Overview

With development focus shifting towards the dodging segment of the game, I realised that I needed persistence of the player and enemy's health between the battle scene and dodging scene. To do this, I decided on using save states, which are arguably the most simple form of data persistence to implement.

Technical Description / Explanation 

Save states / slots essentially take in data with variables and save them to slots that can be called upon at a later date. For my game, this only needs to be for a single play session (whereas save slots are permanently stored on a player's device). To fix this issue, I simply reset the save slot with every play session upon the main menu loading. This prevents the previous play session's data (health primarily) from being called erroneously and having the player or enemy spawn with zero health.

With this setup above, the game will always ensure there is a cleared save slot called Save in the player's save games. I also set up my own custom SaveGame blueprint with the variables that I wanted to persist across scenes, such as the player's health, enemy's health, and if the player or enemy has accessed this data before.

To access this data correctly (and not constantly rewrite the player or enemy's health to max), I set up so that when either variable is first accessed, it will set it to the intended value and then make the first time access variable false, thus preventing the game from rewriting the health again and always assigning the player/enemy health variable to its local counterpart.

Reflection

With health now persistent throughout all scenes where it's required, the game is nearing mechanical completion for the alpha stage. All that is left now is to implement conductor attacks and player death / victory screens. I didn't run into many issues when creating this system outside of unfamiliarity with how the save slot system worked (I spent a little while figuring out how to ensure that player data is reset each play session before landing on the solution I implemented). Overall, I'm quite happy with the system I have made given time constraints and the looming Alpha deadline, but if I were to redo it in the future I would try to find a more streamlined method than using save game slots.