Beta 4 - Suggestion: Make saves less intrusive

[SoItBegins]

After playing the game a bit, I've come to the conclusion that saving would be more user-friendly if it was handled without showing on a file system dialog box. Here's what I was thinking of:

When the user goes to save, a box comes up (like the pause box) that says simply

Save Game? Y/N

This box wouldn't interrupt fullscreen, unlike the current save box.
If the user clicks on Y, the usual occurs. Statue on pedestal.

Later, when the user goes to load, instead of showing a file-system box, it shows the 'choose mansion' map. When the user clicks on a mansion, the display changes to a very rough B/W sketch of the mansion, as if drawn on an old parchment by Jack. The save points are clearly visible. Clicking on one brings up some sort of graphical way of picking the different saves made at that point (maybe each save is listed by time and date, score, and secrets?). Then, when the user chooses, the game loads.

I'm not sure how this would work for custom mansions, but for the built-in ones, this solution would detract less from the flow of the game, a bit.

Thoughts?

[RobSeegel]

576B4D704661636D6A77040 wrote: Thoughts?

I have to agree that the current approach yanks you out of the game, and feels a little awkward.

What would be nicer would be a custom window for dealing with file loading. Something that offered some of the same features of the system dialog, but was less intrusive, and possibly offered some quick info about the saved game - inventory, lives, time elapsed perhaps, as a preview before loading it. Something like this would take time to create, though. I'd also want at least some of the features we get with the current file dialog. Because I definitely make use of them.

I have hundreds of save games for regular and custom mansions. Sometimes a single mansions may have dozens of saves depending on whether I was testing something or trying to fine-tune a speed run.

There are times when it's very convenient to sort the listings by date, so I can see the games I saved most recently at the top of the list (I use that a lot). There are other times, when it's more convenient to sort things alphabetically to find saves for mansions I haven't played in a long time. The only thing that might be handier would be a way of filtering the listings. Still, the things I find valuable are handled right now albeit in a slightly clunky manner.

I sympathize with the disruption of breaking the game out of full-screen even though it's something that normally doesn't bother me since I prefer playing in windowed mode.

[VernJensen]

I'd love to do something like this. Not quite as elaborate as what you suggest for opening past saved games, but something kinda similar -- you get a list of saves just for that mansion. It would take more thought and work. Something I'll put into a future release after the initial 1.0 release if the HD version sells well enough to allow me to add this.

[jacobvann]

Love this idea. I would love to see a

simple save

mode where when you step on a pedastal, it automatically saves and replaces the current save file for that mansion, maybe with a simple

Do you want to save? (y/n)

dialog.

This would more accurately reflect modern games. This simple save would be the default if

Simple Saving

is selected in their options.

Then, the more advanced save dialog would display the last few saves for the current mansion in a window with details like time elapsed, inventory, score, etc (just as Rob describes). The top choice would be

Create New Save

, and it would do just that, create a new save by incrementing the number to, e.g.,

Nighmare Mansion Save 4

. When they click on a previous save, they'd get a

do you want to replace this save? (y/n)

dialog.

At the bottom of the window, there should be a

cancel

and

browse...

set of buttons.

Browse...

would take the user to the OS'es filesystem browser just like it does currently. That way people can navigate to different save folders if they want.

This would all be done with in game graphics so you don't have to use OS dialog. Would make porting to windows easier

Best part is you can use this identical dialog window for loading saves as well, just change what action is performed when they click on a save.

[VernJensen]

How about instead, it saves replacing the former save *in that room*? That way, you can still have multiple saves for the mansion -- one for each room.