If You Could Change Things In Games...

[GaryCXJk]

Here's a pretty obvious one...any game that uses a password system for saving (or a lack of saving altogether) instead of a battery backup.  No one wants to enter long ass passwords every time they want to continue XD.

Okay, let me paint you a picture here.

Let's say we have a simple RPG-like platformer, with just one character. It should store its player level, its weapon and its armor, to keep it simple. To also keep it simple, this character has no inventory, whenever you get a new weapon you have to pick which weapon to keep or which armor to keep. Each password point is at the beginning of each level.

Now, let's assume each data only takes one byte, so, in total you'd only have four bytes. But now you need to convert it to readable data. So, you have the option between using both upper and lower caps, however, there are issues with that, but we'll ignore those for now. So, you have all letters at your disposal, as well as the numbers. Now, we need to have a total of 64 different characters to easily round it out. With both upper and lower case characters, you'd have 52 characters, plus all the numbers make it 62. Now, let's also add an exclamation mark and a question mark, rounding it out to 64.

Now each character can be represented by a six bit value. Each byte is eight bits, so, the total amount of data we need to store is 32 bits. This means that we need at least six characters to cover all the data of the password, as 6 * 6 = 36, four more than the amount of bits we actually need.

Now, like I said, using both upper and lower case characters poses several problems, mainly writing problems. For example, one character can look a lot like an I, an l or a 1 (the upper case i, the lower case L and a one). On top of that, you generally want to simplify the password system, using less characters to represent a password.

So, we'll only use the upper case letters. Also, we'll make the I and 1 (the upper case i and the one) a synonym, as well as the 0 and the O (zero and upper case o). Maybe also the B and the 8 (upper case b and eight), and the 5 and S (five and upper case s). In this case, we only have about 32 characters, with each character being represented by a 5 bit value. This means you need a password of seven characters.

And this is only for data that consists of four bytes.