To save or not to save…

Mike and I spent a long time talking about the save game feature in LOM and DDR. Both us came down on the side that a save game on a modern platform diminishes the story nature of the game. Unlike loading the game back for 10 minutes from a tape as it was back in 84, it take less than a second to reload the game, and therefore a lot of the challenge is removed. I’ve discussed this previously here…

Anyway, I received an email today about the save game feature…

Due to the complexity of the gameplay, it is difficult (impossible) to excite new people to play if you do not include a true “Save” mechanism in the game.

I’m still not of the mind to add a save game feature, but I ended up wondering if it was time to expand the UNDO feature a little.

The game creates an undo position after every single move. It allows to roll back completely through the game. It marks special undo records such as Dawn and Night. However, in the game it only utilises the last move and dawn. I originally wanted to give the facility to playback the undo records as a way to watch the game unfold… never happened. And I was going to add difficulty levels that utilised the UNDO facility more… Also, never happened.

The undo records except dawn and last are purged as you end the story and return to the menu. This happened because I received a report that stories were taking up a lot of space. An undo record is actually a full uncompressed, unoptimised save game and takes about 30k. They can soon mount up.

What I was thinking was… how about if I left ALL the undo to dawn records live and possibly the last x moves too. That way you could undo a couple of moves, or undo dawn, undo dawn, undo dawn… etc… Maybe an option to redo so that you could step back up the dawn undo list if you have not pressed night since undo.

Thoughts?