The latest build of Omi Oh My AI aims to resolve a save file corruption bug experienced by a number of players. For most players this will not impact their experience, but if you are interested in an explanation of what was happening, read on!
Bug Fixes
- Moved some save game triggers that were resulting in corrupted saves when the game was closed
Feature Additions
- Added corrupted save recovery
- Added game save trigger at the start of a new puzzle theme
Save Game System Technobabble
Saves are an issue for any game, and there's a good reason why games pop up with a little icon that indicates when it is saving. Closing the game during one of these icons being displayed can result in corrupted saves, but most games will attempt to restore to another recent save or have some sort of corruption recovery method. The scale of this usually depends on the scale of the game, but for Omi the scope of it is relatively small and the possible game states is limited. We therefore decided to keep save games simple, and only output a single file.
Internally, the game tracks your state as you play, updating that state. But it only exports that state to a file when it's commanded to do so. Previously, this was upon completing any individual puzzle, but this led to some unexpected behaviors. For example, closing the game during a cutscene would mistakenly make the game load back up mid-way through that cutscene in a state that could no longer be progressed, because our cutscenes are simply made up of different puzzles.
So to avoid this issue, we've moved to saving the game at two points:
- When the player receives their puzzle theme overview from Omi
- When the player starts a brand new theme
This means that we can now start to clearly indicate to players when they have reached a checkpoint: the end of a puzzle theme. Closing the game after completing all of the image puzzles in a theme will mean that upon reopening you will need to complete those puzzles again, but hopefully these changes will prevent any risk of corrupted save files occurring.
However, we now also have a catch for the corrupted save files we were seeing. In these situations, the game was saving in a state that was not reachable. This seemed to take place primarily during cutscenes: closing the game right at the end of a cutscene could generate a save file that believed there was another phase of that cutscene to progress to, and fail to load. If this state is detected, we now send the player back to the very last puzzle they completed. Upon completing this puzzle, you will progress to the cutscene, and allow the game to save again in an uncorrupted state.
But Game development is complicated and things never go as you quite expect. So if you experience any sort of issues, please continue to post in the forum and let us know!