I am designing a game at the moment, but I want to use a custom saving structure. Rather than allowing the player to save whenever they want to, I'd like to have "checkpoints" of sorts...that is, the game will save automatically at certain places in the storyline, and the player can choose to go back to any of those points at any time. That way, I can allow the player to make "mistakes" in the game and have to rewind to try again.

Is this possible?

Bump!

If you can do this, I don't think it would be easy. (Fun, maybe, but not easy.) It's definitely not a built-in feature. Informing your players to do mutliple "save as..."'s seems like the easiest route. I don't think there is a script command to restore a saved QSG file. In other words, as of now, I think you'd have to play around with creating your own internal save and load commands, and develop a way to capture the entire state of your game internally (every variable, object, object property, location, etc.).

It's probably not possible in Quest as it stands. It's quite doable in TADS or Inform, though.

I have a feature similar to that in my game King's Quest V: The Text Adventure. You can find it in the archive. The way mine works is that when the player walks into a potential dangerous area, a window pops up and asks the player if he/she wants to save the game. If yes, the game will save. HOWEVER, it doesn't do it invisibly. It will pop open the save as menu and you navigate to where you want to save the game. I do not know offhand how to make the game save without seeing this option. It would seem that if it's possible, the player would still have to initially save the game and later auto saves will save over that file.

I don't believe it can be done invisibly, because Quest would still want to know where exactly you want to save the game. The two easiest ways of doing something like this would be to...

1) Do like Steve, and create a pop up menu asking if the player wants to save.
OR
2) Create an object, then when the player takes it, execute a command as if it were typed by the player "Save" and check the built in quest command box. If you decided to call your object "checkpoint", you'd also want said object to become inaccessible when it's taken, as it will have no other purpose.

Thanks for the thoughtful responses, everyone.

I think the option I'm going to go with is providing the player an opportunity to save at certain checkpoints. As in, I will say:

"You have reached Checkpoint 2. It would be advisable to save the game now to a new file with a name that reflects that."

And then, if they screw up before checkpoint 3, the game will say, "You have lost. If you go back to Checkpoint 2, it is possible to move on and win."