This is quite impressive! An only usability detail: why do you need all users to approve access to the file system, if that functionality is only required for saving games? I'm sure most users will be scared by that banner.
That's a Flash problem - you can possibly use more space than the 100k default if you have five profiles, and Flash will fail silenty when trying to write to it unless you ask for the block up front.
And the Flash prompt is pretty badly worded - it's just the Flash cookies that it's talking about!
The whole thing has driven me crazy...
Edit: Oh, I see what you mean about waiting until the user saves. The game saves transparently when you walk around so there's no other good time to pop up with the allocation popup. Would have been much easier if we used a 'choose slot to save' kind of system when you are back at base.
Why don't you present a message asking users if they want to have the auto save feature or not? If they want, they need to enable a security option. Otherwise, they can play anyway even if scared by such option.
Why can't you store the save games on the server? You can easily store a unique access key in the default 100k for casual users (and I assume that registered users log in).
Well, that ends up as a lot of data on the server. One of the people behind the casual collective just released his tracker stats that show 100 million plays (loads), which would be 10 terabytes, assuming of course that each load resulted in a store.
We don't have a full time server guy so I'd prefer to stay out of that kind of thing, for now anyway! I think next time we'll just design the game around a strict 100k limitation.
We could, but that ends up being a lot of traffic. We'd expect the average person to save a lot more than once (in Robokill it's automatic), so you're looking at at least 100tb of traffic - a pretty big hassle.
If the game routes through rocksolidarcade.com (which is probably a good idea) to save/load things, traffic ends up being 38 cents a gb - 10 for upstream/downstream at Softlayer, and 18 at S3. I think that's pretty close to being impractical.
I'm going to design the next game around the 100k limitation and explicit saves, so this problem will go away anyway.
I think that's exactly what we'll have to do - design the save files to fit in 100k. This wasn't by design - this was 1 day from release, where we discovered that amazingly enough there's no way to tell if a save was successful or not in Flash, so we couldn't ask people to up their storage only when needed (which should be rarely).
