Thanks for playing and your valuable feedback!
I made some design choices early on to have a stage-select screen, hidden warps, and infinite lives, instead of saving. Kinda like NES games, but I don't know if that was a good idea or not, so I need more feedback. Maybe it's an antiquated design, but I thought it was a fair way to encourage replay, increase challenge, but also allow freedom to play levels out-of-order if you wanted.
So, more-or-less from the beginning of the game, the branching paths are like this:
- stage 1 level 1 (from stage-select screen)
- stage 2 level 2 (from stage-select screen)
- stage 1 level 4 (warp in level 1)
- stage 1 level 7 (warp in level 1)
- stage 2 level 4 (warp in level 1)
- stage 2 level 7 (warp in level 1)
So the idea was that every level is accessible from 1 or 2 levels away. Except for the very last level, which requires finding all the gold idols. I was thinking to make some videos showing where the warps are, but I think some of the fun is in finding them :)
Having said that, I take your input to heart, and will consider how to implement a save system.