While trying to fall asleep my mind somehow wandered to the save system and how its kinda not the best right now. There are certain cutscenes where the game autosaves after them, and the simplest way of autosaving in RMMV is to write to the last save slot the player made. This seems like a good solution but has problems. If a player starts a playthrough on slot 1, gets to a cutscene that autosaves, then starts a new game on slot 2, then the player reloads slot 1, and finally triggers the cutscene, it will save on slot 2 instead.

My solution to this was kinda hacky before, basically when the player makes a new game the game will make an autosave after the initial cutscene. If the player doesn't have any saves it autosaves to slot 1. If the player has a save already it saves to slot 17. Slot 17 is unique because it doesn't actually exist. It's a placeholder slot that the game deletes when closed. This has its own issues though, because if the player tries to save and doesn't select a real save slot then they'll save over slot 17 and lose all progress on quit.

The solution I just came up with is more brute forced but would fix all these issues if I can get it to work. Basically I'm going to make the player pick a save slot when they start playing, and then save the slot number in the file. The player will be unable to save manually. This means all saving will be done automatically and means I'm going to have to put in a lot of effort to balance the save triggers. Entering and leaving towns will autosave for example.

The reason this solution fixes everything is because it means the game doesn't have to make a loose guess on what save the player is currently on. It has the save slot saved directly to the file, so it can overwrite whatever slot the save says it's in. It also means that during the ending sequence if the player screws up they don't be able to just quit and reload, or make a backup save in case they mess up. If they mess up they have to live with the error they made, which should make the endings more impactful (hopefully).

On the topic of endings while I'm at it there are 3 different endings with a few variations based on a choice towards the end and if you succeed or not. I don't want to say too much, but the ending is a race against time to stop Aretisia from being destroyed. When I say a race against time, I mean it. The timer doesn't stop for anything. Cutscenes, battles, even the final boss. Once the timer starts you have until it ends to finish the game and still get a good ending.

It's possible to still get a good ending after the timer hits 0, but once it does the final boss becomes immensely more powerful, making it more likely you'll fail. Plus the ending is different so it's not the best ending anyway, and losing the fight at that point is a bad ending. Of course I'm trying to be lenient with the timer and you only have one dungeon to get through before you reach the final boss so it isn't that big of a deal, I just like the idea of inducing anxiety with a timer rapidly approaching zero as the stakes get drastically raised.

The amount of time given will need to be tested obviously. Lots of things will need to be carefully adjusted and I want it to be just tight enough that there will be a large split of players who manage to finish in time and players who didn't. Ideally good players who know what they're doing should be able to get the best ending 99% of the time though (battles do have an element of randomness so they might just get incredibly unlucky and run out of time), but this is going to make testing the timer difficult.

If I keep getting the same people to test the timer then they'll learn how to beat the ending quickly, which means they won't be a fair match against someone who doesn't know what to do. New testers will be required at that point to just see how long they take to finish.

So I came up with that convoluted autosave system in my head last night, and after looking into how I'd get it work, I came across this plugin that came out a few months ago. It functions exactly how I wanted it to. Oh. http://yanfly.moe/2019/02/22/yep-180-autosave-rpg-maker-mv/

...and 5 hours later I've done a small amount of the legwork needed to set up the autosaves properly.