Talking in another post, I recall that sometimes is a good question to have a savegame which let us restoring a game. This way we wo n’t have to restart the game from the beggining.
Are some repository in internet?
I’m not aware of any IF save-file repositories on the Internet. I don’t think it would be very satisfying to play from someone else’s saves. It’s always a good idea to save your own games!
One context in which I do think distributing save files would be helpful is for the purposes of studying, rather than playing, a game. That way one could immediately get the game into the state one wants to experiment with. Ideally such a playthrough would be maximalist about getting rooms and objects into scope, and minimalist about every other form of state change…
I played Anchorhead with no hint till end with 100% score.
When I was at third day I got stuck becouse I make a mistake in first day. I spent all saturday’s morning replaying untill that nasty point. If I have had a savegame available in internet I had been more happy.
Unless there’s randomness, walkthroughs/transcripts meet a lot of the same role, and they are quite common.
One problem with save-files is that in large, sprawling games you can do things in different orders. You’ll need to document each save-file carefully to list where in the game it is saved. This is often a problem with walkthroughs too. Often when I consult a walkthrough I accidently spoil another puzzly because the one that wrote the walkthrough did things in a different order than me. I prefer hints/invisiclues but they are, of course, much harder to write.
One approach could be to combine a walkthrough with save-files so the save-file is easily located in the game progress.
(I just played through Curses! and have save-files after each paragraph from Marc Leduc’s walkthrough. I did this for my own sake to be able to give hints to others and easily test if I remember a solution correctly.)
EDIT: I think it would be possible to put save-files, with or without walkthrough, in an archive (zip) and linking that on the IFDB-page for that game.
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This is a great idea when you get stuck: to stick savegames with a walkthrough.
In such a games that are separated in chapters, days, etc, there is easy to save and identify files.
I play mostly spanish IF and I am sending savegames to a specific location in my tablet after completing the game.
Personally, i prefer logfiles/scripts rather than savegames. Those can be stored easily with GIT. And you have a chance to figure out where you went wrong later.
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I made a walkthrough for Curses! with accompanied save-files. This walkthrough is for release 16 and all 550 points (actually 554 points!). The save-files are saved in Windows Frotz 1.21, but they also work in 1.22.
Are the save-files valuable or should I remove them?
EDIT: I havn’t written any Z-machine, but is the save-file format all upp to the implementer of the terp or are there any possibility to move save-files between terps?
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The save file format was standardized around 1997.
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This is a good and thorough approach. Sadly save-files for z-code or glulx games become invalid if a new version is released.
I’d be very interested in a keystroke sender/logger that could take a walkthrough and input it into a game. Perhaps there could be some standardized format or markdown to say, okay, these commands get you through chapter 1, and so forth. In the case of parser adventures, there might be the additional problem of “press any key to continue” whether in-game or because text scrolled over, but it seems doable in the big picture. I’d certainly like to be able to do this.
Invisiclues seem doable as well with a minimum of technological fiddling. I homebrewed my own invisiclues I can generate from text files, and I bet other people can do better.
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These can also become invalid if a new version is released, although it’s unlikely for minor (bug-fix) releases. Some games also have random events or random puzzle codes, which mess up recorded command logs (but not archived save files).
If you’re seriously contemplating this, I think save files are the better tradeoff. Most IF games are never updated after the first year after release.