Saving data to XML is an important and powerful ability. XML is such a common data-interchange format that almost all data-driven applications must support it, both for loading and saving data. Nevertheless, XML files are often large, syntactically verbose, and inappropriate for saving small nuggets of data. XML files can be needlessly large in file size, and can be time-consuming to process. As a result, JSON has emerged as a lighter alternative, and it is commonly adopted in games. Since the release of Unity 5.3, JSON is a natively-supported format. Prior to this release, developers needed to use third-party add-ins. This section covers the latest, native JSON tools provided with Unity. However, if you want or need to use an earlier release, then take a look at the following, free third-party add-on offering JSON support, available here: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/SimpleJSON.

JSON parser

To get started using JSON in Unity, create a new project and add the...