Help making world-less episode.

[Metrovania]

Is there a way to make each level in an episode be directly followed by another level without entering the world map? I know you can simply link the levels with Warps, but then when you get a game-over as far as I'm aware you shoot all the way back to the beginning of the sub-level "chain". For reference SMB1 on the NES does this.

[Wohlstand]

With SMBX that isn't possible directly, however, there are some workarounds possible, and the best practice you can get with TheXTech and its ability to resume the game at the last-entered door but should work on other SMBX branches but you'll need to use the different way.

So, look at the ugly workaround idea:

• Make the HUB-based episode
• Build the hub level (intro level with doors) that will be fully black and hide the player in the darkness
• Make the startup event that will hold the "LEFT+UP" keys
• Set up the "Restart on death" flag
• When you quit the game in the middle of the process, the player will resume (in TheXTech) at last door where they exited and will start playing the level where the player got stuck
• hub should be fully automated, the player shouldn't interact with the hub

I'll try to craft some simple examples to show you how the thing would work.

Also, there is the possible more complex way that would work on other branches too:
- at the exit of every level put the star
- every star should add the instant warp that leads to the following door, making sure the player will resume level at the last taken star

This is a more tricky way to perform, other ways will require you scripts making episode being incompatible with the rest of branches.

[Hoeloe]

You can do this directly in SMBX pretty easily, so I don't know what Wohl was rambling about. It just needs a few lines of Lua. Basically you'd link the levels together using warps like normal, and use a special level at the start that just reads a level name from SaveData and calls Level.load on that (and if it's nil, load the first level). Then at the start of each level, you can write Level.filename() into that variable, and call Misc.saveGame(). That way, any time you load the episode it'll put you back at the level you game overed in.

[Wohlstand]

I don't know what Wohl was rambling about

I explained the universal workaround that will work on more branches of SMBX.
You explained the workaround for SMBX2 exclusively (technically it's a workaround too because you don't change the internal workflow of the game to make the true level resuming, etc.). So, both workarounds were fine for every case.

[Hoeloe]

(technically it's a workaround too because you don't change the internal workflow of the game to make the true level resuming, etc.)

What are you talking about? It's not a workaround, it does absolutely change the internal workflow by offloading level loading to Lua and allowing you finer control over it. It's also substantially simpler than your convoluted method.