You Can Finally Delete Your Saves

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24

It’s not particularly your style? Or it’s not particularly to your benefit?

To that I’m curious. Since Twine games which are in the same group as COG have back buttons, that are actually easy to implement, and I never see anyone complaining about it.

But since I’m a man of business, I been thinking about this situation. Why would I want to give people something as easy as a back button or save check points?

I think I reached a quite possible explanation.

Most people buy COG games via Steam or via Google play. If those plataform have something truly in common is their refund system.

Steam allows to refund a game if you haven’t played more than a hour. And google has a similar system I forgot about. So let’s go with steam.

The average of the latest COG/HG published works seems to go between a 30k/60k.

Given that demos are a thing it would be safe to believe the purchase wouldn’t happen until more or less in the middle.

Now we need to keep in a mind that people may like a demo but not the full content, and at that point we find ourselves in front of two situations.

1- The buyer drops the IF quite early after paying it, getting a guaranteed refund.

2- The buyer doesn’t discover their didnt like the IF until is too late. Since they would need to replay the game from scratch if they got a wrong option or they want to try another path.

Now what would happen if we were to put a back button or/and checkpoints?

The time someone would need to replay the game would get shortened and could fill that hour.

So after the buyer was done? They would could get a refund.

Now, given how the latest games hasn’t had exactly the best popularity (No offense to the authors, I’m talking numbers here) that other anterior works, that can suppose a problem.

Basically because publishing anything on steam/google play has a cost. So if the sales dont go well, that’s money lost, and that’s a big no no for a business.

Ofc that’s just my reflection over the issue, with the most utmost respect towards Choice of Games and it’s staff.

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25

I mean, if you want to talk Steam, someone could have the game as soon as they download it if they know how to grab the scenes folders. You have a COG script game on Steam for five minutes and you can have the whole game. It’s not rocket science.

Of course, the only people who would do this are shitty, but they’ll be shitty, regardless, so that’s no reason not to give honest, paying customers a thing many have been begging to have for a very long time.

I get the whole “the author wants you to experience blah blah blah I don’t care” argument, but almost every damned game in creation now has save points, at the very least. Most VNs and text-based games have back buttons. Unless it’s CoG script, in which case you’re screwed and are stuck wasting hours replaying a game for one damned wrong choice. That isn’t pleasurable, it’s infuriating. And I don’t have so much time to waste that I find fun in that crap. Instead, I end up speed running and hitting next until I get to the choice that was flubbed. And, by that time, I’m too damned pissed off to do anything other than skim for a while. It would actually be far better from an writer’s standpoint to have the damned button there (or a save system), because it’s far more likely people will read more carefully and pay attention if they aren’t pissed off from being forced to replay again and again to get the character/story they want.

They have definitely helped, but I think it would be better if you could save at each of the checkpoints. That way, if you want to reload to an older checkpoint, you can. Of course, at that point, it’s pretty much a save system, which is what I’m whining to have, lol.

Yep, exactly. That would be great if you try it!

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26

I like checkpoints a lot. They’re currently a bit fiddly so it would be delightful to have a quicker way of implementing them.

Oh, like reloading to Chapter 2 at the end of Chapter 4 rather than just replaying Chapter 4? I was thinking of doing that for Honor Bound as an experiment - I’m already doing the latter but it would be fun to try out.

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27

Oh! And also—strikethrough and underlined text :pray::sparkles: would be so great

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28

Thank you for this great news!

29

That’s a great addition, thank you!

Next would it be possible to add a toogle to turn off images also in the less recent games, like in the latest ones? That way all us players who prefer to play without them will be happier to replay (relatively) older titles!

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30

Tfw only now you realize you have like 50+ saves for one game (hi, ZE:SH!) combined cuz you used multiple emails for your saves… :eyes:

But now that the cleanup is done, everything is all so shiny and new :sparkles: :sparkles: So thank you guys sooooo much for this!

But realtalk tho, looking at all of my older saves makes me feel nostalgic. Like wow, I’ve been playing COG/HG for like, half my lifespan. We’re all getting old, guys lol.

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:musical_note:Hallelujah
:musical_note:Hallelujah
:musical_note:Hallelujah

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O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! :clap: :partying_face:

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Oh I am so glad to here this!!!, personally I would love all the official choice of games games I am not sure how else to say it to have cheat menu add ons

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I’ll put it simply…

Took. Long. Enough.

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35

I dont get it, why force people to play a certain way? Its a choice game after all, cant the reader choose if they want to experiment with every choice in a single playthrough?

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36

@AletheiaKnights @KV1_DESEMPREGADO

Maybe the “undo” botton is too much but an option to replay from the checkpoint or a chapter selection after having read them would be nice.
The problem is sometimes is not very clear which stat is required for certain choice with stats check.

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38

This article from ChoiceBeat seems relevant to the discussion. I’m not saying I agree with it per se, since I’m pretty strongly on the anti-rollback side of things. But I think all the issues it brings up are worthy of consideration.

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39

Good opinion from this author, but its not really the same situation, is it? The platform they are using provides them the choice of using the back feature or not. CoG doesnt do that, they leave the author to wrestle the code if they want to add a very simple acessibility option.

The least CoG could do is provide the choice to the author, since they dont want to provide it to the readers.

Often a writer would like to implement a save system, but dont because its quite hard to do, and we cant blame the author for that, since I believe it shouldnt be their responsability to provide it.

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40

Finally :partying_face::partying_face:

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For authors interested in doing checkpoints (at the end of chapters or whenever you like) do take a look at my template code over here. Before looking into it I assumed it was super complicated. It is a bit fiddly and takes some time, so it would be excellent to have a shortcut somehow, but it wasn’t at all as complex as I feared.

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42

time to clean up my fallen hero and wayhaven saves.

Personally I do not think that a back bottum would solve anything. Thanks to the delayed branch system most choice game uses it would just move the problem from: Mindlessly clicking choices from the beginning of the game to reach the choice you want to change to mindlessly clickling choices from the end of the game to reach the choice you want to change.

What we need is a proper save system or failing that an easily implemented code for checkpoints any authour can use.

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43

Well Devils!!! This indeed is a great thing to add. It’ll make the saves less cluttered.

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I feel like the fear of the back button makes sense for some play-styles but not for all. If we imagine the player’s goal is attempting to create their desired playthrough, and not some objective “optimal” playthrough, the fear of back buttons makes less sense. Usually, large choice reactions or consequences are delayed enough to not make it relevant for a back button, and instead, the player can simply make sure they get their desired Mc choice / short-term reaction which may be unclear or buried in a branching dialogue. If the goal is not to always win, perhaps you even want the tragic end for playing for emotional reasons, then what’s wrong with a back button? I would argue the satisfaction of getting the narrative you want is to many more satisfying than replaying a lot till you get the branch you desire. (Additionally, I would argue that simply clicking the right stat over and over to win isn’t that interesting tension, and removing the dangers there wouldn’t in my view be very detrimental). Perhaps the solution is simply having back buttons but letting the reader decide to use it or not.

Although the above is just subjective, none of what people have talked about argues against checkpoints or a way to make it easier to add them for the author. It’s really something both readers and authors want and it feels very missed amongst other modern game systems.

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