Fair enough. I like the idea of the map as screenshot instead of a screenshot of the village
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I think it should be like Ironman mode in some games where you have only one save that is from autosaves from a set period or at logout
Several recent games have attempted limited saves and theyāve faced community backlash. Save files can also get corrupted, so forcing all players into one style of play is a bad idea. Give players an option of one save or infinite saves and everyone will be happy. Plus if there arenāt leaderboards, itās kinda irrelevant if people cheat. Iām sure some will even want an insta-build sandbox mode.
If you want to encourage a certain play style (i.e. Ironman) itās better to use positive reinforcement like achievements, player statistics, and unlockable perks/cosmetics/boosts. Reward players for choosing a hard/realism difficulty.
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I agree that positive reinforcement is the way to go to reduce cheating behavior rather than to force all players to have limited save games.
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IMHO, the Ironman mode is a good choice - you leave that up to the player
Probably do something like Kerbal Space Program. An option to disable/enable quicksaves and reload from a state.
Or maybe a The Universim-like system ; A building that makes you be able to save but this building requires maintenance and people to run it so the players canāt just let it there untouched.
Or just a difficulty choice: Easy = save whenever you want and load whenever you want but Hardcore only saves when you exit to main menu so you can only load and continue from the main menu and not be able to reload previous parts, etc
Allow any amount of Saves at any time under all difficulties but separate the save game portion from the status/Configuration portion of the file which there is only one. In other words you can cheat all you want but there is a record of it.
Add a tough man score that is tracked by a status/configuration portion of the file it can be very simple you get one free load per day you get 2,4,8,16 etc. points per 10 min of game play without pause (caped at 256 per 10 min) reset to 0 on every pause or save. You lose 2,4,8,16 etc.(no cap) points per extra load per day reset after 3 hour of no load/save or the no pause counter getting to 256 .
Please be careful not to promote unsafe or excessive game play. We all do it but my recommendation would be never reward anyone for more than 3 hr. of game play per day by capping positive scoring to first 3 hr. of game play per day. At some point someone will sue someone who had something bad happen because of playing a game to long and win the suit PS no amount of disclaimer will prevent this.
Also please if this or a variation of it is used track Saves, Pauses, Points, retries/do overs and loads donāt combine different factors into a overall score or if you do have a overall score also display the individual factors that separately make up the overall score. For example my gameplay is pause/save a lot but only reload once a day except when learning the game I reload a lot to see how changes in game play change outcome.
One extra possibility is to track the last x load times vrs. auto save times there by giving a continues play record vrs. retry count.
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