Why persistence stores player progress in Unity - See It in Action

Why Persistence Stores Player Progress

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are making a simple game where players collect coins. You want to save how many coins the player has collected so that when they close and reopen the game, their progress is not lost.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to store and retrieve player progress using persistence in Unity. You will create a simple script that saves the player's coin count and loads it when the game starts.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable to hold the player's coin count

Create a key to save and load the coin count using PlayerPrefs

Write code to save the coin count when it changes

Write code to load the coin count when the game starts

Print the loaded coin count to the console

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Games need to remember player progress so players can continue where they left off without losing their achievements.

💼 Career

Understanding data persistence is important for game developers to create engaging and user-friendly games.

1

Create a variable to hold the player's coin count

Create a public integer variable called coinCount and set it to 0 inside a new C# script called PlayerProgress.

Unity

public class PlayerProgress : MonoBehaviour
{
    // Your code here
}

Need a hint?

Use public int coinCount = 0; inside the class.

2

Create a key to save and load the coin count

Add a private string variable called saveKey and set it to "PlayerCoins" inside the PlayerProgress class.

Unity

using UnityEngine;

public class PlayerProgress : MonoBehaviour
{
    public int coinCount = 0;
    // Add a private string variable called saveKey
    // Your code here
}

Need a hint?

Use private string saveKey = "PlayerCoins"; inside the class.

3

Save and load the coin count using PlayerPrefs

Write a SaveProgress() method that saves coinCount using PlayerPrefs.SetInt(saveKey, coinCount). Write a LoadProgress() method that loads coinCount using PlayerPrefs.GetInt(saveKey, 0). Call LoadProgress() inside Start().

Unity

using UnityEngine;

public class PlayerProgress : MonoBehaviour
{
    public int coinCount = 0;
    private string saveKey = "PlayerCoins";

    // Write SaveProgress() and LoadProgress() methods
    // Call LoadProgress() inside Start()
    // Your code here
}

Need a hint?

Use PlayerPrefs.SetInt to save and PlayerPrefs.GetInt to load the coin count.

4

Print the loaded coin count

Add a Debug.Log statement inside LoadProgress() to print "Loaded coin count: " followed by the coinCount.

Unity

using UnityEngine;

public class PlayerProgress : MonoBehaviour
{
    public int coinCount = 0;
    private string saveKey = "PlayerCoins";

    void Start()
    {
        LoadProgress();
    }

    public void SaveProgress()
    {
        PlayerPrefs.SetInt(saveKey, coinCount);
        PlayerPrefs.Save();
    }

    public void LoadProgress()
    {
        coinCount = PlayerPrefs.GetInt(saveKey, 0);
        // Add Debug.Log to print loaded coinCount
        // Your code here
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use Debug.Log("Loaded coin count: " + coinCount); inside LoadProgress().