Transferable Save Game?

[Carduus]

In the Mass Effect and Baldur's Gate games, there's a mechanic such that you can take the save game you used to beat the game and apply it to the next game in the series in order to preserve continuity between games in choices and characters. 


I've had to pare my game idea way, way down over the course of creation, and seeing as I still have a million ideas for games 2 and 3 of the series, I'd like them to act as a continuation of the series if possible. Is it possible to create some Javascript that would allow a 'You saved the game!' scroll  to port out a file that could then be applied to another game to preserve at least some attributes from the previous game? 

 

[Andar]

yes and no - it is possible, but it is not easy.


Unless you rewrite the entire structure (or make your second game contain the same database as the first one), you cannot use savefiles like that, because savefiles contain parts of the entire gamedata.


What I would suggest is a plugin that writes a new file with very specific data set by the plugin, and another (for the following game) that loads that specific file and convert the numbers it gets into data for the later game. This conversion would allow you to reassign data on different databases, and the data selection on what to save (as done by the plugins themselves) will allow you to limit that conversion to the parts you really need.