ErikH2000
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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Hi!

I am designing my player profile functionality for The Godkiller game. I expect there are many similarities in how people will play GK compared to DROD. So I'm asking a question about DROD to influence my design on a different game.

If you take some time to vote in the poll, that's great! Please answer for *your* situation, as opposed to what you would like to see in a game or what you think is important to other players. But there is plenty of room for discussion in replies, and I'm interested in opinions.

Also, my memory is that DROD licensing supports as many players as you want on one installation. So I'd not be afraid of getting "busted".

-Erik

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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Xindaris
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I need to add a caveat to my "it's just me" vote, although I don't know whether or not it will apply to Godkiller. For certain collaborative architecture projects, because of the way hold permissions work, it has been useful to set up a separate player profile that everyone shares so they can all work on the same hold with minimal hassle. Of course, this doesn't matter if Godkiller doesn't and never will have that kind of "level editor", or if the level editor's way of handling authorship records and editing permissions are less "obsessive" than DROD.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 01-18-2021 10:37 PM]

ErikH2000
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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Xindaris wrote:
For certain collaborative architecture projects, because of the way hold permissions work, it has been useful to set up a separate player profile that everyone shares so they can all work on the same hold with minimal hassle.

Yeah, that is a good use case to think about. For GK, any level editing features would come after the first release. And when I get to the design of that, I'd expect the "Settings" and meta screens to change in ways I can't confidently envision now.

The poll above is so far justifying a decision to *NOT* include player profiles, in at least the initial release.

I'm hoping to instead piggyback off the logged-on user in the O/S, and use it to select an invisible "profile" tied to that user. With this approach, when people want to use different settings and saved games on a single computer, they'd just use the O/S features to change accounts.

It makes for a simpler UI for the user and less coding on my part.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Dischorran
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It's pretty much simultaneous here. By which I mean I play and then my cat settles on the keyboard and picks a command for Beethro to repeat for the next couple minutes.

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Insoluble
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I think my situation is atypical but my daughter and I play on the same computer under different profiles. I mostly set her up with her own profile because she insists on having a control scheme that's different from mine (who wants to use boring old dad's control setup.) She uses "a" and "s" for CW and CCW turns just to be different so I just made her her own profile so that I wouldn't have to adjust my own playing to that setup. It's been useful for other stuff too though, like for having a joint profile with an architecture hold that we both make rooms for each other in.

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Xindaris
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I didn't think of this before, but the "player profile" system does have one other use for the way I play DROD. Basically, I have two different computers (a desktop and a laptop), and importing/exporting the player file is an easy way to keep the two synced if I want. Of course, this sort of thing really isn't a problem with most of my games since if it's not self-syncing on steam I can generally hunt down the save files and just copy them over through dropbox or something. I only mention it since I dunno whether this would be affected by tying saves to the user profile in the OS or not.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 01-19-2021 02:12 AM]

Rabscuttle
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My nearly 5yo daughter has played through the tutorial a couple of times. I made a profile for her so she could try another hold without progress problems. Also numpad control is easier for her than laptop controls, which I use for some reason.

I also have an AE profile that I imported in.

slimm tom
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I only use the profile system in DROD when testing stuff for new releases or when tinkering around in the code. Nothing that a regular player would usually do, I guess.

I also do something that's similar to Xindaris' approach; I basically pointed my DataPath.txt to a folder that's synced to my Google Drive, which means I can pick up and play DROD on any system and have all my progress without requiring manual syncing. It also has the added benefit of not losing everything in the case my computer decides to quit on me.

navithmastero
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slimm tom wrote:
I also do something that's similar to Xindaris' approach; I basically pointed my DataPath.txt to a folder that's synced to my Google Drive, which means I can pick up and play DROD on any system and have all my progress without requiring manual syncing. It also has the added benefit of not losing everything in the case my computer decides to quit on me.

This is one of the things I really like about the Steam version. If for whatever reason I'm on my laptop rather than my desktop I can continue with whatever bit of DROD I was doing, whether it be architecture or smitemastery and then close it and reopen it on my desktop with all my progress transported over instantly.

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ErikH2000
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2794
Registered: 02-04-2003
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You people are making me question my corner-cutting. Argh!

The thought of leaving people's daughters out in the cold...

"Daddy, can I play your game too?"

"No, honey, the mean developer didn't make it multi-profile."

(Little girl crying)

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Keiya
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 73
Registered: 03-25-2012
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Honestly, I'd probably have profile functionality hidden in a command line option. Something like `-playerdata <path to player file>`, where it'll create it if that file doesn't exist. People can use it with shortcuts in their OS for edge cases, and it's easy to create new users for testing purposes. If it's not specified, just default to `$XDG_DATA_HOME/godkiller/player.save`, `%appdata%\Godkiller\player.save`, or wherever the heck you're supposed to put things on OS X this week (I gave up making sense of Apple's changing guidelines years ago since I don't have a Mac anymore anyway) as platform appropriate.

Not as slick and integrated as DROD's player profiles, but it's an effective way to implement a useful niche feature.

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[Last edited by Keiya at 03-11-2021 11:04 AM]