I'm just about to release a line drawing game, and from the start I got the idea that I would allow the user to switch highscore profiles during the game or even after Game Over, as long as the game world still lives...
I guess I figured that the player might have forgotten to select her profile initially and wanted to change it...
It's caused me a ton of pain to implement, since I had to create my own wrappers to store game session data, such as unlocked awards and highscores and game time, that I would otherwise have simply been able to send off to AGON and relax knowing that the user's highscore is safe...
Not that I didn't take precautions to safeguard the play session, game data is saved when the pause screen, and all important data is stored on disk then...
Still, there was a lot of pain to make sure that changing a profile would update all relevant visible and hidden data, like highscores and cached profile-specific data... Also keeping awards synced during a game between profiles was a bit of a pain... Not to mention keeping awards saved if the user exits the game... Normally I would just tell AGON to unlock them and be done with it!
I probably should have just presented a dialog box asking to select a given profile before starting the game, but I just didn't want anything to be between the gamer and the game... And also I guess I felt that I had come too far to stop now!
My question is: Does anyone here feel that this is a useful feature, or maybe I should disable it altogether, to avoid potential bugs that may have been overlooked... Perhaps I should allow switching of profile after the game ends, but not during the game, to limit the amount of space in which problems could occur...
Has anyone else had similar experiences or thoughts?
One thing I know for sure: I'm probably going to try and avoid this in my next game!
