[flohofwoe]

Agreed, when the data is already in a table format (instead of an "object spider web") the idea to automate serialization makes more sense, it essentially becomes a "database problem". I would still very carefully consider what data columns need to be persisted and which should be reconstructed, and I wouldn't try to come up with a too generic solution.

For instance in some games it might not be necessary to save a reference to a targeted object, if the gameplay targeting mechanism picks up a target in the first frame after loading a savegame anyway (etc etc...). Whether that target is exactly the same as at the time of creating the savegame might not be relevant (but very relevant for other games).

I guess the TL;DR is: in many cases it might be much easier to come up with a specialized per-game savegame system instead of coming up with a generic savegame system that works for all types of games.

[slaymaker1907]

Depending on how large your save state is, it could be as simple as a function mapping from a list of game objects to the saveable object. That approach works really well with Redux on the web since you really don't want to save most things. Where things really get tricky is when you want to get fancy and support things like saving only the changed portion of the state.