Zombox

The problem:

Since the inception of Zombox almost 5 years ago, one thing I’ve never addressed is how the save system will work.

For a long time in gaming, it was fairly common for game designers to provide players with some kind of manual ‘save’ menu (whether in a user interface, or within gameplay itself). But modern players — especially on mobile — just assume that their progress will be saved when they close the game, and resumed when they re-open it. Implementing an auto-save feature which provides that functionality can come with many challenges…especially for Zombox. To list a few:

• Zombox is a massive open-world game with a city spanning over 20,000 individual ground tiles, and over 100,000 individual interactive objects per map. Since players can change the state of these objects at any time (destroy, repair, put items in, take items out, etc), their states need to be saved between plays.
• Zombox needs to run smoothly on mobile devices, and can’t freeze every time the player needs to save.
• Due to the constantly changing nature of the game world, saves need to happen often.
• Save data needs to be small in size, because nobody wants their mobile device storage space eaten up by huge save files

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