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Saving in browser (HTML5)

A topic by the it lives project created Aug 27, 2021 Views: 1,422 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2

Hello! I'm using Ren'Py to make a visual novel, and a lot of people who are interested in the game want to be able to play it online on mobile. For reasons, I need it to be playable online, not just as an app. However, as probably is usual from what I've seen of browser games on Itch, saving is becoming quite the ordeal. If you close your browser or the tab, it erases everything. If the page refreshes (which it'll automatically do if you're away from that tab for 10+ minutes) it'll erase everything. Even if I were able to somehow bypass  the auto refresh, I'd have to require everyone to keep that tab open all the time, and if I add updates the game will get reset anyway. There is an export button to export your save, but that only works on the computer, which is useless since players who play on the computer will likely just download the game.

I've seen people talking about having their players create a third-party cloud login or something, but I have no idea how to get that set up. I'm not opposed to doing that, if it's something that will work. Anyway, that's my question. What's the best option for saving data for online players and how can I do that? Thanks!

(1 edit) (+2)

I've found that localStorage saving is pretty stable on itch.io, at least within a single version of a game upload. It looks like Ren'Py's WebAssembly output is using IndexedDB as opposed to localStorage; I'm sure they have reasons to do that, but it doesn't play nice on itch.io, and it'd be good if they offered a configuration option to use localStorage instead.

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