Saving during a run

[隣の黒人]

Please in the name of all that is good create a auto save feature. The idea that you have to sit for 50 minutes at once to finish a run is a bit frustrating.

[aes]

Agree 200%, learned this the hard way. Had life happen and lost my best run to date on lvl 3 yesterday.

[Matthanic]

There is a saving feature now. It is not automatic, however.

[okcomputing]

As I wrote in another thread over in general:

Originally posted by okcomputing:

Originally posted by Matthanic:

It already exists! Though perhaps it should be more obvious. When you go in to the anti-void in between levels you can choose to save your progress. Do note however, when you resume you will be dropped in to the next level immediately. So do everything you want to do in the anti-void before saving and quitting!

That's nice, but why aren't we able to just the quit and continue from any room without enemies or active boss, like so many other rogue-likes allow you to? It'd be much less restrictive. I don't quite understand why it needs to be so limited.

Is it a technical reason or the sanctity of the save? If other people want to reload their save to cheat and redo an encounter, I personally don't care. It would just be nice to not have to commit a minimum amount of time each time I start the game. That makes me less likely to start it at all, unfortunately.

[Matthanic]

Originally posted by okcomputing:

As I wrote in another thread over in general:

Originally posted by okcomputing:

That's nice, but why aren't we able to just the quit and continue from any room without enemies or active boss, like so many other rogue-likes allow you to? It'd be much less restrictive. I don't quite understand why it needs to be so limited.

Is it a technical reason or the sanctity of the save? If other people want to reload their save to cheat and redo an encounter, I personally don't care. It would just be nice to not have to commit a minimum amount of time each time I start the game. That makes me less likely to start it at all, unfortunately.

I'm not a developer of the game, but it could be the sanctity of the save as you mentioned. The reason why I assume this is the case is because, unlike what you said, most other rogue-likes work similarly or without saves at all.

Often rogue-likes have no save system at all (Nuclear Throne, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Risk of Rain 1 and 2, Downwell, Gonner, Postvoid, Spelunky 1 and 2, Super House of Dead Ninjas, Tower of Guns) meaning your run is limited to your playtime or for how long you can keep your PC on.

But a lot of modern rogue-likes they did add a save system is casual runs are long. (Voidigo, Enter the Gungeon, Deadcells)

There are two games I can think of that match your description which are:
Monolith which resets you to the start of a floor when you quit.
Noita, which allows you to save anywhere at any time.
In these two games however, they 100% delete your save file the moment you die to prevent you from going back to redo an unfavorable encounter.

There are definitely more games out there, but in my experience it does not seem uncommon for developers to make sure people cannot cheese encounters in their rogue-like games.

That said I am personally not against the idea of an open save system where people can make and load saves however they like. But I can also see why developers specifically do not have that in their artistic vision for the game. Not having a general save system that can be loaded at any point in time is also a core concept in the original idea of the rogue-like genre.

I am genuinely curious to hear which rogue-likes have such an open save system! I'd love to try it out. My library seems to not have one as far as I am aware.

[隣の黒人]

Even if it's not an auto save, there's no reason not to a save whenever you quit out and delete the save after loading. Unless a single level will take 5 min or so like Downwell it's just a bad development choice.