Deep Dive: Creating and fine tuning the save system of Shadow Gambit

gamedeveloper.com:

Hi, I'm Philipp Wittershagen, senior developer at the small, independent German game studio Mimimi Games. We're best known for reviving the stealth-strategy genre with Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun to critical acclaim, following up that success with Desperados III and, most recently, our most ambitious and self-published title Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, which, although again released to critical acclaim, will sadly be our final game.

The groundwork for the later titles was laid by a very small development department of four people at the time of creating Shadow Tactics. Though many things were optimized later on, the architecture of the save system was defined by then and was therefore influenced by the small team size and a requirement to be ultra-efficient.

You might think, "Most games have a save system. What's so special about yours?" Let me give you a short introduction to the stealth-strategy genre and what special demands it places on a save system, after which I'll describe how our system works, how we tackled the requirements, and how we optimized it all for production.

The stealth-strategy genre, and especially the productions by Mimimi Games, feature a top-down perspective over maps of around 200x200m. This might not sound like much; however, they are densely packed with enemies and interactions. While the levels of our previous games were filled with at most 100 NPCs, Shadow Gambit, with its more open structure, sometimes has up to 250 NPCs on a single map. All these NPCs have their own detection, routines, and AI-behavior running, which the player can scroll over and analyze at all times. Add to this up to eight (though in most cases it's three) player-controlled characters with skills that can be