T w e n t y S i d e d
Players expect to be able to save their game. Which creates the question of, “Where do we store those saves?” Previously we’ve seen some surprisingly lively debates around the subject in the comments. I can’t find it now, but one person even went so far as to say that if a game doesn’t save in the /My Documents/ folder then the game is broken.
I can understand this. Microsoft created the /My Documents/ folder as a place for applications to store their crap. In an ideal world, someone wanting to back up their computer ought to be able to back up /My Documents/ and be reasonably certain they have everything. It’s supposed to be a general dumping ground for text documents, spreadsheets, game saves, configuration settings, power point presentations, email archives, web bookmarks, drawings, photographs, and whatever other data people create with their computers. It’s one location where users should be able to look and find ALL their files.
Unfortunately, /My Documents/ suffers from all the same problems that plague the Windows registry. Microsoft created “one system to rule them all”, and then made the implementation ambiguous. And it didn’t really do everything it needed to do. And it created security concerns. And then they changed how it worked from one version of Windows to the next.
For one thing, it’s not even called /My Documents/ these days. It’s /Users/. The location keeps changing. The internal structure keeps changing. The rules governing access keep changing. All of this creates problems for would-be game designers. Where do I put the user’s saves?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot #29: Saves Go In the Save Place”
