We released version 1.2 of MMA Manager for Android on Friday evening, on Saturday morning we were getting emails and Play Store reviews saying people were losing their save games.  This was obviously something to do with the new build so we put 1.1.5 back up there as quickly as we could, and this got people their save games back.  But, there was still something wrong with version 1.2.

The last three days have been dedicated to trying to work out what was causing this issue and then fixing it.  The main issue is we didn’t have access to anyone’s save that had lost it, so we were taking educated guess at what the issue was.  Our first solution was shore up everything in our code to do with save versioning and how things are loaded, as this seemed the most likely candidate.

Unfortunately this was not the issue, this issue comes from the a combination of how Android handles storage and how Unity interacts with it.  The plugin we use for capturing screenshots adds the Read & Write External permissions to the Android Manifest.  As a result of this version 1.2 is installed to a different location than version 1.1.5, and the persistentDataPath in Unity is where the game is installed meaning we couldn’t read the save files from the old location.

We have fixed this and made the loading of save games on Android more robust so this will not happen again.

If you lost your 1.1.5 save and started a new game then you will be offered the chance to load your game from 1.1.5 rather than the new one.  We would advise doing this, especially if you have a lot of time invested in the old save or have purchased IAP.

We’re sorry this happened, and we hope we caught it quickly enough so it didn’t affect too many of you.  We’re new to releasing games on Android and this just completely blindsided us.  Version 1.2.1 will be on the Play Store soon, all the advantages of 1.2 with none of the lost save games.

As usual you can contact us via feedback [at] bitbybitgames [dot] co [dot] uk