The Drunken Lizard Pub

Hi,

First let me say that this is a great game and impressive for the work of (mostly) one person.

Please please implement an auto-save feature. This is a huge deal, honestly. Losing hours of progress to a crash is not fun.

I play iron man since that is the most fun way to play, so I'm not in the habit of saving much. An autosave (perhaps at every sector switch) would be presumably easy to implement and would save huge potential headaches. Please. Thanks.

If I can offer a potential suggestion, let me add that it might be possible to add 'crash recovery' save functionality. It couldn't overwrite existing saves clearly, but for quick and dirty added functionality, it could just be a specifically named save file which the user would have to rename to be one of the 'normal' saves before it was available to be loaded.

From there it may be easy, if the language in which this game is written has Exceptions or something like them, to wrap the main code-path bottlenecks with try/catch and if there was an unhandled exception, save to the special file. The user could rename it and try to reload it.

Such 'error recovery' saves are pretty common in business/productivity software, and might be surprisingly easy to implement.

Or you could just remember to save more often. Also, your game crashes? It's never crashed on me before...

Opunaesala wrote:Or you could just remember to save more often. Also, your game crashes? It's never crashed on me before...

Yes, it hard-crashed on me. No error message of any kind, just complete application shutdown. I was in a battle at the time and retreating to another sector.

As for saving more often, while that's the obvious glib response, the fact is that having to manage the mechanics of playing the game in that way detracts from fun. It's a subtle point and not one that I expect very many people to understand, but the author of this game seems well thought out about what makes games fun, and I suspect he'll understand where I'm coming from. (Even if it's not feasible to implement an auto-save or crash recovery save.)

An auto-save feature would be a great addition indeed. I'll go ahead and say that I'd like to see further changes to the save system as well; something not slot-based to be more specific.

Slot-based save systems are an acceptable way of handling cartridge or memory card video games, but hard to justify on a PC game. Not being able to simply save as many times as I want feels more like an arbitrary limitation than an engine limitation; feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Also, quicksave and quickload buttons I feel are a must in modern gaming. I tend to save a lot, a bad habit some might say, but one I feel there's no reason not to enable, considering just how common such a function is in pretty much all games I've played in the last few years.

F2 is your friend. I used to be a big save neglecter in this game until I saw how easy it is to die if your not careful in the beginning. Remember, F2.

F2 F2 F2 F2


I usually keep my left hand index finger hovering over it while I play.

all that F2'ing is simply not fun, especially for those of us who play iron-man (no loading from previous saves other than to recover from a crash).

In fact some games contain an explicit iron-man option (such as Wizardry 8 ), and at that point an auto-save is necessary for crash recovery.