Adding Verbosity to a Program

This is a very n00b question but I'm writing a nix based tool and would like to have verbosity flags, based on the number of vvv's passed in I would go about printing debug/information statements in my program. My question is how would I go about using opargs for this, since optargs can only parse one character at a time. Also suppose I know I'm at verbosity level 3, do all my print