Save game thoughts for Unity

There's a lot of ways Unity could be improved for savegames. here's some of my thoughts on that. 

I think the big one is to save a scene (and reload it) during playback. It's clear the editor has this power in some fashion already, and it would be hugely useful for many types of games. 

But I know that's no small task. So, besides that, there's a ton that Unity could include, like: 

More data types for PlayerPrefs. The abllity to save arrays, for example. See EasySave on the asset store for a good third party solution for this.

Unique GameObject IDs that are static. When you save data associated with an object, you need to uniquely identify the object. GetInstanceID is a unique id for each object, but they can change every time you load the scene. I came up with a simple hack for powerups, but there should be a better way, especially since Unity's own way of saving data (PlayerPrefs) requires unique keys. 

An automated way to load and save a script's current properities. Right now, you need to write your own saver and loader for every single variable in your script. Add a variable? Add some code to saver. And don't forget your loader.  This is error-prone, and this should be automated. It's clear that the property editor has automated access to all the script's variables, so why not give us a way to bundle it up and save it and load it? It wouldn't have to work for everything (I understand the problems with saving transforms and whatnot) but just letting us save all integers, floats, and strings would save a ton. 

And if not that, at least give us a way to walk through them ourselves so we could roll our own autmated saver that doesn't require me hand-adding variables to save every time I change my script. There would still be the need for special-casing things, but this would be a great head start.

Summary

I know there's no way for Untiy Technologies to make the perfect SaveMyGame() feature that would work for every game out there, but really Unity needs more than what it has at the moment. It's almost non-existant.  In other game development environments, I'd have the tools to say "these variables are going to be saved." and then that's the end of it. 

Currently, for any game this isn't dead simple, SaveGame is one of the first things I need to think about -- and think hard about -- before I do any fundimental development.  And that's typically not what Unity's about. Unity is about focusing on your game, and not your engine. 

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