Im developing a multiplayer game using Blueprints, and I would like some thoughts on the best way to go about setting up profiles and save game data. What I would like to do is have the player create a profile, and then within that profile setup a character or characters to choose from, customize, and then play.
Ideally I would like this to be a online multiplayer game, but with my limited knowledge of blueprints/coding, especially with servers/databases, I thought it might be best to stick with a split screen local setup. I figured out how to save data creating a SaveGame blueprint class, but I was wondering if there’s a way the player can generate that instead of doing it before hand like in this tutorial. I would also like the player to create a profile too, so when they play the game later they can select their profile, it will show all the character(s) they have created, and then they choose one and play.
If someone has some tips or suggestions that would be great! Thanks.
For online/muliplayer, profiles can get complicated but you don’t necessarily have to dig into dedicated databases and web servers.
First you will need an account system that your player can log in (so you can ID each player)… that can be a steam account (if your game will use steam) so you will need to get the steam id of the user and use that for the saving the data of the player into a SaveGame file.
If you don’t want to use steam, then you will have to either setup an in-game registration and login page or setup some kind of a registration web page, database etc. (this can get complicated and goes beyond blueprints (and this forum section :p)).
Now if we are talking about local split screen, you will still have to have some kind of account system but it doesn’t have to be anything too complicated, simply let the users enter a nickname at some kind of load screen, and then you can load/save data from there (using the nickname as ID).
So quick example steps:
Games loads into the menu screen -> create new profile -> enter profile name (let’s call it Player1) -> create character screen, customize etc. -> when done, you can save all the necessary character variables into a SaveGame (you will use Player1 as a way to id the save file).
Then we can go into our character selection screen which can be loaded from the SaveGame -> load game, open map etc. -> at begin play, spawn a character based on the saved variables in the SaveGame file.
It’s the same thing using steam, but instead of a create profile screen, you can use the steam id to load any saved data and use the steam nickname for display name purposes.
The actual implementation is not going to be as simple as this sounds but that’s pretty much it in a nutshell :p.