Best way to store player data like scores, rewards, login info, checkpoints etc for offline PC games?

Question

I am creating a VR game in Unity, it will be an offline PC game. I want to store user login info, score, checkpoints, learning points, rewards etc in the database. I checked out firebase but it doesnt work for pc games apparently. I only have Oculus Rift to test my game else I wouldve switched to android as which platform the end game is for doesn't really matter. What are some other good alternatives? What should I use for my pc game?

I will later use the score and rewards to create learning points which will then be processed in an ML model to perform categorization.

Moreover, it is possible that I integrate firebase with unity while keeping my game in Windows platform while I test it on Rift and in the end I build it for android so it works fine with firebase?

Answer 1

There's no single "best way" to store data. Which approach works best will depend on the complexity and volume of your data, and the way you interact with it.

With video game save data that just needs to be loaded rather than queried, a common solution is to serialize the data into a text (e.g. JSON) or binary format, and save that in one or more files.

If you're storing a very large amount of data, or data that's fairly complex or frequently queried, you can use a database. The easiest way to integrate a database is to find an existing C# library or Unity plugin for local database support; a common choice is SQLite, but you'll have to determine whether SQLite is appropriate for your use case.

If you determine that a database is the best solution for your needs, you should try to avoid anything that requires the player to install or run a database server.