Saving state of a 2D map

Hello everyone,
I'm a beginner trying to make a game with several 2D stages (levels). When the player is in a stage, they may choose to save and come back later, so I need to save the stage state as well as the stage itself. My question is: ¿how would you go about implementing the saving and loading of the stages and their states (and also, creating the stage so it can be loaded in the first place)? I've looked into ScriptableObjects and loading maps from textures but I want to know if there are better options to do this.

Thanks in advance!

 

http://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/object-management/persisting-objects/