[dazzawazza]

There are usually two types of flags. Whole-game and level specific.

For most games I've worked on the most senior game designer will control the game specific flags and then levels will be "owned" by individual designers and they will control the level flags.

Someone, usually the most senior game designer, decides how many flags the game gets and thus the max number of flags each level can have.

If this seems a bit uncontrolled to you.. then yeah it is and yes that's why a lot of games are full of bugs :)

This has become less of an issue as runtime memory has expanded and save games can be HUGE. In the N64 days the constraints were more real and a bloated save game could double the cost cartridge manufacturing and destroy any profit the game made (Nintendo charged a lot more for cartridges with larger battery backed memory).

[sandinmyjoints]

Interesting! Thanks for the glimpse into the workings of the game dev world.