posted 18 years ago
Depends on your type of game.
Eg. if your game was a tile-based platformer, a simple text file would probably be a good choice, using different characters to specify different game objects, '*' could be monster A, '$' could be reward X, etc.
As for choosing next level, one approach might be to just name the level files so they have a natural order ('level001.txt', 'level002.txt',...). That way you can just iterate over the directory containing your level files.