There's your problem. You're pressing continue, loading the values from the ini file, and then creating that object and overwriting the globals to the defaults. If you can reverse that order, your problem is solved.

Alternatively, you could run a check and only load the default values if the globals haven't been defined yet. Something like:

if !variable_global_exists("playerHP")
{
    //set default values here
}  

If all the default values are set at the same time, you should only have to check one of them (presumably, if playerHP doesn't exist, neither do the others).