Storing Level information - best practice

[jasperPT]

Hi

I am building a game that Will have upwards of 500 levels, possibly into the thousands.

It is a 2D puzzle game that progressively gets harder with a simple equation making all the numbers bigger based off the level number. This works fine and can go on in-definately without any need to store information about the level.
What I am wondering, is if I want to add in different elements, such as specific spawnable objects on certain levels, or walls (think candy crush level design) Im not sure what the best way to aproach this would be.

Should I have a few arrays for each level that contain information such as what objects are to spawn on said level? This may mean that I need to have vector 2s or vector 3s to position and rotate level elements like walls, which seems like it would take up a lot of space if there was a substantial number of levels.

My other thought was to use easy save 2 to save out all the level information and load it in when the level loads up. I think this may help to reduce the file size, but im not quite sure.

Just wondering if anyone has some good experience with this?

The best point of reference would be to say, how would you go about saving candy crush levels (my game is not a match 3 but I want to have level design in a similar fashion)

Any thoughts would be really welcome.

Cheers,
Jasper.

[jeanfabre]

Hi,

 if you really will have 500+ levels, then maybe you shoudl organize them by chapters at least, and then I would use a file per chapter hosting all levels data for that chapter.

 we currently use xml in a game project done 100% in playmaker, and it works well, we define content at edit time, load and save data when th euser is playing. But in your case, easy save will do the job very well too. Xml requires some proper understanding of xpath and can be tricky if you don't have experience with xml to begin with. But the great advantage of xml is that it's plain english and so it's a lot simpler to debug, even on the device since it's a plain file that is readable.

Bye,

 Jean

[jasperPT]

Yeh Maybe chapters is the solution so that Im not loading massive amounts of information at a time.

I was hoping to avoid having to create the saved information at run time, that is going to take a lot longer to do

[coxy17]

Just for managing the levels and saving ingame data I would recommend the plugin 'mad level manager'. Great for organising chapters as you can use there 'group' feature to do this. It supports playmaker. You can save level data and it handles it all for you. Saved me weeks of development.

its on the playmaker wiki.

[Phuzz]

YEs, I use Mad Level Manager and it is pretty good and has auto save feature so you dont need to worry about any saving and loading