Autosaving Completeness (Patreon)

The autosaving system in Retroquad is really good, but now I'm adding a few extra features to make it even more perfect:

• First, backtracking. If the player dies a couple seconds after an autosave was created, it's logical to conclude that the conditions that triggered the latest autosave weren't safe enough for the player. In this case, the autosave system should revert the latest autosave to the one previously used, which should be safer for the player since the timing between autosaves is always higher than 4 seconds.

• Second, periodic autosaves. There's quite a bunch of big maps out there where the player can keep wandering and fighting for a long time without meeting any conditions for triggering the autosave system, so it should be a good idea to add periodic triggers to ensure the game will be autosaved. These periodic triggers may be, for example, a timer to autosave every x minutes, or a counter to autosave after every x enemies are defeated. However, it's not a good idea to autosave the game right in the middle of a fight, so I need to think about how to check that the player is in a safe place before triggering the periodic autosaves.

• Third, autosaving and autoloading when shutting down and initializing the engine. This is a very handy feature that some mobile games and console emulators have, where you can quit the game at anytime, and when you open the game again you'll continue right at the same point. However, this one may wait a bit longer to be implemented, because there's something I want to implement, which is the concept of "game sessions".

"Game sessions" would be an evolution of what some games call "game profiles". When you start a new game session, all your saves and other created data should be stored in an exclusive timeline dedicated for that session. I still need to put some further thought into this concept, defining how to deal with the possibilities of branching and other stuff like that, but it's really something I want to implement someday.