Since I have began my new journey into game development I have often wondered how others are keeping track of their levels. I am planning arcade style games where the player progresses through levels and cannot go to a previous level. Imagine the game Balloons. If the player survives the round and pops all of the balloons they move to "round 2", difficulty is increased etc. The player simply sees the next round, but how is this configured/coded in the back ground?
For my games, I was thinking of simply keeping a global variable and if the player completes the round then the game will add one to the variable. This Global variable would drive the game to load the next level and certain objects being loaded for certain levels or difficulty being increased along with other level dependent things.
This is my narrow minded idea for level control. How do you all like to handle level control?