work I listened to the latest Three Moves Ahead podcast where they talked about Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri they mentioned the fact that they stored a random seed into the game, so that upon reloading a battle would always end the same way as it did last time. (to prevent reload abuse) It turned out that playtesters (and in fact later actual gamers) thought that this was a bug "I played through this battle 50 times and every time I lost!"
That's pretty funny. In Civ V there's actually a game option that goes something like "Save scumming works y/n".
King's Bounty takes this farther - I'm not sure how exactly they store random seeds for battles, but it also pregenerates the entire game world: the contents of every chest, and so on. (And to go even farther, dealing with this is one of the reasons my current project has deterministic damage.)
Actually, even with all the talk about quicksaves, autosaves have hardly come up? In a quicksave-deleted-on-load system, dealing with your permanent saves often eats some time - finding a save crystal and making sure you hit it before you take on some risk, rather than just saving when's convenient. Rather than my quicksave disappearing, I think often I'd prefer that after I load it once it becomes a permanent save at a recent automatic checkpoint I hit (e.g., the entrance to the dungeon.)
author=Radnen
Just because you are an indie game designer doesn't mean you create for a particular style of gamer or for some the "underground". You should still aim for the masses, or otherwise you won't do too well.
This is an attitude I would very much like to see go away.
(And we wouldn't have gems like Demon's Souls if everyone aimed for the masses)
I rather agree with that(though I am very surprised to hear this point of view from the author of 101 {not a critic!} which to me, and considering the downloads, is really, if not aimed, appealing to the masses?).
Well, since none of us are doing this for money (I think?) the best one can hope to get by 'appealing to the masses' is a high score and some good reviews. When one brings a 'business standard' into an arena which isn't actually a business, there is little point in trying to pander to a specific crowd. Likewise, any measure of success is going to be pretty relative to the goals of the developer.
As developers, we are very lucky because we don't have to worry about sales, and we are more free than anyone in the professional gaming business to do what we want.
As developers, we are very lucky because we don't have to worry about sales, and we are more free than anyone in the professional gaming business to do what we want.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
True that. Make the game you believe in.
author=ThiamorI suppose that if there's a person who wants to protect his CBS/CMS code from being copied, he could use Molebox to compress the project files into one executable.
I always wanted to insert actual cheat codes, so that it would discourage those type of players from opening up the project. Then they can find the cheats in some way, and play the game.
I'm a bit wary of locked games for 2 reasons : bugs, I played a number of very old and excellent demos (always?!) that were totally blocked at one point or another (actually was struck by the fact after a while, who does this?), and played countless others games with a few bugs; 2- it's happened that the game was too difficult (unsolvable mini-games...), and I still wanted to finish the game.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
So, this thread inspired me to modify how saving works in Iniquity and Vindication.
The game now has checkpoints. If you die, you get a choice to continue from your last checkpoint at no penalty. Checkpoints consist of a map ID, x coordinate, and y coordinate - everything else they did persists from when they died. They are fully healed, and any cut scene that they were in the middle of is cancelled (and can be started over).
Every time a battle starts, the player is automatically granted a checkpoint just before the battle. This functionality can be turned off in situations where it would cause problems, like battles that are in the middle of cut scenes. In those cases, the player still gets a checkpoint, but I set the location manually (to a tile in front of where the cut scene starts).
The player can also save anywhere, obviously. I already had the ability to save anywhere - checkpoints mostly just allow me to easily have cut scenes with multiple boss battles in a row and let the player start from the one he died on. They also make it so you only have to actually save when you're ready to quit for the day, which is a nice little superficial quality of life improvement.
This sort of "free retry" makes it so, like FF13 or tactical RPGs, dying is pretty much identical to running away. But the catch is that, like FF13 or tactical RPGs, battles in my game are individual, non-connected challenges - there's no resource like MP that carries over from one battle to the next, and no two battles are identical. There aren't long dungeons with limited healing that force the player to conserve MP. Essentially, every battle in the game is like a boss battle.
I do not think this system would work well at all in, say, a Dragon Warrior game (or any other traditional JRPG). It would feel like save scumming. Because each dungeon in a Dragon Warrior game is a complex beast and a large part of the game's challenge is getting through the entire thing without running out of healing, having this kind of checkpoint system in Dragon Warrior would mean you'd essentially be restarting from the middle of a challenge. But in my game, or in a tactical RPG, or in Dragon Age or FF13 or The World Ends With You or any other game where every battle is an isolated challenge, it doesn't feel cheap. It feels like you're starting the challenge you were on over from the beginning.
The game now has checkpoints. If you die, you get a choice to continue from your last checkpoint at no penalty. Checkpoints consist of a map ID, x coordinate, and y coordinate - everything else they did persists from when they died. They are fully healed, and any cut scene that they were in the middle of is cancelled (and can be started over).
Every time a battle starts, the player is automatically granted a checkpoint just before the battle. This functionality can be turned off in situations where it would cause problems, like battles that are in the middle of cut scenes. In those cases, the player still gets a checkpoint, but I set the location manually (to a tile in front of where the cut scene starts).
The player can also save anywhere, obviously. I already had the ability to save anywhere - checkpoints mostly just allow me to easily have cut scenes with multiple boss battles in a row and let the player start from the one he died on. They also make it so you only have to actually save when you're ready to quit for the day, which is a nice little superficial quality of life improvement.
This sort of "free retry" makes it so, like FF13 or tactical RPGs, dying is pretty much identical to running away. But the catch is that, like FF13 or tactical RPGs, battles in my game are individual, non-connected challenges - there's no resource like MP that carries over from one battle to the next, and no two battles are identical. There aren't long dungeons with limited healing that force the player to conserve MP. Essentially, every battle in the game is like a boss battle.
I do not think this system would work well at all in, say, a Dragon Warrior game (or any other traditional JRPG). It would feel like save scumming. Because each dungeon in a Dragon Warrior game is a complex beast and a large part of the game's challenge is getting through the entire thing without running out of healing, having this kind of checkpoint system in Dragon Warrior would mean you'd essentially be restarting from the middle of a challenge. But in my game, or in a tactical RPG, or in Dragon Age or FF13 or The World Ends With You or any other game where every battle is an isolated challenge, it doesn't feel cheap. It feels like you're starting the challenge you were on over from the beginning.
author=LockeZ
So, this thread inspired me to modify how saving works in Iniquity and Vindication.
The game now has checkpoints. If you die, you get a choice to continue from your last checkpoint at no penalty. Checkpoints consist of a map ID, x coordinate, and y coordinate - everything else they did persists from when they died. They are fully healed, and any cut scene that they were in the middle of is cancelled (and can be started over).
Unless I'm reading this wrong, won't that break if the map changed at all between dying and respawning? ( Like if a door is locked behind you. )
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I don't think so! I can't think of a way that would cause a problem, since I imagine you'd always be able to redo the same thing you did to open the door the first time, but I could be missing something. If you think it could cause the player to get stuck, I would appreciate a more detailed example of the problem.
author=LockeZ
I don't think so! I can't think of a way that would cause a problem, since I imagine you'd always be able to redo the same thing you did to open the door the first time, but I could be missing something. If you think it could cause the player to get stuck, I would appreciate a more detailed example of the problem.
Well, for instance, lets say there is a checkpoint before a room. This room has a key item in it, and you fight a battle as you leave.
Now lets say that you die on the exiting fight, well now you are outside, no need to fight now, any event/variable changes brought around by winning the fight could be skipped.
And if you stuck a check point in the room then there would be a chance of never getting out if you were low enough level.
This of course, would probably be rare and obviously wouldn't be hard to change (put the fight as you enter.)
But it could also happen on a much bigger scale, I think.
I don't know though, maybe it wouldn't be a problem.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Ah, I see. Well, when I have battles that block the path backwards, I will need to put the checkpoint before you get blocked (outside the room in your example case), and also make it so dying resets the key item or puzzle or whatever to whatever state it was in before you entered the room. That'll require individual attention to such cases, but I don't think it'll get too out of hand.
Code-wise, I think the simple way to do it will be to make it so the event that the battle is in goes something like this:
- Remove item
- Start battle
- Add item
Code-wise, I think the simple way to do it will be to make it so the event that the battle is in goes something like this:
- Remove item
- Start battle
- Add item
