Beasty Save System — Unity Save/Load

Beasty Save System saves and loads your game without dragging anything else into your project.

No dependencies

It ships its own JSON engine. No Newtonsoft.Json, no third-party DLL, nothing to version-conflict with what you already have. Import it into an empty project and it compiles.

A result you can check

Every call hands back a typed result instead of throwing. A save that failed says so — it does not look like a save that worked. That one detail is the difference between a player who sees "could not save" and a player who closes the game believing their progress is safe.

var settings = new BeastySaveSettings { Folder = "Saves", Extension = "save" };
SaveResult saved = BeastySave.Save(myData, "slot1", settings);
if (!saved.Success) Debug.LogError(saved.Message);
LoadResult<MyData> loaded = BeastySave.Load<MyData>("slot1", settings);
if (loaded.Success) Use(loaded.Value);
else if (loaded.BackupAvailable) BeastySave.RestoreBackup("slot1", settings);

Scene state without writing a serializer

Drop a BeastySaveable on an object and tick the components you want persisted — including inactive objects, and several components of the same type on one object. A BeastySaveManager in the scene saves and loads all of them at once, straight from a uGUI button. Objects you spawn at runtime get a stable id of your choosing, so a chest you instantiated finds its own state again next session.

It saves what Unity itself would serialize: public and [SerializeField] fields, including private ones inherited from a base class, plus arrays, List, Dictionary, HashSet, SortedSet, Queue and Stack, and the Unity value types (Vector, Quaternion, Color...).

 Safe by default

• Atomic writes: the file is written to a temp and swapped in, so a crash mid-write cannot leave half a save behind.
• Backups: the last good version of each slot is kept, and a corrupted slot can be restored from it. Saving on top of a damaged slot does not destroy the recoverable copy.
• Strict loading is all-or-nothing: if any component fails, nothing is applied and the world is left exactly as it was. Tolerant loading skips the offending field, reports it in Warnings, and loads the rest — the escape hatch for when you rename a field mid-production.
• Optional AES-256 encryption with a random IV and a key derived with SHA-256. It is obfuscation against casual save editing, not real security, and the package says so out loud: the key ships inside your game.
• And it tells you what it did: every save, load, delete and restore logs its slot, size and timing — with a Verbose mode for chasing bugs — in the editor and development builds, silent by default in a release build.

Customizable

The converter layer is open: write a converter for your own type, or replace the one for a Unity type, and the pipeline picks it up. The settings object (folder, extension, encryption, strict mode) is passed per call, so an autosave and a manual save can behave differently in the same project.

Genre-agnostic — it persists C# objects and scene components, so it fits an RPG, a survival game, a visual novel or an editor tool equally well. It is the same save system that ships inside Beasty Visual Novel, extracted and usable on its own.

 Technical

• Zero external dependencies: own JSON engine, no Newtonsoft, no DLLs.
• Slot API: Save, Load, LoadInto, SaveAsync, LoadAsync, Exists, Delete, ListSlots, ReadMeta, RestoreBackup.
• Optional converter modules (uGUI, TextMeshPro, Physics, Animation, Particles, Audio), each gated behind the Unity module it needs so a project without it still compiles.
• Full C# source and test suite included.
• Unity 6000.2+, Mono and IL2CPP (verified against a real IL2CPP build), Built-in / URP / HDRP.
• WebGL is NOT supported in 1.0.0 (needs atomic file writes + Task async).

Documentation: https://bauflowbeasty.github.io/