CompSci//Media Arts - Saving in Games

Computer Science 1

Saving Data & Retro Games

Today's Goal

Learn about old save methods in games

Opportunities to be aware of:

Nov 8th // NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Application Due
Dec 19th // Amazon Future Engineer Scholarship Due
Jan 7th // NSA Codebreaker Challenge Due

Completed

Encryption vs Encoding
Revisit Info Theory Concept
About Control Flow
Flux

Today

Generating Game Ideas

Upcoming

Quiz eventually

Saving & Retro Game Systems

While the Nintendo was vastly improved over the previous Atari system, a lot of this was through clever engineer and programming. The hardware in the Nintendo itself was not drastically better than the Atari that proceeded it.

Games were bigger than before. Games were longer than before. So, how would game makers handle the limitations of having no built-in storage to save a player's progress?

loop-save.mp4

Between not wanting players to copy games, and the US release of the Nintendo not including discs... game makers needed a way to save with cartridge-based games, using a system that had no internal storage.

So the first home console game that let you save, thanks to the hardware itself, was the Legend of Zelda for the NES. However, this did require extra components in the game cartridge, and that also increased the production cost for that title.

The other option, as we saw in the previous video was 'passwords'.

One password became pretty famous...
Metroid's 'Justin Bailey'.

metroid-password-justin-bailey.mp4

TASK, p1

1. Sketch out how a 'password' screen might look for one of your game ideas.

2. How would the players input the password?

Saving with Passwords

Saving with passwords became a fairly common feature found on NES, SNES, and Genesis titles of the time. These passwords were essentially a way of storing 'bits' of data as numbers, letters, or symbols, that the game could then use an algorithm to figure out the game state from where the player last left off.

Let's look a bit more at how this worked.

game-password.mp4

Designing password systems to retrieve or reload game state is a method of 'encoding' that data into a string of characters or symbols. The user becomes the storage device, and they input it directly into the system. Hopefully they'd input it correctly.

You didn't want to just ask the player how far they were, or what items they had collected, or etc; as then they could also cheat. As such, many of the password systems used algorithms that weren't easy to figure out, essentially a form of 'encryption' as well.

That didn't stop players from trying though.
Let's look at Metroid again.

metroid-password.mp4

You can try out the password generator site he shows here.

The Metroid Password Format Guide resource referenced and utilized in the video, in case you're curious to see it.

TASK, p2

3. Try out the Metroid Password generator, and see how different selections change the password. Include a couple screenshots showing some selections you played with.

4. What are some things you noticed about how your selections affected the password?