I think this is as good as any place to put a thought of mine, and looking at raigan's last post added another question to my short list. There's been a lot of talk (or so it seems to me) about save states in the middle of episodes, and it generally seems to be agreed as a good idea. I was thinking today about how that would relate to episode highscores, and I think if anything it would be an overall improvement, provided there are restrictions. I think that being able to save, quit, and come back and restart in the middle of an episode would increase the competition for episode highscores, which currently is far behind the amount of competition for level highscores. However, this would really only work if your only options when opening N v1.5 are to resume an episode, or start another episode/level while erasing the current save state. In other words, if you pause at 00-2, if you come back and start at anything else other than 00-2, you lose the progress through the episode so far, and cannot resume again from that point.raigan wrote:Just to be clear, there will always be episodes -- it's just a matter of whether they should have associated highscores, or whether episodes should be more of a "singleplayer only" experience and leave the highscores for single-level speedruns.zenoxman wrote:Keep episode highscores. The fact that the time limit carries between levels would be useless if the game just became isolated levels. But it'd still be nice if v1.5 let you resume your progress within an episode.
Definitely we want to add some sort of "resume" option; we don't know exactly what we're going to do yet though (i.e per column? per account? etc.)
The question I have comes from raigan's parenthetical comment. The "resume" option, being per column/account/whatever the final decision is: Are you looking at a set number of resumes? That's kind of what it sounds like, and I don't see that as being a good idea. If you include a resume option (sounds like what we've called a "save state"), it should be unlimited. I don't see any reason to limit the number of times you can pause the game in the middle of an episode. If you have a desktop, you can already do that by just hitting pause, or leaving the level loaded but unstarted, and minimizing N. So why put a limit on the times that you can save/resume when closing the program?