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(2 edits)

I am writing this post in the spirit of constructiveness and giving pause for thought.

Have you considered that, being in the position where you are giving a player a cheat-code (or debug-code, I believe) because the game doesn't allow saving, it's a more awkward and less desirable position than if you have allowed saving at all? After these many years, what are your current thoughts on that particular design decision?

Consider that players can play the game through ScummVM, and can save the game that way. Do you figure those players are having more or less enjoyment out of the game? And are they having the experience you envisioned or is your vision crippled by this save-game functionality?

(An afterthough: if there was a glitch, and I'm not saying there is, in which Antik-sova couldn't complete the game because of a bug, that would be another circumstance in which it's usually a good rule of thumb to allow saving - there could have been a workaround, possibly. The other usual rules of thumb are the well-known stuff like power cuts or batter depletion, unexpected game-crashing or game-breaking bugs - sorry, but they come up even when designers think they don't -, real life intruding unexpectedly, and just plain needing a to take a break. I'm afraid disallowing saving is a design choice fraught with peril. What are you thoughts about it these days?)

Hey PeterPiers, while don't disagree with any of what you've written here, unfortunately the answer to your question is rather plain and unexciting. Not being able to save wasn't a design choice for this game, I made this game eight-odd years ago and did not know how to make a save function; I was still learning AGS. The three games I did prior to this one used a different template that added the function automatically. Anyway, suffice to say, all of the old games under the 'classics' header on my page are quite mechanically unsound in many ways.

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Thanks for the reply, I must say I'm surprised; I thought the save function in AGS was always present, and if you didn't specifically disallow its F5 shortcut it would still be there. I re-downloaded AGS and I see that the empty game template doesn't include that, what a strange choice. Not a good one, I'm afraid. I'd thought you'd specifically gone there and removed the function.

Well, things are quite unclear when we're beginners, so whatever happened, happened, and that's the end of it. Thank you very much for the clarification.