Phish will need to have the ability to save its state, so that a user can shut down the game and resume it at a later time. Once this is working, we'll also want to have the user preferences persist, though we may use a different method for this data. For example, on Windows, we may save the user preferences in the registry, rather than in a data file on disk.
As a first approximation, we will implement saving the species. This information is complex and the user will find it inconvenient to create multiple species each time he starts the game. Once this is working and tested, we'll explore implementing saving and restoring the game itself, though this may not make it into the first commercial release.