Hey everyone!
Today I bring you information about an update to the Save Slot system in Melvor Idle, due to release in the next week or two.
The existing save slot system in its current state is prone to many issues, particularly with accidentally overwriting saves. This issue became evident during the temporary gamemode where reports were coming through of saves being deleted or overwritten by their new save.
This issue wasn’t due to a bug in the game, but more around the lack of clarity as to how the save slot system works and what actually happens when creating/deleting characters. These issues also appear for players who play on Mobile as well as Steam (using the same Cloud account and saves).
These issues are due to bad UI on our part, and we will continue to listen to feedback and adjust where required.
Be sure to join our Discord server where you can provide direct feedback and talk with us: https://discord.gg/melvoridle
Increasing Clarity
This update focuses on the UI of the save slots to ensure everyone is given the opportunity to manage their saves effectively.
Here’s how I’ve gone about doing this.
Visual display of Save Slots
The game will now display all save slots in front of you, whether they are empty or not. This gives you the freedom to choose where your new characters will save, and will also allow you to see how your saves are set up.
Existing Cloud Save Detected
Creating a new local character when a Cloud Save already exists in that save slot is where most of the accidental overwriting issues stemmed from.
Now, on top of being able to actually choose which save slot to use, the game will also warn you when an existing Cloud Save is detected in that save slot.
It does this in a few ways:
- A warning on the empty save slot itself.
- A popup when attempting to create a new character
- A popup when attempting to import a character.
The game will also provide similar warnings for loading a Cloud Save when a Local Save already exists.
New Information inside Pop ups
As you saw in the previous screenshot, the pop ups also look a tiny bit different.
When the game warns you about a potential save overwrite, it will now actually display what saves will be overwritten.
Minor Updates to Save Slot UI
We have moved the big Settings button for saves to the top right corner into a drop down menu. This frees up horizontal real estate that we can use later down the line.
This Settings drop down menu is home to your standard Save settings.
Deleting a Cloud Save
A missing feature from Melvor Idle that has been requested quite a lot is the ability to delete your Cloud Saves.
The game never had this functionality for some reason (blame me lol).
Now, you can simply delete a Cloud Save from the Cloud Save selection screen.
Dealing with Save Errors
In the event your save becomes corrupted for any reason, the game will display this information to you in the form of an error message.
Prior to this, the game would crash or simply not load when any of your saves were corrupted or unable to load.
This gives you the ability to manage this error without it affecting your game.
Refresh Cloud Saves from inside the game
Another missing feature was the ability to refresh your Cloud Saves from inside the game.
If you are playing on multiple devices and ever run into the issue of Cloud Saves not synchronizing, then this will be a handy button for you.
Clicking the Cloud Save Refresh button will fetch your Cloud saves again. This saves the hassle of needing to restart the game completely to see updated saves.
Conclusion
We are always in the process of increasing the clarity of information displayed by the game. Your suggestions are definitely read and noted, and things are always in motion behind the scenes.
We do hope the UI update for save slots helps with the accidental issues caused by the old system. It will especially help when we start releasing more temporary custom gamemodes in the future.
With this updated UI, we are now more confident to eventually release more save slots for everyone, so be on the look out for this!
This update will be released in the next week or two, along with the usual bug fixes and all that.
- Malcs