Comments on: Making Gunpoint’s Save System

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 12:52:57 +0000

shut up and take my money

By: LongShad

LongShad — Sun, 06 May 2012 16:36:34 +0000

I think – best use save-triggers in safe areas, like in “Stealth Bastard”.
When player enter in safe-trigger (they place level-designer) – game is saving and safe-trigger destroying (saving run once).

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Sat, 05 May 2012 06:18:16 +0000

“I guess this can work for a demo but for a final release you must move to a checkpoint based system: in 5-10 seconds i’m probably still idle thinking what to do next, so there’s no difference between the saves or, as you highlighted, you are in the heat of action and you could die.”

Perhaps auto-save after the player takes a few significant actions, rather than geographical checkpoints?

By: Flavio

Flavio — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:26:55 +0000

If I may, i don’t mean to offend, but the system is completely wrong and I think the test you write about demonstrate it.
I guess this can work for a demo but for a final release you must move to a checkpoint based system: in 5-10 seconds i’m probably still idle thinking what to do next, so there’s no difference between the saves or, as you highlighted, you are in the heat of action and you could die.
I don’t get this animosity that comes out of your words about informing about the autosave, you don’t need a big banner to tell you are saving the game… console games are not intrusive in this, there’s just some kind of spinning icon in the bottom corner. The banner comes when starting the game, so I don’t see the problem.
I’d say that quicksaves are the solution, but in the HL times it happened often, because of the default bindings, to save while falling in pit and get stuck in a dying cycle.

Personally i can figure myself just hitting reload in a game like this, because i don’t think levels will be so long to complete, like more than 5 minutes… but i don’t know that and it could get frustrating.

In the end the perfect solution would be checkpoints on key moments of the levels (that you must break up in “stages”, at least just for you) _and_ quicksave.
Another nice idea that would integrate in the game would be for the player to manually save at some point with the character interacting with a particular object, i’m thinking about Flashback, where you had your avatar interacting with a computer-stand, or Resident Evil and the beloved typewriter.

By: SirFry

SirFry — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 23:46:18 +0000

One way you could do saves, if you have time to implement it, is to have a sort of rewind interface that allows you to press back in certain intervals, like 5 seconds, and see a picture of that save state before you jump in. I have seen other games do something similar, and it makes for a fairly intuitive interface, but I have no idea how long it would take to make or if its really feasible. Just an idea.

By: LionsPhil

LionsPhil — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 20:22:57 +0000

Why dance about with filenames when surely you can get the age of an arbitrary savegame by looking at its modification time? Doesn’t GameMaker let you stat() files?

By: HuCares:)

HuCares:) — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 12:29:01 +0000

Sorry don’t understand you’r problem? :)You think in not right direction.
Every 5 sc game do save game using system time like this
12:16:01
12:16:06
12:16:11

When player die let say in 12:16:22
You have last save games like
2:16:11 – 11 sec ago
12:16:06 -16 sec ago
And so on;
If you want skip save-games in dif time line you need
Add to save game field like previus save_game
Hire is our saves
12:16:01 prev null
12:16:06 prev 12:16:01
12:16:11 prev 12:16:06
Die in 12:16:12
load 12:16:06
new save 12:16:16 prev 12:16:06 and so on ..
so you can handle last 3-5 … saves and can display real time or time line with offset in 5 sec(if save every 5 sec)
let I show :) :
last save 12:16:16
diy in 12:16:18
12:16:16 – 2 sec ago (2 sec real)
Take prev 12:16:06
12:16:06 -7 sec ago(12 sec real);
HF =)

By: joxp

joxp — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 21:48:12 +0000

Well, I’d say you should later on implement a rewind/timeline. My Duke Nukem 3D for the Xbox has a rewind feature, and it works great. And do release a new build :D

By: Rei Onryou

Rei Onryou — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 14:14:01 +0000

I know your happy with your system, but you could display a little snapshot image of what was happening at each save. A player may not be able to remember exactly what status the world was in 10 seconds ago, but a screenshot might help them go “No, I was already on the path to failure, I need to go further back in time!”

I’d also go with system timestamps if possible. Determining time inside a system where time can change is difficult, but time relative to an outside system is easier to work with. Unless I misunderstood how time (and time travel) work in GP.

By: Cyanyde

Cyanyde — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 23:58:03 +0000

I would like to see something like Braid, where you can drag a slider or something in order to rewind “time”

I’m sure whatever you come up with will suffice, you definitely are *not* a “shitty, shitty designer” :)

By: Andytizer

Andytizer — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:54:53 +0000

Please please put your savegames in a logical place such as that suggested by John Walk: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/01/24/start-it-the-place-to-put-save-games/

That path would be:
C:\Users\[user]\Documents\My Games\[game name]\Saves\

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 08:18:51 +0000

I feel your pain with save games. When I was in the industry I worked on the save system for a big open world game. The technical side was way more complex, but it was always the basic save logic (when, how, etc) that ended up being the harder problem to solve. Sounds like you’ve got a pretty good philosophy/logic for your game fleshed out, which is helpful when making the tons of tiny decisions necessary for implementation.

By: Ash47

Ash47 — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 08:07:53 +0000

Loads instantly, saves instantly? It would be really cool to have a timeline popup, and you drag it backward and forth and it loads the game paused, so you can see where you were, that way you can pick the best save quickly :P

By: Optimaximal

Optimaximal — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:40:44 +0000

Does Game Maker not support system timestamps? That’s usually the best way to deal with time handling, regardless of whether they’re datetime or epoch-based.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:27:44 +0000

In my case ‘better’ always means ‘better and less work’ – this system only took me an evening and solves all the problems I need it to. I just didn’t want anyone to put loads of effort into a suggestion hoping I’d do it: I’d never finish if I spent time making good systems nicer.

By: Corintho

Corintho — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:27:25 +0000

Its interesting to read your reasoning and think “That makes sense.” And when you say what the problem is, it goes like “How the hell didn’t I think of that before”.
I actually felt a little bit like developing the idea of the system.
Thanks for sharing that.

By: DeliriumWartner

DeliriumWartner — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:58:41 +0000

“No-one suggest a better save system! I just finished the save system!”

You just wrote a big post on different types of saving systems. It was kind of inevitable that this would be a “kick myself” comment section. Too-late crowd-sourcing FTW!

By: grobitbox

grobitbox — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:46:08 +0000

A more simple idea: what if when you die, the last save is loaded, paused and you can move backwards and forwards between the paused saves to select one you like the look of. I think something like this where you can see what the saves are would be better than just a list.

By: DeliriumWartner

DeliriumWartner — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:45:51 +0000

Would it not work to log the save games according to the time on the PC’s clock? Then they would be in literaly chronological order. Indeed, you could then use a comparison (I assume) to say how long ago the save was.

Then again, I know nothing of programming, so that could be really hard to implement.

By: relikd

relikd — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:43:58 +0000

yep Dave’s idea sounds great. A horizontal line with some dots on it (like your hand-drawn timeline). Hovering will show a screenshot in the background (you said its loading immediately so this shouldnt be the problem loading the state)

By: Philippe

Philippe — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:42:47 +0000

I’m not in on the beta (meaning: I haven’t played, just seen videos), but perhaps you could save based on certain actions: elevators, doors, cross-link.

I agree that rewinding a la Braid would be the least jarring (and pretty cool), but it means all your update() functions need to accept negative time deltas (assuming you’re coding like most games I’ve seen), and you still need to keep track of certain decisions to “undo” them.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:37:52 +0000

I love rewind systems, but you do need to design for them from the ground up. And if it’s not your core feature, that’s a lot of work for a small benefit.

I dislike checkpoints and positional saves because they dictate what counts as progress. If a player wants to spend ten minutes in the same place just messing around with the wiring of a building, I want Gunpoint to value that as progress and save every step of the way, so he doesn’t lose it all if something goes wrong.

No-one suggest a better save system! I just finished the save system!

By: MLeoDaalder

MLeoDaalder — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:37:07 +0000

Sorry to ask, but will there be a new test build in March?

It might be interesting to try out this new save feature.

By: grobitbox

grobitbox — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:26:20 +0000

I guess the the best system for this would be one where you rewind time naturedly to a point that you’re happy with, like in the first world of braid, but I’m guessing that would be ridiculously difficult to do. I was also wondering about some system that some how predicts when you are about to enter a dangerous situation and saves, but I doubt that would work.

By: Gary the Llama

Gary the Llama — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:24:26 +0000

Couldn’t you solve the last issue by keeping the just-loaded game paused upon load, until you press a key to start the action? That way you have a chance to get your bearings before you action starts. Just an idea.

By: Jorma

Jorma — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:21:35 +0000

Rewind seems like the best solution for this kind of game. No idea how easy/hard that is to implement tho :)

By: ynp7

ynp7 — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:04:45 +0000

Is there a reason that check pointing at known “safe” points wouldn’t work? I haven’t played the game so maybe that wouldn’t work into the design.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:53:52 +0000

You could have a timeline allowing the user to select which save to load.
When highlighting each option, the state of the game could be shown, letting the user see what state they will be in if they load that save.