Quicksaves and arbitrary loading (Patreon)

For me, permadeath is a huge part of the roguelike experience. When you make enough mistakes that you lose--that's it, it's over. No immediately starting from a safe checkpoint not long before in order to try again, no in-game benefits carrying over to future attempts. Each run is an isolated attempt in which you're armed only with your knowledge and experience, where the lack of second chances clearly raises the stakes, and the consequences of each and every action feel that much more meaningful compared to games where you can simply say "oh well whatever I'll just load my last save." Taking on added risks has an all new meaning that fundamentally changes one's approach to decision-making (unless the goal isn't to win, of course :P). 

In that vein Cogmind has been strict on permadeath for its seven years of history to date, but things are [sorta] changing...

Cogmind today is a much longer game than it used to be (or at least it can be depending on play style and goals), and some people don't have the time or desire to be punished by losing a lot of progress/time to their mistakes, or maybe they simply don't have the time to spare but are still eager to enjoy more of the game. These are the same people for whom multiple difficulty settings were added some time ago [LINK]. It's an important form of accessibility, and while it isn't for me, features like difficulty levels have added a lot of value for a decent chunk of players. 

The same can be said about the ability to save and load progress. If an additional subset of players can better enjoy a roguelike once they have the ability to easily load a save slot, then adding such a feature seems like a good idea already.

People more inclined to want or need this feature are already more likely to do their own save scumming anyway, so why not make it easier? Well, technically there are arguments on both sides of this, both sides with merit, so for Cogmind I've ended up opting for a middle ground on this particular feature.

So yes, Cogmind is getting it's very own save/load feature.

But it's "middle ground" because this feature is not included in the highest difficulty setting. I decided I want to preserve that mode as the "intended/designed way to play," and a significant chunk of people who will enjoy that mode in the first place are going to be into the challenge of traditional roguelikes and permadeath anyway.

The two other difficulty modes, on the other hand, both support the designation of an arbitrary save point which can be restored at any time.

When in either of those modes, the game menu displays two new buttons for controlling the "restore point."  As you can see below, if there is a previously saved point to load, the load button becomes available and shows both the location and turn number to be restored.

The feature is also accessible via keyboard without the menu, simply by using Ctrl-F8/F9 as quicksave/load buttons while in the main UI.

In terms of architecture, Cogmind was of course already capable of saving runs to be continued later, and even arbitrary input-based saving and loading because I rely on it heavily for development and debugging. From there it eventually became a Wizard Mode feature available to some patrons starting earlier this year. But the next step was a big one--debugging and wizardry are fine with some limitations or quirkiness, whereas a public feature needs to be accessible and robust!

For one, saving and loading need to also be available from the game over screen, in case the run ended prematurely but the player wants to go back and try again from their save point. So that was yet another expansion to that screen, adding a new row to the bottom if and when that option is available.

For convenience that also displays the save file's depth and map (if the latter is known to the player).

Overall there were a surprising number of technical considerations behind building a quicksave system that would be compatible with the rest of the game design, which ended up taking a couple days to work through all the possibilities.

Like the game already maintains a save file for the current run, the one that is restored if you exit the game and come back later--should this manual save override that? No, that would conflict with one of the goals of having a manual save in the first place: to be able to go back to an earlier point than the most recent progress. Clearly this needs to be a separate file, meaning this system exists outside the normal save system.

So if you die and never explicitly made a save point to recover, this approach implies that's the end of the run there's no option to go back. [I could change this such that if there is *no* manual save, then the game automatically makes/updates a revertible save point at the beginning of each new map. Technically the game already does that, saving for each new map, but as is that's just to maintain the primary save slot in the event of a crash or sudden shutdown. This additional feature would give a player the option to retry from the beginning of the last map in case they hadn't been saving at all. Or perhaps the game could be a little smarter about it and skip the beginning-of-map automatic restore point if the player is in really bad shape there :P (in which case a load would probably go back to the beginning of the previous map instead). This sounds like a good idea.]

We also have autosaves--backups in case a save file somehow gets corrupted (but more often for debugging purposes), and the save file used for time travel (yes that's how that feature is implemented :P), so together with this new type, there are now four different possible types of save files for the current run!

One of the other quirks of the new quicksaves is that they're only valid in the current run. In other words, once you start a new run the save point from a previous run is no longer accessible--that would get rather confusing, suddenly switching back to a different run, and it would cause a number of other problems too, so that restriction was put in place.

Altogether the save system is a little different than what's found in non-roguelike games, since it was designed to work alongside the original "run-based system with automatic resuming on return" more common in traditional roguelikes, while combining the benefits of each.

I'm pretty sure that even though it's now an "official feature" of two of the difficulty modes, runs that have been quickloaded will be excluded from the leaderboards.

The HUD also got a new indicator that pops up in the top-right corner when applicable, showing the number of times the current run has been manually loaded so far.

And for those who want to play these lower difficulty modes but don't want to even have the quicksave option available to them (to avoid the temptation to use it), I added a new advanced config option to disable that feature entirely, in which case the hotkeys won't work and none of the relevant buttons will appear.