Saving Game Data

Three different needs, three different answers: settings go in CCUserDefault, game-state saves are yours to format, and one engine API must be avoided entirely.

Settings: CCUserDefault

Key–value storage for options, preferences, and small flags — the engine persists it for you:

var prefs = CCUserDefault.SharedUserDefault;

prefs.SetBoolForKey("music-enabled", true);
prefs.SetIntegerForKey("high-score", 12500);
prefs.SetStringForKey("player-name", "Ada");

bool music = prefs.GetBoolForKey("music-enabled", defaultValue: true);
int best   = prefs.GetIntegerForKey("high-score", defaultValue: 0);

Bool, Integer, Float, Double, and String accessors are available, each with a defaultValue overload — always use it, so first-run reads are well-defined.

Swapping the storage backend

Where those values physically live is a pluggable seam: CCUserDefault.Storage accepts any ICCUserDefaultStorage. By default the engine uses a settings file on desktop and isolated storage elsewhere. On platforms without a writable file system — console save-data systems are the motivating case — supply your own implementation:

// Set BEFORE the first SharedUserDefault access;
// combine with CCUserDefault.PurgeSharedUserDefault() if swapping mid-run.
CCUserDefault.Storage = new MyPlatformSaveStorage();

This seam is the engine's model for platform-specific behavior generally — see Platform-Specific Code.

Game state: roll your own format

For actual save games — progress, inventories, world state — serialize your own model objects with the .NET serializer of your choice (System.Text.Json is the obvious default) and write the result where your platform wants saves. Keep the save model separate from your node graph: scenes are cheap to rebuild from state, and save formats outlive scene-graph refactors.

⚠️ Do not use CCNode.Serialize

The engine's node-graph serialization (CCNode.Serialize / Deserialize) is known-broken and unsupported: the write path never flushes, so it persists nothing. It predates the current maintenance era and is slated for a ground-up rework rather than a patch — until that lands, treat the API as absent. Do not build a save system on it; nothing you "save" through it survives.