It’s funny how some of the simplest design decisions in A Place for the Unwilling weren’t that easy at all. Take save systems, for example, something that people have asked about a couple of times. We could have done it in dozens of different ways, like allowing you to save and load whenever you feel like it. We implemented two different options (players must choose one when starting a new story), one saves your progress ONLY when you get to the end of a new day (this is the one we recommend), the other does that and also saves when you leave the game (even if in the middle of a day).

Again, we could have coded something which gave players more freedom, like lots of game do. The reason why we aren’t doing that is because we feel that being in total control of this system makes your choices feel less important. If you could always press a rewind button and choose a different thing to say then nothing would prevent you from correcting every mistake. Everything would be the way you wanted.

Having that kind of power would allow people to easily go through all the lore and branches of the game. Other games include such options and even allow you to skip all the content up to a certain dialogue decision. We felt this would destroy the core concept of A Place for the Unwilling. This is a game about living in the city and building your story, even if it doesn’t turn out as you would like. We included a second save system, one that is friendlier, because forcing players to get to the end of each day to save would probably ruin the experience for many. It’s easy to see that the later can still be exploited in order to try different branches, but doing so is definitely tiresome.

One could argue that we should implement more save systems and give players more freedom. We could do that, it surely requires more production time but it’s not an impossible task. We are confident when we say this is the optimal way to enjoy A Place for the Unwilling.

Does this mean there’s no way we’ll ever change this? Of course not, but it’s highly unlikely we do this before the game releases. If after launch we see this becomes an obstacle for players then we would totally look into changing it. When Gods Will Be Watching released it was a narrative game with a hardcore resource management side. Just a tiny part of the players got to the ending, so the devs decided to add a narrative mode (which made resource management easier). Design is tied to iteration, which means that you make a decision based on your experience. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes testing proves it needs to be reworked.

We believe other save systems would weaken the overall experience. We want the whole thing to feel like a unique story you want to explore, not a hunt for narrative, endings, and secrets. If we’re wrong about that then we’ll do our best to fix that mistake.

And that’s all for today. We’ll see you soon with a new update. While that happens, why don’t you go ahead and join our Discord?