Player Profiles and Score.

Hiya, I'm just adding profiles to my framework and I wondered what you thought about this:

For a puzzle game e.g. match3, you'll have a certain score at the start of the level. If you save mid-level and exit and resume later, I'm not planning to save the position of all the pieces, you'll have to play the level from the start again. This is pretty normal for puzzle games. However, what I'm planning on doing is also resetting the score to what it was at the start of the level not what it was mid-way through to avoid cheating (i.e. continously saving, playing a bit, and restarting). I did this for Xmas and Easter Bonus and it seemed fine. It's in the readme file but not the main instructions as it's a pretty minor point. However, I guess it could confuse some people who may for example reach 50000 mid level, save, resume later and notice it's dropped back to 48000 or whatever. Tough?

Anyway, what about for shoot-em up games? If you save and exit mid way through a level, should it do the same thing i.e. not record current score but only score at start of level. I guess if the shooter had checkpoints, you could resume from one of those and have the score go from there. Or maybe it shouldn't rollback the score at all?

Of course there is nothing stopping users of my framework from altering the profile to save *everything* so it is a real save, with all objects and positions and sounds etc. and then the score thing isn't an issue. Good luck to them though, as I bet it isn't easy!

What does everyone think?

thanks for your input.

i think that a 'snapshot' of the game in progress should be saved, and reloaded when the game is restarted, and the player selects continue previous game (or something similar)...

this means that player positions, scores, any time settings, etc should be recovered...

easy to say when someone else has to do the work, right :)

--Mike

yeah easy to say ... :-) Almost all puzzle games don't do this, but big name 3D games do. Thing is, it can lead to lots of bugs... Anway thanks for your opinion.

anyone else?

I don't know how hard this would be to do but perhaps you could have a save which the coder passes in what they want to be saved, such as types and variables. That would help with it as there could be things that the user would want saved.

But answering your actual post I think rolling the scores back is fine.

ok thanks. Really I'm just thinking of having the structure in place for people to create/delete/load/save player profiles (inc. their own preferences about tips/instructions) and if coders want to expand what's saved, then fine, but I'm not doing it :-)

The majority of games, that I can recall, have a "level score". The level score is zero at the start of each level and is only added to the "overall score" when the level is completed and all the bonus calculations have been made. Taking this approach will solve these issues.

Ah yes, maybe I should do that instead of showing the total score on-screen. I already have a level score variable as at the end of the level it shows you the level score but the total has been updated as you go along as well. That's easy to change though.

I'm not sure if you retain the level scores? This is something we do in cBubble and GEOM. It allows the player to compete against thier own best scores/times on each level.

No I don't do that yet ... I just show them on-screen. It could certainly be added later. I'll put t on my to do list.

In Sticky Balls I saved everything so you could continue from that exact point. In fact I did an auto-save just after the player took each shot (but before the shot happens). That way they could quit out any time and continue but never cheat when a shot goes wrong. Naked War works the same way - you don't see your turn till after it has been sent, so you can't really cheat.

I see. Well it makes more sense in an RTS for sure.