The "save" pattern

Many games implement some manner of saving and loading progress and game state. I've been thinking over, for a while, just how these various features affect the game play experience.

Some examples of the pattern are in order:

- A friend of mine played max payne with me many years ago. In my games, max, the titular character, was often limping around on low health, dodging bullets and dodging death with them. In my friends game, he was always stacked with 5 bottles, the maximum number, of painkillers, the games healthpack, and he was always at full health.

The difference was, he always loaded if he got hurt and he had the clear sense that he'd be able to do better. He would replay some encounters 3-4 times on occasion, till he got it "right". I only ever loaded if I died.

The game had an adaptive AI - it would leave a lot of painkillers around for the player if he was hurt, leave few if he had a good stash and he was healthy.

It should be painfully obvious that our different utility of the save game system made for different gameplay. I was consistently running the risk of bumping into an encounter that was too difficult for my hit point level, forcing me to reload over and over at the same place 10 or 20 times. He was constantly reloading nomatter what, but rarely many times at the same place; it would be wrong to say that he wasn't challenged, because clearly, it was more difficult to do every situation perfect rather than only those where max was low on health. But he always knew he had leeway, if it came down to it, whereas I always knew I didn't. Quite possibly, I might even have had easier encounters, and I deffinately had more healthpacks to pick up, than he had, so in some manners I was challenged less.

The point is not that there is a wrong and a right way to play a game. The point is that if you give a utility, such as saving games and reloading games on demand at any time, to the player, you may greatly impact his play experience by doing so. Certainly, you could argue that the how responsibly the player uses it is his choosing, not yours; but if you know that whatever you choose to make for a save game system will effect 99% of the players playing your game, and that 30% of those people will use the save game system to play the game in a min-maxing fashion, your choice concerning the system could make a difference between the game being called good or bad by many players, so responsibility doesn't even come into it.

The save game system is therefore part of the game as a product. So, the application of the save pattern, then, is concerned with a very product-oriented manner of percieving the game. It relies far more on outside context than many other patterns I have described thus far.

As such, boiling it down to rules will take a lot of work, and will likely relate a lot more to the consumer-producer analysis of the game as a product, and the context the consumer provides, rather than the contextual constructs which we, as game developers, provide within the internals of the game.

I'll be fun to write more about this in the future =]