I play Shattered Pixel on my phone, and sometimes circumstances cause a mistap or similar, and with the way this game works a single bad action can mean a drastic hinderance on the run or effectively ruin large amounts of effort.
This is true for many games, and in most circumstances I can roll back to the last save and lessen the loss. While in plenty of others I can edit the save files with a shizuku-powered file manager. I had hoped that the non-google android version on github would expose the save files to shizuku, but sadly learned that was not the case. Of course, there are others where neither are an option and I just have to live with it, but I just tend to not play those games for long or that much. However, I’ve been playing Shattered Pixel for years. It’s easily the one mobile game I have spent the most time playing. But it can really kill my desire to play for long periods of time when something happens to kill a run I was really enjoying and spent a good amount of time on and there is no way to “undo” any amount of the loss.
For me, it would be an absolute game-changer if there was some way to allow manual save/loading or access to the save files. If it means by an opt-out of online leaderboards or whatever I’m okay with that. (I’m not sure what there is for SPD, I really don’t know because I only care about offline regular play.) You can mark my game a “filthy gross evil stinky dirty cheater” or something, I don’t care. Personally, I don’t consider it “cheating” to recoup from a mishap outside of their control in an offline singler-player game.
Is the threat of some sort of bad-actor that high that save/reload or save file access can’t be considered? What exactly would be on the line by allowing “cheating”?
I have to imagine there would be a sizable enough group of people interested in manual save/load or save file access considering there are save editor tools out there, like spud. It would also allow easier transfer of game progression like this request mentions.
Is manual save/reload something that would interest others that you know of? At least, enough to get 00-Evan to consider some sort of option? Can we work out some sort of option that 00-Evan would consider?
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I also want to note that I went out of my way to make this post after having left lemmy due to far too many awful experiences on lemmy. I’ve been significantly happier not using lemmy, so I feel like I am really out on a limb just to make this post.
I don’t know about how cureent mods are but there used to be one which had save slots you could copy and back up. It was a fairly large mod and took Pixel Dungeon in a fairly different direction with you starting in a town and being able to return through a portal every few levels. It was cool but doesn’t solve your issue.
Could you back up the entire game data? Maybe that would do the trick?
As someone with ADHD that gets distracted easily and makes lots of silly mistakes, I feel your pain. It’s a single player game, cheat if it makes you happy.
On Windows you can save scum (back up the save files when you want, I did it every new floor when I was learning, then copy them back to the save folder on death).
On Android, you can install ElectroCheckers SHPD Toolkit from Github which doesn’t allow save backup, but gives you lots of information about the run so you have a large advantage (what all the potions and scrolls are, what levels have secrets, what fixed items will drop, what the quests will be etc).
Once you have won once you can use the seed to re-try promising runs to try different tactics/builds.
All that said, I’m against a built in save/load mechanic. It would take away the key component that makes this a roguelike. Permadeath is kind of the whole point. When I die to stupidity, i laugh and go to sleep like I should have three hours ago.
Hey there, my thoughts on it are that it’s… well… cheating. Obviously Shattered is a single player game so it’s not like cheating ruins the experience for others, but I’d rather not make it easy to do or expose any functionality within the game itself to enable people to cheat.
I’m not super familiar with how shizuku works, but generally apps don’t expose data in their private folder at all to other apps without tools like root. Shattered does support Android’s backup and restore functionality, but not for individual save files as otherwise it would be really easy to use built-in restore tools to cheat. Similarly, having the game write the files to non-private storage would also make cheating really easy via any file manager app.
The main reason for this is that in most cases players are tempted to cheat as a quicker way to overcome a challenge in a game like Shattered, and by doing that they rob themselves of the satisfaction of beating the game legitimately. It sounds like in your case you have already gotten legitimate wins and it’s more about mistap insurance, but there’s no way for the game to know that unfortunately.
@00_Evan
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the OP was just saying, in a quite complicated and technical way, “please give us a switch to turn off permadeath”.And I would support that. I know that permadeath is a common feature of rogue like games, but it is also a p.i.t.a. 😉
I like to play rather casually and would prefer the option to return to a savepoint and continue from there. Yes no leaderboards etc in this case, sure, but it would be a big qol improvement.You’re basically asking me to turn Shattered into a different game then. Roguelikes have permadeath, by removing it or making it optional Shattered would no longer be a roguelike.
The game would NOT have the same replayability without permadeath. You’d play through once, find it easy, and stop.
Hey there, my thoughts on it are that it’s… well… cheating. Obviously Shattered is a single player game so it’s not like cheating ruins the experience for others, but I’d rather not make it easy to do or expose any functionality within the game itself to enable people to cheat.
The main reason for this is that in most cases players are tempted to cheat as a quicker way to overcome a challenge in a game like Shattered, and by doing that they rob themselves of the satisfaction of beating the game legitimately.I can understand making it too easy to cheat being a bad thing as it would definitely create the circumstance where, as you said, it would rob them of the experience. However, if there’s enough of an effort required to do so then that makes it so that the individual is proving, at least to some extent, that they are aware of the “consequences”.
Consider the idea of security. There is nothing that is truly secure, and security is just a trade-off of convenience, i.e. as you implement security you increase inconvenience and the opposite. Good security methods are ones where the trade-off is high on the security side while very low on the inconvenience side. Since there is no such thing as true security, if anyone wanted to gain access to something they absolutely can if they are willing to invest the effort, and similarly, they are proving that they are accepting the consequences.
It sounds like in your case you have already gotten legitimate wins and it’s more about mistap insurance, but there’s no way for the game to know that unfortunately.
There’s already functionality of unlocking features based on progress, could this not be used to lock a save/load function and prevent your main concern? That seems like the perfect solution.
I think you’re misunderstanding me a bit, what I meant was that you have already gotten a legitimate win AND you just want mistap insurance. I don’t ever plan to put cheats into the game because there’s no way to verify the player is only using them for things like recovering from a crash or mistap. I’d rather not let players cheat generally as I suspect it will damage the experience of playing the game normally.
Well, this was not a case of misunderstanding. I was just trying to figure out some sort of compromise without getting into what seems to be the main block, that is… why does it matter so much to prevent cheating that you would rather limit people’s options of enjoying the game even more?
I was trying to avoid it because I am certain I’m not going to convince you to change your thinking on it. It is your game after all and if you just don’t like cheating that much, then it’s certainly your prerogative to make the game how you like.
I just personally don’t understand. To me it seems like it shouldn’t matter that much because it is a personal decision to be okay with cheating in a single-player game, since it doesn’t affect others. As long as the barrier is high enough to ensure that the person is sure they are willing to take the risk of damaging their experience. At that point they only have themselves to blame if it damages their own experience. Additionally, what level/amount of “damage” would this really be? Can this damage really be so bad that it needs to be prevented at the cost of other’s diminished experience? I am confident that the benefits of enhancing other people’s enjoyment of the game would greatly outweigh the much lower chance of a much lower number of people who’s experience might be lessened.
On top of all of that, people who play on their computer can already very easily edit their save file. While that option being available on mobile as well would be enjoyable to me, I think the ideal option would be to add a save/reload which is unlocked once you complete a win or a certain number of wins. Save/reload is a standard among many games, even roguelikes, and creates enough of a barrier to prevent it from being too easily used as a way to bypass the core difficulty that gives the game its character.
Frankly I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a game appealing to a specific audience and deciding not to let its experience be substantially changed in the name of inclusivity. There are SO many games out there and I think it’s fine for a game to not try to appeal to as many people as possible.
I’m not going to take this to the extreme of actively trying to fight save file editing on more open systems though (windows, rooted android, etc.) There’s no real way for me to do that without a system that would be overly awkward for regular users. The game already compresses save files, which makes them not editable as plaintext, and that’s good enough.
IMO if a game offers save/load (even optionally) it isn’t a roguelike. Permadeath is a core part of the genre. It’s like calling a game such as Call of Duty a ‘first person adventure with added guns’. There’s nothing wrong with a game offering choices if that’s what it wants to do, but it changes what that game is, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
