Ytukyg

I have a complex RPG video game under development and it supports multiplayers, matchmaking, and cloud save game. For a lot of reasons, we are handling the "cloud save" ourselves - mainly for cross platform support.

For this, we created a SQL database on our servers, and for now we have a "users" table handling the different login, password, save, Steam/PlayStation/etc ID, and anything unique to a user. We have a "saves" table, and that's where I feel we can improve. The table definition looks like this:

CREATE TABLE saves (

  id uniqueidentifier PRIMARY KEY,

  user_id INT NOT NULL,

  create_date DATETIME NOT NULL,

  edit_date DATETIME NOT NULL,

  name text NOT NULL,

  data text NOT NULL,

  FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES users(id) ON DELETE CASCADE

);

The place I feel is lacking the data text NOT NULL, where right now we simply feed a Json'ed of a save game. In a RPG, a player may have an inventory, a number of quests, different NPC dialog states and so on. However, from what I understand there is no "clean" way of doing arrays inside a table cell in SQL. Having each saves game being in a different table would be terrible, as we could end up with tens or hundreds of tables.

Is there something we are overlooking, or is using a cell to store a serialized version of the save data the best I can do in SQL?