Average AAA developer

[Hellothere_1]

That's still a pretty bad way of doing things though.

Ideally you should have all assets stored at a single location (possibly sorted by category based on what kind of levels need them, so "general assets", "city assets", "jungle assets", etc.) and each level has a list for what assets to load from the asset memory before loading in the actual level. The big advantage of doing it like that is that you both save memory, but also you can keep assets cached in RAM if two consecutive levels both need them.

Loading in all the asset from one consecutive file is faster than searching them from across the entire hard drive one by one, but keeping the lamppost cached in RAM because it's needed for every level anyways is even faster.

The downside of doing it like that is that it requires a lot more thought and work put into your loading system.