FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Saving the Game

Saving a game takes a snapshot of a game world and all its particulars at a given instant and stores them away so that the player can later load the same data, return to that instant, and play the game from that point. Saving and restoring a game is technologically easy, and it's essential for testing and debugging, so it's often slapped in as a feature without much thought about its effect on gameplay. As designers, though, it's our job to think about anything that affects gameplay or the player's experience of the game.

Saving a game stores not only the player's location in the game but also any cus - tomizations she might have made along the way. In Michelle Kwan Figure Skating, for example, the player could customize the body type, skin tone, hair color and style, and costume of the skater. The player could even load in a picture of her own face. The more freedom you give the player to customize the game or the avatar, the more data must be saved. Until recently, this limited the richness of games for con­sole machines, but now console machines routinely come with enough storage to save a lot of customization data.