GamerSafe? Other services for storing save games online?

[Karja]

Hey there! I'm polishing my superhero puzzle/RPG Spandex Force: Superhero U, and one thing I'm debating with myself is how to handle the save games.

The game will be available as a downloadable game for Win/Mac (Flash), as well as online via a web page. The plan is to make Android and iOS ports too - essentially, a "Spandex Force anywhere" experience. In order to make it more interesting I'd like to have all the save games stored online. It'd enable users to continue playing from various platforms, as well as some other nice features.

Soo... Up 'til now I've done this through a simple custom PHP API, but I really don't want to re-invent the wheel. Does anyone have any experiences with GamerSafe? Are they any good? Any unforeseen problems?

These "other nice features" I'm planning include stuff like having a "hero statistics" webpage to show off your hero with, and the possibility to compete against AI models of other people's save games. I guess that these could be hard to accomplish with GamerSafe or other APIs of that kind since a user will only have access to his own data?

It -does- seem like I might as well write my own API to solve these things... But maybe you have some other thoughts what I could do?

[lennard]

I'd go the PHP/mySql storage solution. The only tricky bit is if a player isn't online - can you have a redundant local save on the iOs device in case the player can't login?

[Karja]

Yeah, I've messed around with that for a bit. A lot of bloody cases to keep in mind: what happens when a user connects to the server after having local saves? What happens if a user has saved stuff on the server, then plays locally, then plays locally on a different machine, and then connects to the server? What happens if he deletes a save locally and then connects to the server? Etc etc...

Oh well, maybe I ought to go for my homebrew API after all.

[GaiaDreamCreation]

Your custom solution might be more appropriate. I don't know GamerSafe, but what you asked for seems so precise that it's probably better to go with something custom. Very often we take some engines and adapt our product around them. This requires comprises. Trying GamerSafe will probably give provide your a clear answer. I tried many solutions like this and very often I ended up with my custom solution because the technology I wanted to use didn't offer an open development. I could say that it provided just a part of the solution and I couldn't even write the missing features because the technology was “in closed box”.

[Karja]

Thanks, and I know what you mean! I'm definitely leaning toward following your advice. I just thought it was prudent to check if anyone has found a silver bullet to solve all of this - I don't want to fall into Not Invented Here behaviour unnecessarily.

[ch00se]

Hey there,

I'm the co-founder of GamerSafe. Nice looking game you have there.

GamerSafe actually does have a way for you to let users create/save/and share data between each other. The service for this is called "Level Vault" as it was initially stream lined for creating and sharing custom levels in games (but has grown to be a flexible sharing api).

There are a lot of other cool features GS has, but based on what you have mentioned I think the hardest part will be having your game on multiple platforms. We are mainly set up for Flash on the web and have not yet made ports to iOS, android, etc. We do plan to do this, but if you went with us you'd be tied to our timeline (as mentioned by others, this is the downside to any 3rd party system). So, if you plan to do a big release on the web first we could probably help you out quite a bit, but if you want to quickly move to other platforms we may hold you back a bit. Though, if your game monetizes well it would definitely move our priorities around to get the mobile ports sooner

Feel free to reach out if you have any further questions. (chris@gamersafe.com).

[electronicStar]

Gamersafe Blog hasn't been updated since april 2010, what? no new games?

[ch00se]

That's our bad. Many new games. We just didn't see much traction on the blog so stopped updating it to spend our time on things that were seeing traction In the near future we'll start updating it again!

[electronicStar]

Yeah don't underestimate the P.R value of your blog.
I was following it for a while and since it stopped updating I assumed GS had given up or sthg. And the FGL forum isn't extremely active either.