How do people design the save game feature in large/complex games?

Question

The save game feature seems simple but it’s mind-blowing how it can return the exact state of a game with all elements/events organised in the correct order. Can anyone explain how it works?

In: 668

Answer 1

I mean, yeah, all of that exact state of the game is already saved in memory while you’re playing, so they can simply dump that into a save file and load it back into memory. There are all kinds of things they can do to simplify that process and shrink the size of the save files but that’s essentially how they do it.