Hey there, my thoughts on it are that it’s… well… cheating. Obviously Shattered is a single player game so it’s not like cheating ruins the experience for others, but I’d rather not make it easy to do or expose any functionality within the game itself to enable people to cheat.
The main reason for this is that in most cases players are tempted to cheat as a quicker way to overcome a challenge in a game like Shattered, and by doing that they rob themselves of the satisfaction of beating the game legitimately.
I can understand making it too easy to cheat being a bad thing as it would definitely create the circumstance where, as you said, it would rob them of the experience. However, if there’s enough of an effort required to do so then that makes it so that the individual is proving, at least to some extent, that they are aware of the “consequences”.
Consider the idea of security. There is nothing that is truly secure, and security is just a trade-off of convenience, i.e. as you implement security you increase inconvenience and the opposite. Good security methods are ones where the trade-off is high on the security side while very low on the inconvenience side. Since there is no such thing as true security, if anyone wanted to gain access to something they absolutely can if they are willing to invest the effort, and similarly, they are proving that they are accepting the consequences.
It sounds like in your case you have already gotten legitimate wins and it’s more about mistap insurance, but there’s no way for the game to know that unfortunately.
There’s already functionality of unlocking features based on progress, could this not be used to lock a save/load function and prevent your main concern? That seems like the perfect solution.
Well, this was not a case of misunderstanding. I was just trying to figure out some sort of compromise without getting into what seems to be the main block, that is… why does it matter so much to prevent cheating that you would rather limit people’s options of enjoying the game even more?
I was trying to avoid it because I am certain I’m not going to convince you to change your thinking on it. It is your game after all and if you just don’t like cheating that much, then it’s certainly your prerogative to make the game how you like.
I just personally don’t understand. To me it seems like it shouldn’t matter that much because it is a personal decision to be okay with cheating in a single-player game, since it doesn’t affect others. As long as the barrier is high enough to ensure that the person is sure they are willing to take the risk of damaging their experience. At that point they only have themselves to blame if it damages their own experience. Additionally, what level/amount of “damage” would this really be? Can this damage really be so bad that it needs to be prevented at the cost of other’s diminished experience? I am confident that the benefits of enhancing other people’s enjoyment of the game would greatly outweigh the much lower chance of a much lower number of people who’s experience might be lessened.
On top of all of that, people who play on their computer can already very easily edit their save file. While that option being available on mobile as well would be enjoyable to me, I think the ideal option would be to add a save/reload which is unlocked once you complete a win or a certain number of wins. Save/reload is a standard among many games, even roguelikes, and creates enough of a barrier to prevent it from being too easily used as a way to bypass the core difficulty that gives the game its character.