Arnn Powell - Unreal Saving

The Problem:

While implementing the system to lock and unlock characters, buy them in the store menu, my save file was being overwritten with a fresh save for some items. I must admit I do not have a lot of experience with saving and loading in Unreal, so up to this point I was using a mix between saving data to the game instance then moving it to the save file, and saving straight to the save file. This week led to needing to use these items more than before and clearly I had created a spiderweb saves and loads by just using them when I needed and not thinking how and when I would need that data in the future. This lead to hours of tracking down where my save data was being overwritten with something outdated or in my case a completely fresh file. 

The Solution:

My solution was to track down all the saves to the save file and to the game instance and got through them one by one. This allowed me to quickly figure out which ones were needed and which ones could be removed or redone in a more precise manner. I was able to create a better plan of when to save and when to load that is able to carry the save data between levels and menus and keep the on screen information updated. Even after goin through this and setting up a better save system, the problem was not fixed. It only took a few googles and a few Unreal save tutorials for the true problem to show itself. When saving to an Unreal SaveGame you can not just update one of the variables in the selected save slot. In a tiny corner of our code, I had saved just the players currency total, and not the players character roster. This meant every time I hit this save point the characters would all be set to level 0. Once I added the character roster variable to this location and saved to the slot, my lesson was learned and everything went back to working correctly.