A modern game needs:

• reliable save/load systems
• world state persistence
• player progression
• inventory & quests
• NPCs and simulation state
• safe serialization & versioning
• replay systems
• modding and content pipelines

Lua is ideal for all of this:

• tables serialize well
• code is data, data is code
• tables are readable and versionable
• hot reload simplifies pipelines
• modding = just load more Lua files

This chapter builds a complete system that scales from small to AAA-style persistence.