Home/ Questions/Q 8949913
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-15T13:19:43+00:00

I am currently developing an Android Game and my goal is to create a

  • 0

I am currently developing an Android Game and my goal is to create a free/demo version of the game, so that the users can try it out. But I also want that the savegames from the demo are automatically imported in the full version.

The savegames I store in the applications private storage and they are basically JSON strings mapping several Java Objects. The user can create as many “new games” as he wants and there is an “auto save” and a “manual save” file for each game he started. To keep track of all the files, I have a list containing the filenames and some additional information (like the players name etc).

So basically there are quite a lot of small files handling the savegames. This may not be the most elegant approach, but it works quite well.

So here is my question: Lets say the user has started a game in the demo version (so there will be 3 files saved in the private storage of the demo version). How can I now access these files from within the full version?

The two versions won’t be much different. They are actually the same, despite the limitations of the demo version. But I would be using the same code base.

I know there has been quite some questions about this issue in this forum and elsewhere, but I was not able to find a suitable solution. All I could find involved either:

  • storing the files in a world readable storage (like the SD-card) or
  • using the SharedPreferences

But I neither want the user to be able to read the savegames (or even alter it – because this could mess up the game) – so no sd-card, nor can I use the SharedPreferences, because each single savegame has approx. 200 lines of code (many many java objects translated into JSON) and mapping all those values and objects into some kind of key-value structure used for the SharedPreferences seems quite impossible to me.

Is this all messed up, or does anyone have an idea?

Thank you for taking the time, looking forward to hear your ideas!

  • Christoph
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    So I see just 2 Solutions:

    The first is a WorldReadable SharedPreferences. You said, that you store JsonStrings, so there is no need to map them any further down, if you can make Objects out of your json-strings (I like to use Gson for this kind of work), you can simply store these
    Strings inside SharedPreferences.

    The second Way is to bother with ContentProviders and implement a ContentResolver interface. This is the safest way I can imagine for your use-case, but you have to implement a lot for it

    • 0