Save and Load Your Game: SaveGame Objects in Blueprints

What saving actually means in Unreal

When your game closes, everything in memory — the player's score, which level they reached, their settings — vanishes. 'Saving' means writing the bits you care about to a file on disk so you can read them back the next time the game runs. 'Loading' is just reading that file again.

Unreal gives you a tidy, built-in way to do this with zero file-handling headaches. You create a special little Blueprint called a SaveGame, drop your variables into it, and Unreal handles writing it to disk and reading it back. You never touch a raw file path or worry about where it lives.

In this lesson we'll do the whole round trip once: make the SaveGame, put a value in it, save it to a named 'slot', and on the next run check whether that slot exists and load the value back. It's a pattern you'll reuse in every game you make.

Build the save/load loop

We'll create the SaveGame, then do the saving and the loading. Tick each step as you go — your progress is remembered even if you close the page.

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   1Create the SaveGame Blueprint

   In the Content Browser click Add (the green '+'), choose 'Blueprint Class', and in the 'Pick Parent Class' window expand 'All Classes' and search for 'SaveGame'. Pick it and click Select.

   Name the new asset something clear like 'BP_SaveGame'. Double-click to open it. This Blueprint is purely a data container — you won't add any logic here.

   TipPrefix save-game Blueprints with BP_ (or SG_) so they're easy to spot in the Content Browser later.

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   2Add the variables you want to persist

   Inside BP_SaveGame, in the My Blueprint panel on the left, click the '+' next to Variables. Make a variable called 'HighScore' and set its type to Integer.

   Add as many as you need — a 'PlayerName' String, a 'LevelReached' Integer, and so on. Every variable you add here becomes part of what gets written to disk. Compile and Save, then close the Blueprint.

   TipOnly put things you actually need to persist in here. A SaveGame holds data, not behaviour — keep it lean.

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   3Create the SaveGame object in memory

   Open the Blueprint where your save logic will live — for a first try, the Level Blueprint is fine (Blueprints toolbar dropdown at the top of the editor → Open Level Blueprint).

   Right-click in the graph and add a 'Create Save Game Object' node. In its 'Save Game Class' dropdown, choose your BP_SaveGame. This makes a fresh, empty copy of your container in memory.

   TipDrag off the 'Return Value' pin and 'Promote to Variable' so you can refer to this SaveGame object again later in the same graph.

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   4Set your data, then Save Game to Slot

   Drag off the SaveGame object and call 'Set High Score' (the setter for your variable), feeding in the value you want to store — say the player's current score.

   Then add a 'Save Game to Slot' node. Plug the SaveGame object into its 'Save Game Object' pin, type a slot name into 'Slot Name' (for example 'PlayerSlot'), and leave 'User Index' at 0. Run this and the data is written to disk.

   TipThe slot name is just text you choose. Keep it consistent — you must load from the exact same slot name you saved to.

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   5On load: check Does Save Game Exist first

   Now the loading half. Add a 'Does Save Game Exist' node and give it the same slot name ('PlayerSlot') and User Index 0.

   Run its boolean output into a Branch node. The 'True' path means a save is there to load; the 'False' path means it's a first run with nothing saved yet — so you'd start fresh with default values.

   TipSkipping this check is the classic beginner bug: loading a slot that doesn't exist returns nothing useful and your values stay at zero.

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   6Load Game from Slot and read your values

   On the Branch's True pin, add 'Load Game from Slot' with the same slot name and User Index 0. Its 'Return Value' is a generic SaveGame object.

   Drag off that Return Value and add a 'Cast To BP_SaveGame' node — this tells Unreal it's specifically your SaveGame so you can read your variables. From the cast's output, call 'Get High Score' and use it (print it, set the player's score from it, and so on).

   TipForgetting the Cast is why beginners can't find their variables off the loaded object — the load returns the generic base type until you cast it back to yours.