Solved: Reload saved game while setting saved variables?

Unity Engine
1

I need a little push in the right direction. I am now trying to save my game and I found a tutorial that was what I was looking for.

The tutorial saves and loads the game on the same scene and I totally understand it and it works. But when my game launches there is the Main Menu, then they click new game and that loads a world map. After the map my game scene loads where the player can save.

I want to be able to load the saved game from the Main Menu, skipping the map scene. The user clicks the ‘Load Button’ and it loads the level just fine and that is where I am stuck. When I push save it saves the level number. Then in the code below I load the saved file and grab the level number to load. I pass that to the LoadScene() method. It then loads the scene but now how do I replaces the current variables with the saved ones? I need a way to tell the scene that it was loaded, instead of being a new game, how can I do that?

    public void loadLevel(){

        Stream stream = File.Open(Application.dataPath + SAVE_FILE + FILE_EXTENSION, FileMode.Open);
        BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();

        playersData = (PlayersData)bf.Deserialize(stream);
        stream.Close();

        SceneManager.LoadScene(playersData.level);
    }
2

After a couple more hours of research I found a way. There is something I had not found yet called PlayerPrefs(); Thought I would share the process incase anyone else is pondering the same thing. There might be better ways of doing this, but it seems to work for now.

In my 2 buttons, 1 that starts a new game and the other the loads a saved game, I simply put these scripts on the buttons.
On my button that loads a new game I just added this line to the button script.

PlayerPrefs.SetString("newGame", "yes");

Then on the load saved game button I did this.

PlayerPrefs.SetString("newGame", "no");

Now in the Awake() in my gameController script I load the prefs and from there I can determine if I need to load all the saved game data or initialize everything fresh.

isNewGame = PlayerPrefs.GetString("newGame");
print("Game is new: " + isNewGame);