What happens when you die? April 1 2026, I certify this is not an April Fool's joke (what would the joke be, exactly?)
This is just to clarify a few thoughts.
Paradise Never 2 has a resurrection cycle-- basically, you pass through something called a "Time Torii" and it acts as a save point. When you die, you go through a sort-of intermission area that frames the game a little bit, and then perform an action whereupon you return to the latest Time Torii you walked through.
Central to Paradise Never 2 is a sense of consequence. You can take actions that (in some sense) close things off permanently for you-- but the game will have systems to compensate for "perpetual loss states". For instance, you might get stranded somewhere without fuel or a boat, but there will be a rescue system to solve that. And so on, in a kind of ad-hoc "I am not a competant game designer, but I know how to shore up an ugly wall with more and more ugly debris" kind of way-- perhaps.
So I have to decide whether or not rolling back to the Time Torii resets the entire game state to that point— what we would maybe call a "hard save", or whether it just returns you in space— a "respawn".
I had originally throught I would have a hard save. But I am rethinking that now.
Thinking as clearly as I can manage, I suppose my main motivation for wanting to do a hard save is to avoid a perpetual loss state. I had in fact envisioned that you could roll back multiple levels— and I could implement this— so for instance if you want to go back several steps to before a certain branch, once you realize you made a mistake, you can. Again, stuff you can typically do with hard saves in e.g., a PC game. It's just a file you can reload from, and you can have as many of them as you want. I guess Zelda Breath of the Wild did it too, which is a game I played recently, so this approach is modern and favours player in some ways— the designer relinquishes control over how player will use the save system.
But this is directly in opposition to the rescue systems I want to build, and more importantly to the general force of perserverence through trouble that I'm trying to create.
Let me talk about that for a second. Many people play videogames in an "abort early" mode. In other words, if they make a large mistake that will affect things later, people tend to save-scum in some way or another to try and return to before that point and do over. I don't like to play that way— instead, if I screw something up, I prefer to play through. Likewise, I tend to avoid "maxing" or "farming", insofar as I can. (I remember playing FF8 and finding it amazingly well balanced— everyone disagreed with me at the time— but the thing is that I didn't farm the draws. At all.) I don't let myself give up on bosses or other fights— if I have to burn through resurrection items to survive, I try to do it that way. This is different than how most people play but it's more roley-playey, in other words, I'm creating a story for myself about how I survived something. Roguelikes with permadeath force you into this, since choosing e.g., to give up on a boss battle to save elixirs or whatever is never an option— no matter what, you always want to survive. I love it.
I want to create that experience for player. I want player to feel like whatever has happened, they should adapt and find some way to push through. They need to change their plans, or even their larger goals, because something out of their control happened. This is a little mean but I like being a little mean in games design, it's part of the dialogue somehow.
Keep in mind, Paradise Never 2 is a longform roguelike, in the sense that the world is randomized to a large extent, and the idea is you would maybe play through multiple times. But longform in that you will be invested in the world, and also in that it's expressly non-permadeath. (So there is no reason to restart, other than you reach some kind of conclusion.) To that end, I have a "main path" endstate, which is, essentially, the "good ending", but I am hoping what makes the game interesting are myriad "bad endings"-- which I have yet to add.
All of this intended design is really in opposition to "hard saves" or being able to roll things back to an earlier state. If the player can roll back, the temptation becomes to "do it over" again and again (I'm now providing an explicit mechanic to enable this), and so player ends up in short loops of redoing boring or potentially tricky things, instead of pushing past mistakes. Ultimately it's not what I want to create for player.
Hard saves are also harder to implement and test-- that matters, at least a bit (a lot). Though I did sketch out in some detail how hard saves would work, respawn is really just about knowing the place to respawn to, and then going there.
So I think my choice is clear, the resurrection mechanic should just be a simple respawn, maybe with some material loss to add friction and cost to dying.
Alright-- thanks for reading!
Random addendum.
I have right now at my disposal these games, which all should appeal a lot to me: Super Mario Oddysee (at endgame), Zelda Skyward Sword (never played), Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (partway through), SMT4 (never played), Persona 5 (never played, probably top of my list), Tunic (partway through), and Suikoden II (partway through, but close to the start.)
By a fair bit, the one that appeals to me the most is Suikoden II. I can't really explain it, except that maybe it's something to do with the lower cognitive load in processing the visuals, combined with really liking the music, combined with nostalgia.