6 steps
Saving that never loses a game
For: Any game longer than one sitting, before the first update ships.
Lost progress is the one bug players never forgive. Saves break in three ways: at the wrong moment, after an update, and on two devices. Each has its step here, in the order they will hit you.
The steps, in order
- 1
Blueprint
Checkpoints
Checkpoints keep a death from costing the whole level. The player risks only the stretch since the last marker, so a hard part can be tried again and again without walking the same easy part each time.
Why here: Start with where a save happens: a checkpoint is a promise about what the player keeps. Place them from the player's pain, not the level's shape.
- 2
Blueprint
Autosave
Autosave means a crash, a dead battery or a closed window costs the player a minute of play and not an evening. The player never has to think about saving, and the game never freezes at a bad moment to do it.
Why here: Then the save that happens without asking. The danger is saving mid-action; the rule is to save a state the game can load without a pending event.
- 3
Wiki entry
After an update, old saves load with missing items or crash the game
Every time you rename or reshape something your game stores, saves made before that day stop fitting. Here is a way to let every old save grow up step by step, and what to do with a save from a newer game than the one running.
Why here: The first update will change what a save contains. A version number and a chain of small upgrades keeps every old save loading, forever.
- 4
Wiki entry
An update removes or renames an item and players' bags fill with broken things
Saves keep pointing at things you later changed or deleted, and the game either crashes on them or shows empty ghost items. Here is how to clean a loaded bag in one pass and tell the player what happened instead of silently eating things.
Why here: The upgrade chain's hardest case: an item you removed is still in someone's bag. Decide once what happens, and it never crashes.
- 5
Story help
How to Make Save Games That Keep the Story
A save must store what happened in the story, not only where the player stands. Model saving and loading as steps, and a checker finds what gets lost.
Why here: A story save holds facts, not only positions. What belongs in it follows from the story model you may already have.
- 6
Code recipe
Game event log
Your AI adds a small log to your game that writes down what happens, such as a level started or a player died, in a plain file or in the browser on the player's own device. It keeps no accounts, device ids or IP addresses, sends nothing anywhere, and records nothing until the player says yes.
Why here: Last, a record of what happened: when a save does go wrong, the log is how you and your AI find out why, with the player's consent.
At the end
A crash costs seconds, an update keeps every old save, and a bag can never hold an item that does not exist.
What this rests on
- Making Gunpoint's Save System
A designer explains why Gunpoint saves often instead of only at checkpoints, how players got confused about which autosave to load, and how showing the last three saves fixed it.
- Game Design Deep Dive: The save system of Alien: Isolation
Shows how the choice between checkpoints and manual save points changes how a game feels, including the trap of dying again and again right after a reload.
- [Unity] Preventing 'My Save Is Gone': Safe Writes, Backups, and Version Migration
Explains why you write a save to a temporary file first, keep one backup, store a version number and upgrade old saves step by step, so a crash or update never destroys progress.
- Cloud save (Play Games Services Saved Games)
Describes how cloud saves collide when a player uses several devices, advises loading the newest data at start and asking the player before overwriting progress.
- Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud
A research paper arguing that data should live first on the player's own device and sync later, and that special data structures can merge changes from several devices.
- A Conflict-Free Replicated JSON Datatype
Presents a method for merging edits made on different devices to the same data without losing any update, which is the core problem of cloud save conflicts.
Say this to your AI
Follow the Spielerando learning path "Saving that never loses a game" (get_path saving-that-never-loses-a-game) for my game, step by step, and tell me at each step why it comes now.Or skip this and connect the MCP: your AI then finds all of this by itself.Connect the MCP